Hi Ukraine

A bit of IT support from far-away Denmark. Below I am introducing tools that may aid in accessing the internet in case of a partial block or censorship. They were made for China, but if Yanukovich is trying something similar, there is no reason they should not also work well in Ukraine.

I urge you to install them today, as they may be hard to get once the blocking is on.

1. Freegate

My first choice is Freegate, since it’s free with no ads.

Download Freegate on the link below. Install it and allow full access through the Windows Firewall. It will open an Internet Explorer window. This window will be through a proxy connection, which means that it will be virtually outside Ukraine. Happy browsing.

Download Freegate

HotspotShield

Hotspotshield is not completely free as it has ads and an “Elite Version”, but it seems more advanced and it supports Firefox.

Go to the website and click free download. Install the program and say yes/allow to all security warning. Allow it to close your browser. When it restarts you are going through the proxy network.

Download HotspotShield

They both slow down your connection considerably, as your internet has to go through an outside server, the proxy. This has the sideeffect of making it harder to track your internet usage, but it also makes Skype and Youtube less enjoyable. It will be fast enough to read news, email and instant messaging and Facebook.

However, if there are no problems, you might as well turn it off. In Freegate it’s just called off – in HotspotShield they call it pause, but you can choose to pause it indefinetely.

EDIT: A lot of commenters have been recommending The Onion Router:

“Tor is open source, and can be made to work on almost any system you can imagine. It works very well on macs: https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en#mac and even on Android phones: https://guardianproject.info/apps/orweb”

Good luck and I wish for democracy with you in Ukraine!