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As we all know, there is no internet censorship in China. However, if you've attempted to access one of the estimated 19,032 websites that are inaccessible in China, then you may have experienced some frustration to that end. It's not simply those of you who have been deemed a cultist, separatists, splittist, or attempt to read illicit material from rogue, upstart news organizations, but China's filtration system is a dynamic, evolving beast that smothers forbidden material faster than Prozac.
What keeps China in a league with such informational blackholes as Yemen, Belarus, Tunisia, Burma (Myanmar), Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia is a hive of 30,000 Internet Police and the infamous Great Firewall of China, which has been known to block offending websites within hours of a violation. In July of this year, a group of researchers at the University of Cambridge released a paper entitled "Ignoring the Great Firewall of China," which details the inner workings of the Great Firewall and describes a method for circumventing it.
Now, however, a group of Canadian internet experts working under the Psiphon project run by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto and funded by George Soro's Open Society Institute, has created software that will, according to the project website, allow users "in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor."
The project's website has a Flash illustration of how Psiphon works and provides the following description:
psiphon acts as a "web proxy" for authenticated psiphonites, retrieving requested web pages and displaying them in a user's browser. psiphon uses a secure, encrypted connection to receive web requests from the psiphonite to the psiphonode who then transports the results back to the psiphonite. There is no connection between the psiphonite and the requested website, as psiphon transparently proxies the request through the psiphonode's computer allowing the psiphonite to browse blocked websites seamlessly.
The software is an open source project and slated for release on December 1. Wired News and The Register have more on the story.
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that cambridge article is so long, isn't it easier just to use a proxy like http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html
The connection is reset when Anonymouse attempts to access some forbidden websites. While it may work for some sites, it's obviously not option for others. In any case, it's not just about access, Psiphon also encrypts data, allowing more private communications, uploads, etc.
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The count of 'banned' websites you mention dates from 2002 and according to my impression (but nobody has redone this count) the number has decreased dramatically.
In a strange way that makes the censorship more effective, since in the past you needed a proxy to do anything online. Now, because the number of blocks has diminished a large group might not even notice that they are being censored.
In that way they miss the real issue in Toronto: it is not about technology, when you know you are being censored, it is pretty easy to get around it. But many people might not realize this anymore.
Google News and Google images often refuses to work, or is dodgy at best. www.alltheweb.com is a good alternative when Google has spat out the dummy.
Firefox + TOR...end of story. Super simple, always works. And with the TOR Firefox plugin you are just one click away from having it on when you need it and off when you don't. Simple simple simple.
Are you posting from China?
Your are referring to Privoxy, correct?
@GregC: I've actually gone through the trouble to install TOR and configured it as efficiently as possible, but my access has not improved.
In any case, if I am configuring it correctly, then it doesn't work, but certainly anything that takes more than a few minutes to configure isn't for everyone. However, thanks for the tip.
also check out gladder https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2864/
doesnt work 100% of the time, though, but its unobtrusive and requires no set-up.
PS i've never gotten the tor firefox extension to work for me either.
Nevermind. I am sufficiently impressed.
Tor moves at a snail's pace for me too.
Tor may be slow, but the advantage over sites like anonymouse.org is that it can handle java and ajax coding, which are typically stripped out with a proxy host. Meaning, you can log in and actually use sites like wordpress.com instead of just looking at them. Different tools for different uses I suppose.
However, TOR only works with http and https so while you can access the "whole web," it doesn't really provide comprehensive privacy and leaves SMTP (mail), FTP (files), UDP, etc. open. TOR does provide a fairly good privacy, but it is limited.
Has anyone tried-out psiphon? Thoughts?
For different values of "actually use".