In nations where there is state control of the internet and/or punishment for visiting prohibited or anti-regime sites (including unbiased news sources) how do people get away with doing it?
I know you can use proxies to access banned websites, but aside from that I am not tech saavy to understand how people avoid censorship or being observed online in autocratic regimes.
Tor is supposed to cover your tracks but it causes firefox to time out (at least when I tried it), making it useless. Who knows if it is better now.
In most “developing/emerging” countries, wire-based high speed comm lines are a rather scarce commodity. Where I used to work (thing mega-corporation), the vast majority of our locations in Africa relied on satellites because the infrastructure was inadequate (10MB files over dial-up leaves something to be desired). If you don’t control the endpoint (user’s machine) or the relay (satellite), you can’t block a darned thing.
Another factor is that the approach usually taken is by dropping firewalls in place with restrictive access control lists (ACLs). But firewalls can be traversed through a variety of methods. An article that I frequently refer to, “The Firewall is Dead, Long Live the Firewall” is from nearly a decade ago, but is still relevant. While the technology has improved considerably in the intervening years, much of the cutting edge gear is illegal to sell/license in many despotic lands (depending on country of origin - US laws, Israeli laws, etc. prohibit sending Iran, for example, robust technologies).
I use a proxie server. Periodically, about once a month a new one is sent to me via e-mail. As long as new ones come out faster than the old ones are detected, I am fine.
Earlier related thread, which I mention because my cat is involved.