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It's becoming more and more important to get a VPN

Dissenter is a service and browser plugin created by Gab.com that allows people to comment on any web page, bypassing the censorship of the Silicon Valley tech giants. Obviously these tech giants, as well as the leftist media, are not happy about it, because they can't control the narrative.

Very recently the New Zealand government started blocking Dissenter at the ISP level, apparently as a response to the recent terrorist attack. Even though neither Gab nor Dissenter had any connection whatsoever with the perpetrator. (The terrorist attack was livestreamed on Facebook, of all places. Naturally Facebook faced no repercussions of any kind for this, because it's one of the protected Silicon Valley tech giants.)

Expect this kind of censorship and blocking to become more and more common. Very soon you might find yourself unable to connect to Gab, Dissenter, and a bunch of other online services that do not conform to the censorship standards of your country.

The only way to bypass this censorship is to use a VPN. A VPN creates an encrypted connection to a VPN server somewhere in the world, and your ISP will have no way of knowing which website you are actually trying to connect to. The website itself will see you connecting from that country, rather than your actual one. Most VPN user interfaces allow you to choose the country. This can be used to bypass regional restrictions of all sorts, as well as hide what you are doing from your ISP and your government.

Of course there are drawbacks to VPNs. Some VPNs, for example, deliberately do not support peer-to-peer connections, while others do. Also, your download speeds might be degraded somewhat (depending on the quality of the VPN service). Depending on what exactly you are doing, you might only want to use the VPN for certain websites but not others, but most VPN software will have an easy way to turn it on and off.

While there exist a few free VPN services, these will be of the lowest possible quality, will generally not support peer-to-peer connections, and may seriously hinder your browsing speed (making eg. watching youtube videos almost impossible). The highest-quality VPN services are all commercial. However, many of them are not extraordinarily expensive, having a somewhat reasonable and moderate pricing system (eg. NordVPN often has offers of about 100€ for a 3-year plan, which is not extremely unreasonable. And it's one of the best-reviewed VPN services out there. But you should of course always read reviews and compare features before making such a decision.)

Expect VPNs themselves to start becoming illegal in some countries some time in the near future, but there's probably ways around that (and probably no way for governments to stop their use). The western world is becoming more and more like China.

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