If you’re concerned about the repercussions of the much-debated SOPA bill that’s making waves here in the US, then you might start looking at ways to get around the DNS blocking that it could potentially lead to. Thankfully, there are already people out there working on ways to get around the blocks, should they happen. And, if you know anything about how DNS actually works, you’ll know that it’s not actually that hard to get around.

DeSOPA is a Firefox addon that was created not just to help circumvent the problem, should SOPA pass, but to prove how silly the bill is in the first place. Essentially, DNS works by having nameservers tied to your domain name. These nameservers then tell your browser the IP address of the server where the website is hosted. Now if the server is configured to do so, you can simply type in the IP address, and you’ll arrive at the exact same place. The primary reason why we don’t browse the web by IP address is that you can technically host multiple websites on the same IP, and 199.27.135.236 doesn’t have the same ring to it that RedFerret.net does.

All you need to do is install the addon, then enable it when you want to browse by IP. You can then easily turn it off with a click to return to resolving sites via DNS. Hopefully creations such as this will help show that not only is the proposed bill ridiculous, but it will be nearly impossible to properly enforce.