To follow up something that I posted last week, there’s a project going on at the U of T, called Psiphon. It’s goal is to allow those who live in countries in which the government restricts Internet access, unfettered rights to the Web. From what I can tell, Psiphon provides proxy access to the Web via a model similar to something like Tor where the users share bandwidth. So if you’re running the Psiphon client, you act as a node on the Psiphon network. As such, your computer will fetch data from a site that is blocked in China, such as Slashdot, and send it to someone making the request in China. This means that it could be detected by someone like the Chinese government, but the data blends in with the rest of Internet traffic so as not to stand-out. This one will be interesting to watch.
halted by the great firewall of china
Being an avid reviewer of my own web server logs like the dork that I am, I noticed a referral to my site from:
http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.html
Apparently this is part of a graduate research project at Harvard University. More info about the project can be found here. After a quick search of the listing, I found chrisbellini.com on the list.
Hopefully China’s computer geeks are helping their less-technical friends and relatives find anonymous proxy servers so that they can access sites that the Chinese government deems inappropriate. Unless that sort of thing can get you arrested or worse; in that case, don’t do it. What is the law on that anyway?