The Top Three Tools To Get Through Internet Fire Walls And Censorship

Internet censorship tools such as China’s Great Fire Wall and other efforts to block free access to online information are seen by many netizens as a challenge to be overcome.

Some are motivated by the “greater good”, some financial gain and others just like to see if they can outwit bigger and better funded opponents.

The result is a host of tools for getting through blockages. Online technology ezine InformationWeek has put up an excellent article on the top three tools for going through, round or over the fire walls. It also has some good advice on other methods. And unlike many such articles which shout out the benefits but ignore the risks  author Serdar Yegulalp lays out the pitfalls and dangers of using Tor, Circumventor and Glype.

Below are some brief extracts from his article. For those who want to know more and need some solid practicle advice read the full article.

And remember to also look at the rfaunplugged censor dodging resources at the top of our homepage’s middle column.Tor (The Onion Router)

Tor is nominally used for the sake of anonymity, but also works as a circumvention tool, and its decentralized design makes it resilient to attacks. It started as a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory project but has since been developed by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and is open source software available for a variety of platforms. Human Rights Watch, Reporters without Borders, and the United States International Broadcasting Bureau (Voice of America) all advocate using Tor as a way to avoid compromising one’s anonymity. With a little care, it can also be used to route around information blocking.

The concept behind Tor is simple enough. Out there are a whole slew of servers that are part of the worldwide Tor network. Connect to one as a proxy, and your Internet requests are routed at random through other servers in the Tor network. Requests between Tor nodes are encrypted. By the time the request emerges from Tor’s network and is sent on to the server in question, its origins have been heavily obfuscated. If you want, it is possible to pick a specific entry and exit node, or even to forcibly exclude specific exit nodes.

The advantages ought to be clear. For one, there’s no immediate way to tell where the connection is originating from, geographically: a request made in the United States could emerge from the Tor network somewhere in Poland. Another major feature of Tor is the hidden service protocol, which makes it possible to use the Tor cloud to anonymously publish a Web site or provide other network services, although only for people directly connected to the Tor network. Tor also works with just about any Internet application, since it works via the SOCKS proxy interface.

Circumventor

Developed by Bennett Haslelton of the anti-Internet-censorship site Peacefire.org, Circumventor works a little bit like Tor in that each machine running the Circumventor software is a node in a network.

Circumventor is most commonly used to get around the Web-blocking system in a workplace or school. The user installs Circumventor on an unblocked PC — e.g., their own PC at home — and then uses their home PC as a proxy. Since most blocking software works by blocking known Web sites and not random IP addresses, setting up a Circumventor instance ought to be a bit more effective than attempting to use a list of proxies that might already be blocked.

Glype

The Glype proxy has been created in the same spirit as Circumventor. It’s installed on an unblocked computer, which the user then accesses to retrieve Web pages that are normally blocked. It’s different from Circumventor in that it needs to be installed on a Web server running PHP, not just any old PC with Internet access. To that end, it’s best for situations where a Web server is handy or the user knows how to set one up manually.

Setting up Glype itself is easy, though — the admin unpacks the files into a folder on a Web server that supports PHP, and the rest is almost entirely self-configuring.

There are two basic ways to use Glype: as-is with minimal options, or with a configuration panel installed that lets you control a great many under-the-hood settings. The as-is version only lets you change a couple of basic options, such as whether or not to load cookies or embedded objects (e.g., Flash), or if the target URL or fetched pages should be encoded to avoid being intercepted by other filters. Most static Web pages — e.g., Wikipedia, text-only news sites — work fine without tinkering. If only one person is using Glype, this basic version should more than do the job.

The expanded options, though, typically come into play when setting up a Glype instance that’s being used by others. Add the control panel — which involves nothing more than uploading a few more pages to the Glype site — and an admin can set policies on a great many things. The Glype instance can perform activity logging, local caching of retrieved Web pages, enforce load-limiting measures, add a footer to any retrieved document, block specific IP addresses, prevent direct hotlinking to proxied pages, or create unique URLs for each page visited, which increases privacy.

Other Workarounds

Over time, users have discovered a whole slew of other, indirect ways to circumvent Web-blocking systems. They’re catch-as-catch-can, and are mostly used when nothing else is available.

One common method is to use the Coral Cache, or Coral Content Distribution Network, a peer-to-peer Web mirroring system originally designed to relieve congestion on heavily-trafficked Web servers. If the various CCDN servers are not blocked, a user can see a copy of a Web site in the Coral Cache by appending .nyud.net:8090 (or .nyud.net:8080) to the end of the domain name in the URL. Many Web-filtering programs already block the Coral Cache by default, however, which makes it of relatively limited use.

Another workaround is to have web pages delivered via email, such as with services like Web2Mail. This is useful if access to the Web is restricted but email itself remains relatively unblocked.

Google can sometimes be used as a proxy-defeating system through a clever hack: the page-translation service. If you request a page via Google Translate, select English as the target language, and use an arbitrary original language — for instance, Arabic, when the original page isn’t in Arabic at all — you can get some pages to load as-is. This doesn’t work with all sites, though; for instance, with the New York Times, it triggers a redirect to a “Page not found” error. Also, the user has to know the target URL in the first place — although that doesn’t exclude the possibility of, for instance, retrieving a site’s homepage and then drilling down from there to the needed page. And finally, this assumes that Google itself is accessible at all.