Code Emporium

As many of you may know, dating back to 2008, there’s been a lot of talk about implementing a mandatory Internet filter in Australia. If your primary interest in the filter is political and not technological, search Google for Australian Internet Filter and go to town with it. What I wanted to propose here however is a simple technical (or actually, not so technical) approach to bypassing the Internet filter if it ever does actually come into play.

There’s been much talk on the Internet about how easy it will be to circumvent the filter by going through a proxy, tunneling, or other tricks that the government may or may not fully understand. Claims of “bypassing the filter takes just one click” abound on the Internet. Most of these “one click” solutions refer to going to a web proxy, typing in the address you want there and having the proxy return the results to you. To me, “one-click” here sounds like a little bit of an oversimplification, and even then, a lot of effort. Firstly, I have to establish whether the reason I’m not seeing a page is because it’s broken or because the government doesn’t want me to. Given that the web page blacklist isn’t going to be publicly disclosed, you can’t simply consult your friendly government official on this one. Sure, for every broken page you find, you could try loading it up by going through a proxy, but this is what I’d refer to as “a pain in the arse”. The solution I’m thinking of is one whereby I never have to visit a web proxy and “test out” whether or not a page has been blocked. If a page has been blocked, I want my browser to seamlessly transfer the request over to a proxy and have the page brought up in front of me as normal.

Enter AutoProxy. AutoProxy is an add-on for Firefox. The way AutoProxy works is that you give it a list of addresses which are known to be blocked and whenever you visit one of these addresses, AutoProxy automatically transfers the request over to your proxy server of choice. “That’s nice” you say, “but how does that prevent me from having to know which sites are blocked and adding these sites to the AutoProxy list manually?”. Good question – I’m glad you asked. AutoProxy has a “subscriptions” feature whereby you can subscribe to a list of addresses that you’d like to have redirected through your proxy of choice. This means you can subscribe to someone else’s list of blocked addresses and even get regular updates when that list of addresses change. So, instead of everyone trying to figure out on their own or through some kind of convoluted Internet search mayhem exactly what addresses have been blocked, a centralised list of addresses could be maintained by the community. You use AutoProxy to subscribe to this list and that way, you’ve always got seamless access to blocked addresses, even as the list changes (grows) over time.

I’d considered writing another post about how people could collaboratively compile a list of potentially blocked addresses, but there’s probably not that much in it. I’m not thinking of anything fancy or illegal. None of this hacking in and stealing the blacklist, just good old fashion “it doesn’t work from all these user’s addresses in Australia, but it does through a proxy – probably blocked” style collaboration. AutoProxy puts the icing on the cake, by hooking into what a small portion of the community uncover to give everyone seamless access to blocked sites. In the simplest implementation, the AutoProxy subscription list could just be a wiki-like list that trusted users can edit based on verifying community submissions for what appears to have been blocked.

Perhaps what scares me most about this is that I’m not convinced it will be particularly hard to reconstruct a fairly accurate list of what’s being blocked by the government. Having such a list publicly compiled could inadvertently draw more attention to the content that I imagine most people wouldn’t mind filtered such as rape and child pornography. Because of this, I wonder whether such content will garner more views when it’s “blocked” than when it’s openly accessible.