Slashdot Mirror
Australian Censorship Bypassed Before Live Trials
newt writes "The Australian Government is planning to conduct live trials of as-yet-unspecified censorship technology. But as every geek already knows, these systems can't possibly work in the presence of VPNs and proxy servers. PC Authority clues the punters in." Maybe the ISPs secretly like encouraging SSH tunneling — and making everyone pay for the extra bandwidth used. Not really; Australia's major ISPs, as mentioned a few days ago, think it's a bad idea.
Any decent blocking software also blocks all the popular proxy lists and proxies too (and it constantly updated). Software that does this (like Websense [wikipedia.org]) may not be impossible to get around, but it makes it damn hard (and I know, this is what my school uses and even with my knowledge it's still hard to find a proxy).
Bypassing Websense:
1. Have a PC running on a high-speed Internet connection on the other side of the Websense proxy.
2. On that PC, you need to run OpenSSH and an HTTP proxy server, say at mypc.example.com. In this example, I my proxy server will be using port 8080. Run SSH on Port 443 (works every time) on this box.
3. Using PuTTY or Plink or one of the front-ends for plink, forward 8080 through an SSH connection to this PC from the inside of the Websense firewall. Putty and Plink can tunnel right through the proxy connecting to port 443 just like an HTTPS connection would do.
4. Set your browser to use the proxy on localhost at port 8080
5. Done. All Web accesses will go through the SSH proxy and all of this data will be encrypted as a result.
I will leave the details as an exercise to the reader.
Doesn't seem 'damn hard' to me at all.
My blog