Bloggers Blocked Out

Recently after the coup in Fiji took place, the government decided to block certain blogs that were against it. Fair enough, some of the blogs were certainly beyond their limits legally both U.S laws and Fiji law. Some described how a bomb could be made. I obviously do not encourage any such activity. There are, however some people who are needlessly blocked out of some internet services.

One of the ways to gain entry to some services would be to use a proxy that is not located in your country or a better one would be an anonymous web proxy. This will at least bypass some of the restrictions. Another solution is to change DNS providers to a free and public one, an example is OpenDNS. This helps people in certain countries like China to possibly gain entry to sites which are filtered. It could even work for Fiji I guess.

Just another tip for maintaining privacy. Try to spread your emails, IM, blogging email addresses over different providers so that it becomes hard for companies to build a complete profile of you. Make sure you can quickly switch providers in case of increased spam or other problems.

The Spray Can

*Amendment: It’s funny really, in less time it would take me to go to my local supermarket and back (less than an hour), this post makes it onto an anti military website news page. Just to clear things up here. I am pro military not anti. I support them all the way. They have really help bring the country back from the slums. This post was mainly just to show others, not necessarily Fijians about circumvention. Fiji was just used as an example, mainly cause I live there and have seen it happen. So think again about what the article is implying, don’t be mistaken.

Amendment to Alvarion Post

Lest I forget that the content is copyright and really I should not be sharing it. I reckon it should do no harm cause I am not really calling it my own. I am only sharing what really should be available to those who need it. Hope everyone understands.

The Spray Can

Alvarion Networking Gateway/Router NG-4D1W

For all of those like me who got a router from their WISPs. To be specific the Alvarion equipment, then you would not be given a manual for that equipment. So after having searched up the manual from the web, I have decided to upload it here onto my blog. It is a shame how Alvarion does does not make this info available to all people, especially since those ISPs would usually not give you the manual anyway. Hopefully this might make it easier for you to configure your gateway correctly.

The file is on the right hand corner at the bottom, under the box My Stuff.

Enjoy

OpenDNS

I recently tried the free domain name service OpenDNS after my ISP’s DNS servers suffered some problems. Although the ISP DNS servers were O.K at first, they began to show problems like blank pages and occasional service shut-downs. Although at the time I had not read any reviews of the service at the time. Most of the time people don’t have issues with their DNS service but chose to use OpenDNS because of the features that they offer like spell correction, faster load times and anti-phishing filters. In my case I was really looking for a solution to a problem, however, my experience was rather short lived. Since I do not reside in the US which is where most of their servers are located, I ended up getting certain sites in the US edition rather than the localised editions of the sites. Having also read of some reviews and a few comments about the service, I have since then decided to use the openDNS server only as my secondary DNS. The primary remains to be my ISP’s DNS server.

Has anyone else had the same problem? What are your views, post your comments.

later