How to stay Online if the Internet or Social media is Blocked in Your Country

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As the 2019 General Elections approach in Nigeria, rumors have it that INEC will likely be shutting down the Internet or major Social mediums. Though some people have come out to say its impossible and others, that it won’t happen since they will need it for collation of results and voting process, cautions can be taken.

The situation is more of a jam than shutdown since only war can shutdown internet.

Aside the negative impact, the internet is very important for dissemination of information – from observers at polling units, from news streams and so on.

Directly, here is a guide to staying Online if the internet or social media has been blocked or jammed  in your country or area.

1. Use circumvention or proxies tools like –  Psiphon, Tor, LanternTails, FireChat or Orbot. These apps help prevents people from tracing your location or spying on your browsing habits. Tor, for instance is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android; Orbot can help you browse the internet anonymously, send messages and encrypt your internet traffic while Tails is an operating system that enables you to start on any computer, allowing you to bypass censorship, and uses cryptographic tools to encrypt files and email messages.

2. Ensure the safety of your VPN. 
VPN means Virtual Private Network. According to Wikipedia, “it extends a private network across a public network, and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network.” A good example is Tunnelbear VPN.

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3. Protect Yourself or Device. 
Ensure that all the sites you are using are delivered over HTTPS.
HTTPS which means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), allows you to access the original site and not an altered version of it. For exapmple, gbetutv.com is under https, which means you are secured and can browse freely on it without someone hacking you. You can install the HTTPS Everywhere extension in your browser courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project.

Also, have a good antivirus for your device.

4. Seek help from the Experts.
Try to reach a Redhat person or someone who is good at internet and device penetration for best solution.

Reasons Why People Shutdown Internet:
1. To target smaller groups of people and locations
2. For National Security
3. To pause the flow of information for certain period

By Fadaka Louis
Contributed by QZ

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