dop’s blog

The other day I read the article in BBC News about Google that is going to censor itself in China (article, same on CNET). I really think that is disgusting to make the most free and open human creation (the Internet) a self-censoring medium. Of course, who can blame Google? China is a highly flourishing economy and the guys in Google want to make business - and money. If they don’t, someone else will, so do not blame them.

For quite some time I was thinking of having the ability to offer proxies to all those, like the Chinese people or the citizen of Saudi Arabia, that have limited or censored access to the Net. The idea has matured in my head and I am proposing a peer-to-peer HTTP proxy service.

I strongly believe that through minor modifications or plugins to existing p2p software - I believe the best candidate are the Gnutella network and Freenet - we can support a p2p service that could be available to all people around the world. I am willing to share a portion of my bandwidth to let anyone to read and write freely. Are you?

Technical proposal: I am proposing a scheme that is to be built around an existing p2p network (Gnutella, Freenet, other) that could look like this:

• For users that act as proxies

1. create a virtual shared file over the p2p network (for example bouncy_proxy.nocensor)
2. start the proxy plugin
3. you are ready

• For users that need to bypass censorship

1. start the p2p software
2. configure the web browser to use the p2p plugin as a proxy
3. when you write a URL to the web browser, the plugin searches the p2p network for file bouncy_proxy.nocensor and registers it as a valid proxy
4. use one or more proxies to retrieve the content for the requested URL
5. you are free

I do not know how this would work and how to solve some security issues - this is not something that you would use to login to your bank account. And of course forget HTTP pipelining and persistent connections.

However, IMHO, it worths a try. If only I had more time. To make the Net more free.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.