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Have you ever tried to access a website or online content only to find out that it’s restricted or blocked in your country? Well isn’t that just great? Someone somewhere thought that restricting or blocking content may be an excellent idea. After all, censoring the Internet is what people were always looking forward to, right?
You log in to Netflix, for instance, to watch the shows you’ve been wanting to see for so long only to find out that they aren’t there. Not for you at least. People in other countries are enjoying these shows and the interesting part is that you’re paying the same subscription fee as others only to have content severely limited in your country.
What a strange twist of fate to be sure. Well, one thing is for certain and it has nothing to do with faith. It’s a brilliant executive idea that results in global inconvenience for the majority of users. Fortunately, there is always a way to bypass these dim-witted restrictions and enjoy the content as the good lord intended. All of that being said, let’s explore some of the ways you can get rid of restrictions and blocked content placed on some online content.
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Long story short, geo-restrictions and geo-blocking. In other words, websites and platforms often check out your location to see where you’re coming or in this case, logging in from.
Then they decide to restrict or entirely block some content for you. The way platforms justify this is that they claim there a licensing and copyright issues but it’s all just a bunch of bureaucracy and red tape that can choke a rhino. Why does it matter where you watch content from if it’s hosted on a platform? We’re all on the same page so what’s the problem?
That’s really up to debate but experience showed that lots of executives have a tendency to shoot themselves in the knees with great decisions and “well-planned” strategies. But people will always come up with a workaround no matter how keen platforms or websites are on restricting or blocking content in some countries.
This video is not available in your country is probably the highlight of your day. Just when you find a great video on YouTube to watch, you get the message that you’re not welcomed here and you shouldn’t watch this because of reasons. What reasons are those is anybody’s guess at this point. Oh well, time to use a YouTube proxy and simply walk around this foolish restriction.
You can learn more on how to use proxy servers for YouTube online, just make sure you pick the right one. So what do these proxies do, exactly? Well they are similar to VPNs as they act as an intermediary between you and the website or platform that’s trying to block your access. Proxy servers reroute traffic through a different server located in a different location so you can bypass geo-restriction. Easy-peasy right?
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a geo-blocking’s worst nightmare and for good reason. A VPN is basically a tunnel made just for you that masks your location, IP address and even your activity from prying eyes and platforms wanting to restrict content to you so badly.
That said, VPN encrypts traffic and makes it look you’re coming from a country that has no geo-restrictions or blocking whatsoever. In other words, you can access any content online that you wish simply by connecting via VPN. As you may already know, a VPN is pretty neat tool to have when you’re gaming as well.
It will mask your activity from annoying Internet Service Providers (ISP) so they won’t decide to bandwidth throttle your connection. Take that geo-blocking. The only downside is that excellent VPNs aren’t free and those that are, well let’s just say you don’t pay with you money for those.
The Tor Browser is a useful way to avoid geo-restrictions but it’s not as reliable as other means. Tor reroutes your connection through three different servers and there’s the so-called .onion option that allows you to access website anonymously. It doesn’t work on most platforms and websites but hey, it’s something at least.
Tor works just like any other browser and it’s completely free but it’s fairly slow, which can get annoying if you don’t have a lot of patience. Nevertheless, Tor is an excellent choice if you want to access websites you couldn’t do otherwise so it’s worth giving it a shot. Try it out and if you don’t like it, there are still other ways to get what you want.
Smart DNS is a technology that allows you to bypass geo-restrictions and access content that may be blocked in your country for the most part, at least. It works by changing your DNS settings to route your internet traffic through a server in a different location, similarly to a proxy serve but not quite. Smart DNS is often faster than other methods of accessing restricted content, as it doesn’t encrypt your internet traffic, which is kind of a downer if we’re being completely honest here.
Lack of encryption may mean faster access but it also means lack of anonymity. In other words, Smart DNS doesn’t hide your IP address and it can bypass basic blocking and restrictions. It’s good for fooling websites and platform into thinking that you’re logging in from another location but any monitoring measures in place will detect your attempts at sneaking in and throw you out the window, not literally.
There are several methods for accessing online content without any limitations or restrictions. Whether you choose to use a proxy, VPN, Tor Browser or Smart DNS is entirely up to you, as long as you choose the right provider, there will be no more annoying restrictions or content blocking for you to worry about. So happy browsing from here on out and make sure you enjoy the forbidden content to the fullest.