Get someone who has a broadband connection that is always on and isn't behind a firewall or router to set up a circumventer
1. Test whether your machine can receive incoming connections
Your machine must be able to receive incoming connections, in order to install the circumventor. Go to
this page to test whether your machine can receive incoming connections.
In Internet Explorer, you will see a message that asks something like, "The publisher cannot be determined" and "Do you want to install and run this program?" Other browsers will display similar messages. Click "Yes" to allow the applet to run.
If the last line says "Result: success.html", then your machine can receive incoming connections; if it says "Result: failure.html", then your machine cannot. (For tech-heads: this page launches a Java applet that listens on port 1238 of your computer, and then attempts to open a connection from the Peacefire server to port 1238 on your computer.)
If the applet displayed "Result: success.html", then you can continue with the install.
2. Install ActivePerl
You can install ActivePerl on your computer by clicking
this link, saving it to your computer, and double-clicking the saved file. Make sure you install it to "C:\Perl" (that should be the default).
3. Install OpenSA
You can install OpenSA on your computer by clicking
this link, saving it to your computer, and double-clicking the saved file. Make sure you install it to "C:\OpenSA\Apache2" (that should be the default). Accept all the default options that the setup program gives you, even if you aren't sure what they mean (e.g. on the screen that asks you to enter your "network domain" and other "server information", just accept the defaults since they don't affect the circumventor).
4. Run our program to set up a fresh Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate to be used with OpenSA
Download
this file to your computer, unzip the contents, and double-click the "SETUP.BAT" file inside the "circumventor-setup" directory that is created. This will install a perl script called CGIProxy and set up an SSL certificate that OpenSA will use to encrypt communications when people connect to your computer. (If you didn't understand that sentence, don't worry -- you don't have to!)
After running the SETUP.BAT file in the last step of these instructions, a file should open in your browser saying "It's ready!" and giving the location of the circumventor you have just installed. If you do not see this message, check the file cgiproxy-setup-log.txt, which should be located in the same directory as the SETUP.BAT file that you ran.
The person who does all this crap then gets a URL which they send to you and then you can go and access the Internet through that link Bess-free.
