The wars of the censored
Don't let the cyber inspectors get in the way of a good web site
Wanda Sloan
The chairman of Microsoft is a knight, but he does not come dressed in shining armour. Sure, Bill, just like you say, "It is not possible to block information, it is just not." And sooner or later, people in countries where the news is heavily censored will learn that quote, too.
Mr Gates, of course, is extremely occupied covering his lower back because of the major and extremely public criticism of his company and others for helping brutish governments keep information from their people as long as possible. If you don't believe that, ask Sir William what happened to the blog of a New York Times Beijing researcher that disappeared at a keystroke from Microsoft Spaces recently.
Tell it to people in
China, citizens in
Iran, surfers in
Arab countries and
even Internet addicts in a well known Southeast Asian nation, where constitution guarantees for freedom of media and speech are of little concern to its Information and Communications Technology Ministry and its dedicated police department.
In such places, web sites suddenly disappear. Here an excellent compilation of Laos history is gone, there the Gemology Institute of Malaysia goes blank, on Monday you can't get to an excellent web site featuring Thai hotels and on Thursday you have to go to the bookstore to get the book Thailand: Land of Beautiful Women because some Cyber Inspector thinks it is pornographic or somehow harmful, who knows what? And on Friday the book web site is back again.
On a recent Monday morning, an admittedly down-market yet popular daily newspaper located not 150 feet below me prints a story about a new web site of the former southern insurgent group Pulo, and on Monday afternoon a Cyber Inspector has craftily posted an "Under Construction" sign, not even respecting citizens enough to tell them he (of course; no woman would do this) has simply blocked the web site.
Throughout the world in brutal dictatorships like China and Iran, citizens who want to be informed use proxies of various sorts to get around the censorship. Just like the proxy on your local network, they divert resources and ultimately fool the people and computers at central control.
In short, when you use a proxy such as Guardster, Anonymity 4 Proxy or countless others, your Internet host - office, home, hotel, whatever - thinks you are somewhere other than in China, say, or some other country that has onerous censorship. You can access even the blocked web sites, fine.
There are numerous proxies. Some are blocked by Cyber Inspectors, but they can't block them all, if only because friends, overseas associates and the kind folks at Pantip Plaza are among those who will help you.
One such proxy, for example, requires a friend with a high-speed connection and living in an uncensored country to place the software on her machine, so that you can access the Internet through her. Clever people there, at Circumventor, which recruits volunteers in censor-less countries around the world to volunteer for this wonderful example of free media.
Freegate is terrific software, and I would write an entire column about it except for one thing - it is basically useless unless you read Chinese. This simple little program, which you can email to a Chinese person if you need to make merit this week, is monolingual for now.
UltraSurf, by a group called Ultrareach, is a single-file download of just over 100 kilobytes, small enough (by design and forethought) to attach to an email to send to friends in places where censors work hard even to prevent citizens from getting to the web sites of such programs.
As with all such software, patience is a virtue. When you start UltraSurf, the program takes some time to establish connections and set up the proxy settings.
It places a large, golden padlock icon down near the clock area in the bottom-right of the screen, which provides access to basic functions, including on/off and also the help file.
There's not much to know about UltraSurf, in fact. If it is running successfully, you can use Internet Explorer to connect with web sites, including blocked ones.
Access is generally slow when using proxies, but UltraSurf does a good job of persevering through the various proxies and false-ended routing to give you a reliable web page of whatever web page you are looking for.
UltraSurf works only with the Microsoft web browser, and a couple of close variants. It is not guaranteed to work with either the popular AM or Maxthon IE clones, and won't work at all with Opera, Firefox or Netscape, at least without extensive tweaking.
Torpark, on the other hand, only works with Firefox, and comes bundled with the latest version of that freeware browser.
That makes it another all-in-one, with no learning curve for Chinese, Iranians and other firewalled victims to get around the censors. But it means that around 92% of people in the world can't use their favourite browser.
That is no knock on Firefox, which tries to stay safer than the Microsoft browser. Unlike IE, Firefox has surfer-friendly features such as tabs - multiple web sites displayed inside a single Firefox window - and groups. You can save and open a number of web sites with a single mouse click, even a number of censored sites if you are in China, Iran or some other censoring country.
Torpark, in fact, comes with portable Firefox. That means you can install the whole software, browser and all, on a removable drive - a USB thumb drive, say, or even a CD - and carry it with you to the Internet cafe or hotel business centre in Tehran or other city where authorities censor the Net.
Thus, if you use Torpark, you wind up configuring Firefox quite a lot, but the actual anti-censorship program not at all. Simply double-click the Torpark icon, and you probably will be able to surf anywhere you wish on the web.
Torpark has an interesting history. In an earlier life, it was a US Naval Research Laboratory project. Like UltraSurf, it fools censors by sending web requests bouncing around several web sites around the world, disguising the location of the actual surfer through obscurity.
But for the reason of simplicity, Ultrareach's UltraSurf and Torpark seem the obvious choices for those who occasionally need access to the truth on the Internet. Serious, daily skirting of censors may require more work.
Hide IP Platinum is equally simple, but costs almost 1,400 baht to download from a commercial site. Still, it is a viable and excellent choice, as is Anonymity 4 Proxy, a 1,200 baht investment if you wish.
It is not entirely useful to put links to these programs here; authorities merely block them anyhow. The tireless researchers at Google, Yahoo, MSN and others can turn up any number of helpful links, particularly if you combine your search for Torpark, Ultrareach and so on with the word "download" as well.
Email:
wandas@post.com
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