With India, Pakistan, China, and Iran (among other countries) imposing bans on what you can blog about, what you can say, and what sites you can access, bloggers are increasingly turning to proxy sites to access forbidden content and venues to speak their mind.
For example, `elgoog’ allowed users in China to use Google after it had been blocked there. Similarly, several proxy sites came up in Pakistan after a ban on BlogSpot last year.
Proxy sites allow users to access a webpage that is blocked by accessing the forbidden site through another (unblocked) site. While officials set up hurdles to curtail the freedom of speech, savvy internet users find new ways to bypass them. As stated by one official from a leading internet service provider in India, these bans are hardly working.
While we have blocked the Web sites from our side, anyone can access them through thousands of proxy sites freely available on the Internet. These servers mask the identity of the blocked site. So even if the user is accessing the banned site, the identity of the proxy server is what is relayed back to an ISP.
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Originally posted on January 21, 2007 @ 11:56 pm
Watch this space :-)
Between them, China and India have a third of the world’s population. How will their governments deal with the internet juggernaut when most of the people are connected?
I think the authorities will have to make some concessions.