Censoring Internet
Now and then one can read articles pertaining to the fact that certain countries wishes to monitor or in other ways restrict access to Internet in one way or another, the latest one about India that wishes to monitor both Facebook and Twitter(http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/08/08/2236225/India-Wants-To-Monitor-Twitter-Facebook).
Well, there are technologies made to circumvent these issues, such as TOR(https://www.torproject.org/). One major drawback of this however is the fact that TOR can and actually has been blocked with a classic combination of known IP addresses and TCP ports.
The other day I downloaded the latest Security Now! podcast as usual(http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm) and listened to it. This episode was named “Listeners feedback #123″, and quite a few users had brought to Steve’s attention the product Telex(http://www.telex.cc/), which seems to be an interesting concept. However – as Steve mentions – I’m afraid that this will only be a great concept, unable implement due to infrastructural problems.
The main idea with Telex is to bypass these censoring authorities by hiding a request to a blocked site inside a regular https request to an unblocked site. While most routers on the Internet will ignore this flag set, some routers would have a Telex client installed, and would recognize this request to the blocked site and would immediately reroute to this site.
This really seems to be an interesting concept, and it would be fascinating to see some calculations on how many percent of the routers needs to have a Telex client installed in order for this to work at a high rate.