Nothing super complex here, as these were some of my first full scene renders in Blender and I was still getting the hang of it. Also, I can't claim any credit for the bedroom set I used here. I try whenever possible to create unique sets for my scenes, but in this case I just went with a default Poser set made by santuziy78, because I was too focused on trying to learn how to work Blender to get further bogged down building a set.
I had planned to do a somewhat in-depth review detailing my experiences working with Blender for the first time, and some other technical “Making Of” type stuff, but current events have convinced me to do something more important with this Author's Notes space, so I'll get right to it…
This is not directly aimed at anyone in a particular country who may have recently seen their access to certain websites curtailed by totalitarian government measures. I'm sure that by now, those people have already looked into it and found a workaround. This is mostly geared toward everyone else, because I know personally I'd never put much thought into the possibility of seeing websites I frequent banned arbitrarily by the government or by my internet service provider. But this kind of thing can happen anywhere. So, what do you do if your favorite website gets banned? Here are some of the best and more popular methods for getting around the blockade…
A virtual private network (VPN) enables you to access the internet through an encrypted connection routed through a secure remote server. That may not have been a very good technical definition, but basically what it means is, the sites you visit don't know where you're accessing from because they can't see your real IP address. You can have an IP address in Switzerland, Serbia, or Zimbabwe if you'd like. There are tons of benefits to using a VPN, and one of them is that it's one of the most effective ways to bypass a regional website ban. If they don't know where you're accessing from, they can't block you; it's that simple.
There are tons of great VPN services out there. I would not recommend using a free VPN service, because not only do they have fewer options, but they're also not always very safe. I'm sure you've heard the expression, “If they're not selling you anything, then you're the product.” If you're going with a VPN, there are lots of very affordable ones which are highly secure and full featured. VirtualShield and NordVPN are worth having a look at.
Getting a VPN is sort of the Nuclear Option when it comes to this type of thing, and maybe you'd prefer not to take it that far, and don't feel like paying for yet another monthly service. So what are your other options? Here are a few less solid but free alternatives…
Opera is a free web browser that has a pretty good VPN service built into it. They discontinued their VPN last year for a while, but have recently brought it back. All you have to do is download the app on your smartphone and install it. (Note: You do need to activate the VPN; it's not on by default).
Yeah, you knew this was coming. The Tor Browser is a modified Firefox browser which anonymizes your web traffic by routing you through an overlay network of thousands of relays, making it extremely difficult (but not impossible) for snoops to track your internet activity. Tor also gives you access to the Dark Web, and all those devious .onion sites you hear about. The downside is that the Tor Browser can be slow, so it's not a good option for streaming videos or downloading large files. Also, while sites don't know where you're accessing them from, they are in many cases able to detect you're visiting them via Tor exit nodes, and some otherwise unrestricted sites will block you if you visit them via the Tor network.
* If the Tor Project website is blocked in your country, you can download the Tor browser here from GitHub: https://github.com/TheTorProject/gettorbrowser. NOTE:It can be installed to and operated off of a USB drive.
This is a weird one, but if a website is blocked in your region, you can access it by typing the url into Google Translate. Effectively, Google Translate is functioning as a proxy server when you do this. However, this will only allow you to passively browse and read content; you won't be able to upload or really interact with the site in any way. It's a good way to access news sites that are blocked in your country, stuff like that.
This doesn't always work, but it can be a quick and easy solution sometimes. If it's your internet service provider doing the blocking rather than the government, sometimes they're blocking the site by redirecting requests as they pass through their DNS (domain name system) server. If that's the case (it usually isn't), then all you need to do is change your network settings so you use some other server besides your ISP's DNS server. Google Public DNS is probably the easiest and most obvious alternative.
This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the easiest and most popular workarounds that you don't need to be an expert hacker to pull off. I hope this helps! (well, actually, I hope you never need to use any of this information, but it's good information to have nonetheless)
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