The New York Times mentions several solutions:
The OpenNet Initiative (www.opennet.net), an international human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, tracks Internet censorship and the techniques used to evade it. To surf the Web in China and elsewhere without censorship and in marginal safety, said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and a member of the initiative, the primary tool is an old standby: the proxy server.
A proxy server is simply a generic computer through which people who want to be anonymous drive Web traffic before it reaches their own machines. This helps dissociate a computer address from the Web sites its user has visited.
It’s not perfect. You never know, for instance, how trustworthy any proxy really is, and servers go up and down unpredictably. But people regularly use proxy servers for all kind of reasons — from the political to the pornographic.
Every day in China, Mr. Palfrey said, an underground economy of proxy server addresses comes alive — usually connecting to servers made available by volunteers around the globe. These addresses are passed along and traded, using elaborately coded language, on electronic bulletin board systems or chat channels.
Elsewhere on the Web, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) helps maintain Tor, a communications network that helps make Internet communications anonymous, and it appears to be accessible from within China. Peacefire.org offers a program called The Circumventor that lets anyone turn a Windows-based machine into a proxy, allowing others to use it to circumvent local Internet restrictions.
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Yes, the OpenNet Initiative is Jonathan Zittrain’s project. The concept of a proxy server is essentially that of masking the identity of the ‘probing’ machine, so that a different IP address is presented during the authentication stage. This confirms the questions we had earlier about access to topics through Google’s China site — it appears to do the filtering based upon the IP address of the local machine. With a proxy server, a machine in China could contact the proxy and then access the site (and content) via that ‘masked’ connection…thereby bypassing the restrictions.
I think this initiative is great, however, it is a “work around” for a much larger problem. The willingness of the the “free” world to pander to China to gain access to their burgeoning economy.
We are dealing with one of the world’s worst human rights violators. This is a country that should absolutely be facing the ire of all freedom loving people, yet we are courting it like a potential bride.
An initiative should be started that urges citizens to contact their local and national leadership and corporations urging them to work for change in oppressive countries like China.
It’s also worth looking at OpenNet as something like the Post Office Box of the Internet Age. The PO Box was the mail box used by people who didn’t have a regular address, or wanted to obscure their location. They were very popular for people in rural areas who didn’t get regular postal service and provided a real service. They were also used to mask identy and location, and are still used for that reason today through non-Post Office locations like the Mailbox Store-type place. If the communication system has personal identifiers, and all communication systems do, then there will be people who seek to track identity and those who will hide from it.