Help Bypass Censorship

[khalido]

The Govt. of Pakistan has started blocking some news websites which have been publishing material which the govt. deems unfit. Now, they are not very technically competent, and while have also been slowly shutting off access to anonymous proxies, there is a number they haven't yet shut.

However, my experience using the majority of these anon proxies is that they're slow - terribly so.

So I wanted to ask the knowledgable fellows here if its possible to run my own personal anon server on a shared host. I already have two hosting accounts which have php, perl, and a few other scripting languages. That should be more than enough to run a proxy server? If someone can help me out with this that will be great!

Secondly, signing up for one of the many paid anonymizer services is not really an option as they are also blocking access to more and more of them.

[willzzz]

Very easily done. If your server supports CGI/Perl/PHP then you can probably take any free/gpl/open source web-based proxy running on those scripting platforms & it should work. One popular package that I used is CGIProxy (free), available here:

http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy

Or if you can program in any of the above languages, you can write your own.

BTW, some countries that are not-so-free use a different method of filtering the internet for their citizens which is called DNS hijacking in which the govt tells the ISP to create fake DNS corresponding zones (so a filtered site goes to a diff. ip than the official one). I know this method is used by China. You can bypass this by using a foriegn DNS server, preferably one from Europe or the US/Canada where the internet IS FREE.

[MazX_Napalm]

Here in UK, the BT ISP has started deciding what sites its users are not allowed to see (mainly kiddie porn).

[khalido]

Thanks a whole lot!!!! Installed it, works great!! The Pak govt. is running some sort of filtering software - they had hired a western company to set it up for them for a astounding 50 million dollars! So it's not just a DNS thingamajing - for example the SA Tribune is blocked, but even if I enter in the IP address directly, it still goes nowhwere. IP being 64.71.179.17.

The censorship is not to bad - they mainly block porn sites and the occasional news websites, but its annoying nonetheless. Especially the news - as it just attracts more attention and more people people end up reading it than otherwise. ironical, but such is the way this country runs.

see PTCL begins blocking proxy servers: Proscribed sites for last years attempt at censorship.

Edited August 20, 2004 by khalido