Thwarting China's Net Censors

from the internet-free-china dept

Ron Morris writes "A computer network China can't censor: "Safeweb, partially funded by the Central Intelligence Agency's Silicon Valley venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is proposing a computer network that would circumvent central control." It's called Triangle Boy." I saw this article this morning and wasn't sure if it was worth posting. It's interesting, but I'm still not sure how it works. Why can't China just block all traffic to a Triangle Boy site? Or, if the answer is because so many people will be running Triangle Boy clients, how do people in China find out about where to connect to a Triangle Boy machine in the first place. There has to be some sort of central location that China can block. Maybe I'm just too tired to understand how it all works.
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 31 Aug 2001 @ 5:36am

    No Subject Given

    The problem with triangle boy (and safeweb in general) is that it passes the urls that you visit in the triangle boy url. Anyone who can see the triangle boy urls can see where you have really been.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 31 Aug 2001 @ 9:25am

    Triangle Boy

    Well I'm sitting here in downtown Shen Zhen
    China right now ... and the triangle boy web
    site with not come up with China Telecom 163
    service! Blocked it be is my guess... still
    no way to look at Geocites 1/2 of the year
    for me.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Eviltwin, 31 Aug 2001 @ 11:01am

    Triangle Boy

    Too bad we won't be able to use this in our country - the DMCA enforcers, the FBI, and the music industry will never allow it!

    Seriously, though - could they just get ISPs, companies, and universities all over the world to install this software voluntarily? It would be flat out impossible impossible to block practically every damn web site in the world, especially if your industies needed acess to some of them.

    As for the URL problem, can they use whatever system is used by anonymous surfing services? These supposedly not only block the place you visit from seeing who you are but also
    encrypt the URLs so that third parties can't see where you're going.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 31 Aug 2001 @ 12:21pm

      Re: Triangle Boy

      Umm, what does this have to do with the DCMA?

      And it is available in the US.

      www.safeweb.com
      www.triangleboy.com

      link to this | view in chronology ]


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