If you have an ISP (Internet Service Provider) whose DNS server report bogus IP addresses now or according to news reports will do so in the near future (for example: Pricefixing cartells trying to ban a russian online music store from selling in Germany are currently trying to supoena ISPs into reporting bogus addresses) then you are not totally out of luck.

Both UNIX and Windows operating systems bring a way to fix these brokenness without you having to install some dubious programs or anything like that.

 

First thing you have to do is get the correct IP address for the website you want to see. This is actually the hard part.

You can ask someone who is with a sane ISP or in a sane country (or both) to give you the IP address.

You can use tools like webping (search for it on google) that help you out there.

You can also use the WHOIS database to query for the correct nameservers for the domain you want and directly query them.

The WHOIS database is sunny.nic.com/cgi-bin/whois

 

After getting a sane DNS server you can do the following.

On Windows:

Click on Start -> Run and start the program "nslookup".

On UNIX:

Open a shell and run "nslookup". It will complain about being obsolete, but nevermind that message. It works just fine.

 

You will get a shell window where you can now query the default DNS server or a specifiy DNS server. We want the latter option.

Suppose that the DNS server reported by WHOIS is 216.21.234.89

To query for "censoreddomain.com" you can now do the following in the nslookup window:

> www.censoreddomain.com 216.21.234.89

The nslookup program will then tell you the address. For example: 195.96.170.20

 

Now, to use that information in your webbrowser you need to enter it in a specific file of your operating system.

On Windows:

C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

On UNIX:

/etc/hosts

 

Open the file with your favorite text editor. It will look something like this:

# /etc/hosts

# short description of this file

# blablabla

127.0.0.1 localhost

 

As you can see, the file maps IP addresses to hostnames. Now just add a line like this:

195.96.170.20 www.censoreddomain.com

 

Voila! That's all. Every program on your computer will now recognise www.censoreddomain.com to point to 195.96.170.20 instead of the censoring site of your ISP.

Obviously, you have to repeat this step for every censored domain you want to visit.

 

Happy uncensored webbrowsing.