In the wake of the Christchurch shootings, the New Zealand government has gone completely insane.  Their PM is walking around in a hijab while instituting a program of mass censorship.  The NZ state just charged an 18 year old for violating their censorship laws because he posted a link to the live-stream of the shooting and published a photograph of the mosque with the message “target acquired.”  He faces 14 years in prison for the censorship law violation.  The judge has denied his bail in the case.

In furtherance of their program of Maoist censorship, the NZ state has instructed their ISPs to block certain “offending” web sites from their customers.  These sites include Gab, Dissenter, 4Chan, 8Chan, BitChute and other free-speech platforms, even though these platforms had nothing to do with the shooting.  Facebook, the platform that actually hosted the live-stream of the shooting, has not been banned.  As a libertarian and a human of good conscience, I feel it is my duty to explain to any New Zealand readers I may have how to avoid the communist style censorship that is being imposed on them.

First, and most importantly, is to buy a VPN subscription to a trusted host that maintains no logs.  I recommend PrivateInternetAccess.  A VPN is a small program that runs in your taskbar that makes your computer appear to be accessing the web from another country. Once you install the VPN program, you’ll be able to choose what country you’d like to appear you’re coming from.

A word of caution about using VPNs:  If you attempt to connect to a banking website while running a VPN, your bank may place your account under increased scrutiny or block access to your account.  This is because many banks do not allow anonymous IP addresses to access their systems, since this is typically a tactic that is used by hackers.  To avoid this, just make sure you toggle the VPN off before you bank.  Some streaming sites, such as Hulu, may also block access to their services if they detect you are coming from an anonymous VPN.

The next thing you should do, which will also avoid most of the censorship and is completely free, is to change your DNS host to 1.1.1.1.  Here is a guide to how you can do this.  It’s pretty simple:

1. Click on the Start menu, then click on Control Panel.
2. Click on Network and Internet.
3. Click on Change Adapter Settings.
4. Right click on the Wi-Fi network you are connected to, then click Properties.
5. Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (or Version 6 if desired).
6. Click Properties.
7. Write down any existing DNS server entries for future reference.
8. Click Use The Following DNS Server Addresses.
9. Replace those addresses with the 1.1.1.1 DNS addresses:
   • For IPv4: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
   • For IPv6: 2606:4700:4700::1111 and 2606:4700:4700::1001
10. Click OK, then Close.
11. Restart your browser.

You basically want to get to a settings page that looks similar to this:

Then right click on the connection (WiFi or Local Area), select Properties from the context menu, then select the TCP/IPv4 and hit the Properties button on the dialogue box :

Then plug in the Preferred DNS server settings for IPv4 (1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1) and hit the OK button.  Repeat the above steps for the IPv6 settings (2606:4700:4700::1111 and 2606:4700:4700::1001).

The be sure to restart your browser.

I further recommend changing your default search engine to DuckDuckGo.  Here’s how to make it the default search engine for Chrome and IE.  While the Google search engine doesn’t necessarily block URLs that don’t comply with censorship laws, their search algorithms are nearly just as bad because they bury alternative news sources and opinion sites.

I also recommend changing your primary email over to a ProtonMail hosted email address.

Good luck Kiwis.