Smashing the Great Firewall of China

The Toronto Star has an inspiring story about a few IT academics taking on China's censorship regime. By creating software that allows anyone to provide an internet proxy to friends the geeks at the University of Toronto are hoping to encourage the Chinese diaspora to funnel uncensored internet to friends and family back home.

A proxy lets Computer A connect to Computer B and have Computer B look up websites for it. As far as the censors can tell A is just talking to B when in fact B is passing on information from all over the web. As the connection is secure - like most online credit card purchases - the censors can't see what's passing between A and B either.

Proxies have been in use for years, and paranoid Westerners (or in the light of Bush's wiretapping, perhaps not so paranoid) have often used them [1][2][3]. The challenge has always been to find a free, public proxy to use, which in a censored country is not easy to do. By making a user-friendly program to provide a proxy to friends the Toronto trio have unlocked significant headaches for China's censors.

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