June, 2009.
We’ve had ‘proxy governments’ in Thailand, why not have proxy internet too. In fact, Thailand’s great Orwellian Ministry of Virtue would rather we not sully our values with this slanderous internet thingy, and are efficiently spending lots of our tax money on blocking all those nasty websites that say bad things about, well, saying bad things. That’s why we’re going to take a page out of Thaksin’s book and conveniently skirt these pesky regulations, by using the internet by proxy. Did you know, for example, it’s against the law to let someone use your internet without recording their ID details? It’s also against the law for your ISP to block all these sites that the Ministry of Virtue have ordered blocked before they’ve even applied to the Great Big Brother Censorship Board for a banning order. The fact is, dear Minister, one way or another, you can’t block the internet. Now, I’m not encouraging you all to go make slanderous comments on websites, but if you really must access those slanderous over-18 sites and untruthful truth forums, here’s how.
Proxy server sites are web pages that open a private surfing window, so that the sites you visit are unseen by your local Thai ISP and therefore don’t get blocked. It also means your unique IP address (assigned to every internet connection) is not recorded or traceable. As you surf, all of this is recorded by your Thai ISP by law and can and will be used against you. But type ‘proxy server’ into Google and discover dozens of sites offering proxy server access, and many more sites listing thousands more. The trouble is, our Ministry of Virtue have been rather efficient with 500 million of our taxed baht and managed to block most of these. Never mind, as I write this Zend2.com is a proxy page as yet not blocked. But you can buy and download (usually for about $20) proxy server software that does exactly the same thing permanently. And here are a few I can suggest: wingate, gotrusted, fastproxynetwork and ghostsurf.