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Peekabooty, Camera/Shy Released
An anonymous (how appropriate) writer sends "Peek-a-Booty, a program designed to circumvent mechanisms (such as China's Great Firewall) limiting access to websites, has been open-sourced. It's listed as a "Beta" on SourceForge, but the Peek-a-booty website seems to encourage people to start using it." And Doug writes "PC World
reports about a new tool to encrypt text with a click of the mouse and bury
the text in an image. After posting an embedded image on a Web site, someone
can notify intended recipients by e-mail with code words such as 'Go to
this URL to see pictures from my birthday party.'"
I can see a growing need for this kind of thing in the USA, as we allow the Megacorp cartels like the RIAA/MPAA to chop off and "firewall" so to speak, the individual.
Remember the Napster trial? The infamous statement by a RIAA honcho "We will firewall them at their PC"? And then go read the story just below this one where AOLTW's RoadRunner is port blocking Kazaa.
I find it very interesting phinisophically, that the net result of "Big Government (Communist)" and "Big Business (Capitalist)", when left unrestrained by civil law that is supposed to protect and affirm the rights of the individual, produce the SAME RESULTS!
In the communist system, as China is, the governmment IS the corporation. It makes up "laws" as it goes along, always to benefit those in power. In the USA, we've allowed corporations to achieve similar results by the fact that our Congress and Presidents are passing and signing laws WRITTEN BY THEM, as the DMCA and CBDTPA are.
Unfortunately for the tyrants, both governmental and corporate, there are a lot of Thomas Paine's in the world, and they tend to be creative people. Hence this program that lets you circumvent firewalls.
Corporatism != Free Market
Last time I checked, they used a NOT list and it was a very small list. For mainstream use, you could pretty much access anything you wanted with the exception of a couple of news sites like CNN and sometimes, NYT. The blocking was erratic though ... some months the sites were reachable, other days, they were perfectly fine. Of course, I'm sure a few dissident sites are blocked, but since I don't view those on a daily basis, I wouldn't know.
But it's really a non-issue. Even 4 years ago, all the internet cafes I visited by default went through a proxy that pretty much allowed you to view whatever you wanted. Knowledge of how to circumvent the blocks were very common among the younger audience. I'm sure it's even more prevalent today. For China, at least, this project isn't really relevant.
Lets write some more utilities so that drug runners and crazies can send undetectible messages to eachother with great ease.
What's the difference between criminals and "legitimate" political dissidents? To the governments of the world, nothing.
I'm sure King George thought Washington and Jefferson were "crazies".
I'm sure the British government thought Ghandi was a criminal. They put him in jail several times.
The price of a truly free country is that "drug runners and crazies can send undetectible messages to eachother with great ease". This has to be so that future Ghandis and Mandellas can do so also.
Or we can just shut everybody up. Yeah, lets do that. Let's start with you.