How to install the Circumventor program, which gets around all Web-blocking software

Bennett Haselton, last modified 6/13/2004

This page describes how to install the "Circumventor" program, which can be used to get around all Web blocking programs.

However, Please Note!! You don't actually install the Circumventor on the computer that is blocked from accessing Web sites. You, or a friend of yours, has to install the Circumventor on some other machine which is not censored.

For example, if you want to get around Web blocking at work, don't install the Circumventor on your work computer. Install the Circumventor on your home computer. When the installer is done, it will give you the URL for your new Circumventor, and then you write that URL down and take it in with you to work, where you can use that URL to bypass the Web blocking there. Similarly, if you're in China and blocked from accessing certain sites, don't install the Circumventor on a machine in China; instead, get a friend to install it outside China, and then they can send you the URL that you can use to access banned sites.

How to install the Circumventor

The machine where you install the Circumventor must have a fast Internet connection (not dial-up), and it must be running Windows XP or 2000 (this includes most computers these days). Also, once you install the Circumventor on your machine, the Circumventor will only work as long as you have your machine turned on and connected to the Internet, so you should only install it on machines that are online more or less all the time.

To install:

  1. Download ActivePerl from this link and install it. It must be installed to C:\Perl (this should be the default). Accept all of the default options.
  2. Download OpenSA 2.0.2 beta from this link and install it. Accept all of the default options. (If you get to a screen titled "Server Information" and it doesn't have values filled in for "Network Domain", "Server Name" and "Administrator's Email Address", just fill in these boxes with made-up random values -- the Circumventor doesn't use them.)
  3. Download the circumventor-setup.exe program from this link and pick "Save" -- then once you have saved it on your computer, run the circumventor-setup.exe file that you saved.

If the circumventor-setup.exe program succeeds, it will display an "It's ready!" page at the end of the install. If it fails, it will create a file circumventor-setup-log.txt -- send that file to bennett@peacefire.org and we will try to figure out what went wrong.

Happy surfing!

Special thanks

This project was made possible by the existence of the following programs, which are generously given away for free by their authors: