Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.