Google’s decision to challenge the Chinese government on their censorship policy is a bold one. It remains to be seen whether it will end up doing more harm or good. In the mean time, there is at least one thing that ordinary computer users can do in order to fight censorship around the world: set up a TOR relay. TOR is a project that allows for anonymous internet browsing through a system called onion routing. It is maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
By setting up a relay, you allow people whose internet access is censored by their governments to access sites that would otherwise be blocked; you also facilitate important democratic processes, such as the actions of whistleblowers. The process of installation is relatively simple, and you can easily cap how much of your bandwidth is given over to the TOR network. By sharing a bit of your bandwidth, you could be helping out human rights activists in China or Myanmar, or just helping some ordinary computer user circumvent annoying restrictions imposed from above. Systems like TOR help the internet to retain some of its vast potential, even in the face of fearful governments that want to control it or shut it down.
One thing to watch out for is that acting as a webserver may be forbidden by your internet service provider (ISP). I checked with mine (TekSavvy), and they have no objections to customers running any kind of webserver, provided they stay within their bandwidth limits.
People interested in this sort of thing may also want to learn about Project Honeypot – a distributed mechanism for fighting spammers.
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Can’t TOR also be used for nefarious purposes: spamming, child porn, hacking, terrorism, etc?
Any powerful tool can be misused.
Wikipedia says this:
The Tor project’s response to accusations that it is helping to facilitate illegal activity has been to emphasize that:
1. many law-abiding individuals who use Tor for “good” purposes (privacy, freedom of communication) do not have readily available and practical alternatives to Tor, while
2. those who are willing to break laws already have other more effective ways to remain anonymous (such as breaking into computers, renting botnets, or stealing cell phones).
The argument is that the benefit to those in group (1) is much larger than the assistance to those in group (2), who have realistic alternatives to Tor by virtue of the fact that they are willing to break the law.
Home routers that automatically run Tor.
You should know that this website sometimes blocks visitors who are using TOR.
That could be because other people have been doing bad things using the exit node in question.
Related: The TOR browser bundle
You should know that this website sometimes blocks visitors who are using TOR.
If you find yourself being blocked from sites while using TOR, it probably means someone used the same exit node earlier to send spam.
With the Vidalia GUI, it’s easy to hit ‘Use a New Identity’ and get assigned to a different exit node.