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Will Femia is a Weblog enthusiast who, through good fortune and dumb luck, was introduced to the form as his position as chat producer for MSNBC.com careered into obsolescence. On any given day, Will can be found having already spent an unhealthy amount of time squinting at a computer screen.

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More on that proxy server stuff

Posted: Friday, March 02, 2007 9:54 PM by Will Femia

Thanks very much to Dwayne in the comments on my previous post for sharing some perspective from Shanghai along with a few links.

Having read this analysis of China's Web censoring it's pretty clear that my impression that you're either blocked or not is a bit of an oversimplification.  Furthermore, I gather that some folks had trouble with the couple links I provided, so let me offer this full set instead:

(This was going to be a cool embedded box but it didn't work, so here's a link to it elsewhere.  It's the same box as on Proxy.org but since some people are blocked from that site, this may work instead.)

Those are all proxy servers.  Enter the site you want to see at the top of that box (replacing the IP tracking site they put in there by default to demonstrate that your IP isn't being tracked), highlight the proxy server you want to try and hit GO.

Some of them will work automatically, some open in a new window with your destination site pre-seeded in yet another box and you'll have to hit another version of that GO button.  If it works, what you usually see is the site you're trying to reach inside some graphic frame from the proxy site.

I got into talking about this as a means of pointing to that GreatFirewallOfChina site, but really Tor is a built for this exact purpose and is widely regarded as the best way to access the Web anonymously.

Incidentally, the recommended proxy server with Tor is Privoxy so that's probably worth a try too.  I see that there is a Tor download that comes bundled with it.  What bears consideration is that when beating the filter means breaking the law you don't only want to disguise your destination but you want to disguise yourself as well.

One last note comes to mind, I've heard that it's possible to run Tor from a flash drive, so you don't even have to put it on your machine.  You slip the drive into your USB and filter your Web surfing through there.  It's slower but anonymous and filter defeating (or so they say).

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What would you have to be doing to be worried about what you were accessing and where you accessing it from? by the way, not my real name and not my real city.

Will Femia, Smallville, Kansas (Sent Monday, March 05, 2007 12:21 PM)

As an IT professional, I've found a few ways of getting to websites and file-sharing services that I like to use. As for using a proxy, one of the best available out there is the Google Translation page. Simply copy the URL that is being blocked by your proxy and then paste it into the Google translation field and translate from something like Spanish to English, and nine times out of ten you'll bypass that proxy! As for surfing the web by USB, I am an avid user of a program called Mojopac (available from mojopac.com). It acts as a portable mini-windows xp system that can be put on any USB drive (I use it on my 10GB USB) and all the data stays on the USB.

Travis Kidd, Boise (Sent Wednesday, March 07, 2007 10:13 AM)

Thanks Will, the proxy list on your website does work most of the time. It seems that going around China's filtering isn't by itself a problem, it is only using it to violate user laws that makes it a problem. I've decided it is safe enough for my kids to do school research this way on Wikipedia.

Dwayne, Shanghai, China (Sent Saturday, March 10, 2007 12:36 AM)

There are even other usb based devices to assist in bypass censorship. Many highschool kids have flashdrives that they carry around for this purpose. Also there is a new proxy based on curl that is experiencing great success... see: www.unblockmyspace.com.cn

Sam Something, North, Texas (Sent Monday, May 28, 2007 9:29 PM)

The vital thing to remember is that you\'ll need to be calm.

travel preparation (Sent Monday, September 17, 2007 12:01 PM)



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