Getting Around Web Censors With Flickr 81
An anonymous reader writes "Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr." For visual learners: this earlier story at GigaOM explains the system with a diagram.
Re:Possession == crime (Score:3, Informative)
True but irrelevant.
China doesn't chase up every little breach of censorship. They couldn't, and they don't need to. Censorship is so evil and insidious because it manipulates the masses world view, at only a tiny level of effectiveness.
Also, why does TFA lump "countries such as China and North Korea" together? They are so dissimilar, might as well be "countries such as China, Australia and N. America".
North Korea has total control over all networked computers, and therefore has perfect censorship. This, or any other technical circumvention won't work.
Re:Pirating tastes like Child Porn (Score:4, Informative)
Pirating != Stealing
And for those who continue to confuse the two, I find this handy guide [flickr.com] to be beneficial.
(and it's on Flickr to boot! :)
Re:Why is this being blurted out? (Score:5, Informative)
flickr is already blocked in China.
After this many years of trying, I've found that all publicly known methods of circumventing censorship do not last, no matter how promising the technique may seem at first. There are (were) online forums where people would share SOCKS and HTTP proxies they find or own, but nowadays these gets blocked faster than you can post it. The only reliable solution I've found is to buy your own commercial VPN service and keep it to yourself. I rent a VM host in California and run OpenVPN which I share with some of my friends. We get pretty decent connection speeds here in China, and it's actually pretty cheap even by us third-world standards, especially if you share the cost among a few people.
The only long term fix to this problem is, of course, to replace the communist (more like fascist nowadays) regime with a democratic government, which is an endeavor that may take a few more decades. In the meantime, I suggest buying a VPN service as a temporary workaround.
Re:Possession == crime (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This will just get sites like Flickr banned (Score:3, Informative)
How about my forthcoming blog "heroes of the chinese revolution". It has lots of pictures and many of them have beautiful textures. Sky, water, so forth. All available in lossless formats.
Re:This will just get sites like Flickr banned (Score:3, Informative)
Cheer up. Only five days to go.