Stardate 20010831.0742 (On Screen): An unlikely participant has appeared in the fight to permit free flow of information into countries which try to utilize national firewalls to censor such information. It's not Cult of the Dead Cow, it's the US International Broadcasting Bureau, which also runs Voice of America. They have released a program called "Triangle Boy", which requires that a lot of us out here in the freely breathable air run the client on a routine basis. We then serve as proxies to permit people in places like China to access anything at all. Since there would be a huge number of proxies at constantly changing IPs, and since the traffic from the proxies to the people in China would be encrypted, the result would be that it couldn't easily be blocked.
I'm skeptical. First, there's a choke point that isn't described: how do the users in China find the proxies? There has to be some sort of central meeting place where proxies announce their existence and users in China receive those announcements -- and that can be blocked. Second is that the data stream to the proxies either will be or won't be encrypted. If it isn't encrypted, then China can do content-based blocking on it regardless of its source. If it is encrypted (and it is) then the Chinese authorities can instantly determine the IP (and hence the indentity) of the Chinese user of this program and stomp on them, since the destination IP of the encrypted packet cannot itself be encrypted. So this amounts only to harassment of China, it's not actually an insoluble problem. (discuss)
