Flux, Flex, and Other

A coworker of mine forwarded this along to me today, and it was really inspirational. I love it when technology, an idea that probably got laughed at, and a little effort can give a big middle finger to the forces of oppression…

Most people have heard that China maintains the Golden Shield, a state firewall run in order to censor unapproved websites from the Chinese people, and to survey who is trying to access them.

Picidae is trying to change all that, with a very interesting, and relatively simple idea.

• A person in China surfs to a website run off of a pici-server — a computer running Mac OS X, which is outside of the Golden Shield. The URL to the server could be found by talking to someone outside of China, by word of mouth, etc.
  • There’s a whole network of these, and the network can be grown by adding an inexpensive new computer anywhere in the world, so it would be nearly impossible and massively labor intensive to Shield them all
  • The individual servers do not know that any other servers exist, nor does the main organizer keep a list, so literally anyone, anywhere could be running one of these, and there’s no away to find it.
• That website has a simple text box and a button.
• The person enters the website they want to see, that may be censored.
• The page, locally on their computer, encrypts the URL so snooping eyes can’t see what they are requesting.
• The pici-server decrypts the data, surfs to the requested website, and generates a single image of it — one huge JPG. It also looks where links are, and maps those areas of the image to be clickable, linking back to the pici-server. It’s called an ImageMap, and has been around forever…
• The image and its maps are sent back to the person — nothing incriminating other than a JPG image that the firewall can’t read…
• The person reads the information off of the image, clicks an area of the ImageMap, and the cycle continues

Here’s a link to the main site.

Here’s how it works.

Here’s what the user in China will experience. I tried it on this blog and it looked identical - you’d never know unless you looked at the code behind the page…

Obviously content shown in Flash (Flex) or any other dynamic content (Javascript, AJAX, video, etc) will not work on this type of network, but hey, a big fat hole in censorship in a great thing.  It also looks really easy to set up your website to proxy to a server or to use your webspace as a server if you’re so inclined — you can even use your Mac to run the server over your cable or DSL connection!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is filed under flex, flash, scary, apple, web, too cool for school, geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.