With an updated Internet restriction policy in Vietnam, the demand to access Facebook in Vietnam has grown exponentially in the last few month. In previous years, the Facebook blocked in Vietnam was just an annoyance, something that didn't stop you from getting on your Facebook account, but just made it more difficult. However, this has changed, and Facebook is now completely blocked. Old methods of unblocking Facebook are no longer working,and Internet restriction in Communist Vietnam is starting to look much like that of China.

One of the old ways to access Facebook in Vietnam was to change the DNS settings when you tried to access Facebook. To be honest, this is something that I don't really understand. What I do know is that there were tons of tech-blogs with guys posting about how to change the DNS or access various DNS changing sites that popped up around 2009. The blogs were filled basically huge lines of code that supposedly worked to unblock Facebook at jobs, school, and Vietnam (China was out of the game pretty early). However, follow up comments by fellow bloggers were often confused and angry that these methods didn't work as advertised. Whether or not they worked in 2009 is irrelevant because as oppressive communist governments do best, the Vietnamese government quickly caught up, blocked these "DNS loopholes" and using them as a way to access Facebook in Vietnam is no longer an option.

Free proxies fell to the same fate as in China, and were discovered, blocked, and/or monitored by government censors. As you know, everyone likes FREE, and the first sign of a great, free proxy is a high amount of traffic which brings attention to it, and gets it blocked by government censors.

So the only remaining, quick, reliable, and guaranteed way to access Facebook in Vietnam (as well as other blocked sites) is the use of a virtual private network.

A virtual private network is usually shortened to VPN, and you may have heard this term if you've lived in a country that censors the Internet. A VPN works to encrypt your data on two levels, hide your IP address, and redirect your communication with Internet sites so that government Internet censors have no way whatsoever to block, censor, or monitor your Internet activity. Data encryption, tunneling, and a VPN server outside of Vietnam (usually in The USA or The UK) will get you access to Facebook in Vietnam, and unblock any sites that you're unable to surf on a local Internet connection.

Vietnam is right behind China in terms of Internet censorship. With the list of blocked web sites that's growing each year, who knows what you won't be able to access next year. Youtube? LinkedIn? Digg? Gmail? Anything is possible. It's best to protect your privacy and stay in touch with the outside world using a VPN.

A VPN will work on many devices including iPhone, iPad, laptos running Windows or Macs with OS/X. Even some of the lesser known stuff like Linux, Android, and Nokia smart phones can all use VPN's to bypass internet censorship in Vietnam.