Internet censorship is not a new thing, and it’s been around as long as the Internet itself, but in the last couple of years, more and more things are being censored, and access to many places online is dropping rapidly for a lot of Internet users.
Some online places are censored because they’re deemed illegal by some countries’ governments, and others are censored for other, less sinister reasons. Still, whatever the reason, what censorship mostly does is make our lives even harder and poses an extra problem for us to deal with.
The Problem with Censorship
This goes the same for everyone, whether you’re unsatisfied because you can’t watch that movie that you were looking forward to, or you’re in trouble because you’re a student that can’t access that specific source that you need to finish your research paper.
Many schools and colleges have decided to take it upon themselves to decide what should or should not be accessed by their students. This was done in an effort to help with keeping the students focused, but as much as it’s good for keeping their minds on-task, it’s also posing a problem for many of them since they lose access to web content that can actually prove useful and helpful in their studies.
This is also the case at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Problems at UCLA
This is a public research university that is located in the Westwood district of Los Angeles, California, and its students are known for having trouble when it comes to accessing many websites, all because of UCLA’s strict censorship and rules about what can or can’t be accessed.
This strict use of firewalls and blocking off much of the online content first started as an attempt to keep the students away from games and social media and other networks that might be bad for the process of learning. It’s understandable that the students would rather post tweets or share pictures instead of studying, but this is seen as an unwelcome distraction by the UCLA and they decided to block access to it on their grounds.
Still, this practice has also blocked out other web content that might have been beneficial to the students, and since the internet has such a wide use today and everyone relies on it for pretty much everything, this has become a serious problem. Fortunately, this and several other problems that you might not even be aware of can be solved through the use of a VPN.
What’s A VPN and What It Does?
Let’s start with what a VPN is. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and it’s just that, a private network that is being used for securing your online privacy and anonymity. When it comes to which one to use, we recommend TorGuard, since it’s described as one of the best, if not THE best one out there. It does many things in order to protect you, but the most important ones are masking your IP address, encrypting your data flow and keeping no logs of your activities on the web.
When it comes to your IP address, it’s your online signature, and many things about you can be discovered through it, including your location, which is something that you don’t want circulating out there. Well, the good news is that TorGuard has lots of servers in many different countries around the world, and when you use it, it connects you to one of those servers. You then receive a different IP address that masks your own, and you become untraceable.
The other important thing that does is data encrypting. Since everything you do online is being recorded by your ISP, VPNs have started encrypting your data flow, which basically means that they’re creating a tunnel through which all of your online traffic flows and that can’t be accessed by anyone. This gives you anonymity, security and online privacy.
TorGuard also has a no logging policy, which means that it won’t record any of your online activity. So, basically, what you do online will only be known to you.
How Does This Help with Censorship?
As we already mentioned earlier, TorGuard and other VPNs all have many servers around the world that are used for masking IPs. This prevents others from discovering who and where you are, but it also has the ability to change your location, for example, if you’re from Germany and you use a server located in Canada, the Internet will start seeing you as a Canadian.
With that, you get free access to all of the content that might be available in Canada, but it’s blocked for users from Germany. So, if you’re a UCLA student, and you need to access things blocked by the University, all you need to do is choose a server that doesn’t have that restriction, and everything that’s available in the region in which the server is located is now available to you.
How to Set VPN Up
Setting up a VPN is a pretty easy thing to do. All you need to do is choose a VPN that suits your needs, for example, TorGuard. Next, you go to its website and sign up. You download and install an application, start it, choose the server and that’s it. These few easy steps are all it takes for you to get access to anything, and you don’t even have to leave the University’s grounds.
There are many other features that VPNs offer and that we did not cover in this guide, like the ability to use the same VPN package on several devices at the same time, a non-stop customer support, ad and malware blocking, and alike. That’s why you should explore the VPNs and see which one offers what you need.
One more thing that you should watch out for are the free versions of VPNs. The free versions can be quite tempting, since paying for stuff is always everyone’s least favorite option, but using the free VPNs is really not recommended for several reasons. Not only do they lack real security and protection, but they often also log your activities, don’t have a customer support, and even have leaks, and what you end up with is a really bad VPN that’s as useful as no VPN at all.
Now that you know about the VPNs and how you can use them, make your way to one of their websites and sign up, it’s the best way to surf the web and secure your online privacy. Hopefully, it will solve your problems and give you access to all the places that you’ve been locked out of before.
