How to Outwit the World's Internet Censors

By Tom Zeller Jr. | The New York Times
January 29, 2006

When Google announced last week that it would censor its new search service in China, the company became, to many, the latest component in that country's sophisticated system of information control.

With strategies ranging from automated keyword filtering and Web site blocking to Internet traffic surveillance, the Chinese government is unmatched in its ability to censor and monitor its citizens online.

Of course, no system is perfect.

The OpenNet Initiative (www.opennet.net), an international human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, tracks Internet censorship and the techniques used to evade it. To surf the Web in China and elsewhere without censorship and in marginal safety, said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and a member of the initiative, the primary tool is an old standby: the proxy server.

A proxy server is simply a generic computer through which people who want to be anonymous drive Web traffic before it reaches their own machines. This helps dissociate a computer address from the Web sites its user has visited.

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