Monthly Archives: November 2008

How to get around a proxy system

Dev, Hacks, morelight, Pals, Politics, , , , ,

This sounds complicated but it is really simple.  That it is so simple is why the internet is amazing and awesome.

from flickr user Bright Tal with a CC licenseProxies are used by people in positions of authority who want to control what you view on the internet.  Such groups include the governments of Turkey and China.  Also, the internet security team of most major corporations.  Some of these motives are good:

  • Blocking you from visiting websites that will infect your computer with spyware.
  • Blocking you from looking at naked people at work and totally creeping your coworkers out.
  • Blocking you from using webmail or instant messaging to communicate with customers in insecure ways or in ways that can’t be audited for a lawsuit.

Some of these motives are bad:

  • Blocking you from learning about problems at the group.
  • Blocking you from “wasting” company time or resources.

Generally you will eventually find a situation where you want to look at a website that has been blocked improperly.  I’ve often seen sites that discuss internet security vulnerabilities classified as “hacking” – but I need to know if those sites affect my work.

kindly sourced from flickr user Dazzie DWhether your intentions are pure or not, here is a simple way to give yourself internet freedom.

Download CGIproxy and install it on something that faces the unfiltered internet.  This might be your web host if you have one.  If not, you can install a web server on your home computer.  It is easier than you might think, and with DynDns, you can have your own domain name for your home computer.

You are done.  Now you can navigate in your browser to where you installed CGIproxy.  It will surf the sites you are blocked from.   Doing that is a hassle, though.  You have to go to CGIproxy when you want to go to a different site.  Lame.

Let’s make it easier through the magical power of bookmarklets.  We will put two little buttons in your browser that let you proxy blocked sites and unproxy them when you are somewhere safe again.

I wrote up a little page for you that generates proxy and unproxy bookmarklets for CGIProxy.  Go there, put in the URL of your CGIproxy, and choose your options.  I’ll automagically generate the bookmarklets for you.  You just drag them up to your browser quick links and now you have the keys to the kingdom.

Let me know if anything isn’t clear – I did the extra work so that it could be useful for you.

Ofanya

Lit, Pals, , ,

As you come out of the forests and first spy Ofanya, you mistake it for a ruin or a bombsite.  Closer to the crumbling towers and half-roofed houses it becomes apparent that the people hurrying about are not in peril or panic.  They are going about their business calmly but quickly among the wasted blocks of Ofanya.  There is no danger, save for when a building collapses.

Spending time in the falling, failing city of Ofanya, the people reveal themselves to be full of great ambition.  No one is a banker or a grocer or a shopkeeper.  Everyone is a writer or a musician.  All are working on projects of staggering beauty and terrible deep complexity, so they have no time to spend on day jobs.  talk to anyone and they will tell you about the three hour underwater dance cycle they are dedicating to the battle of normandy.  A shy young man will show you his preliminary sketches of for a full-body tattoo of his life, the lives of his ancestors and the predicted lives of his someday children.

They cannot stay with you long, these poets and sculptors.  There is no one who will keep a shop in Ofanya, so there is nowhere to buy bread.  In the morning, the artists all wake up and scour the countryside for wild wheat they can handmill to eat.  The muralists go to the river to catch trout.  All the time everyone complains about how they can’t get a cup of coffee.  They greet each other mainly by asking for cigarettes.

You grow weary of Ofanya as everyone you meet asks you for favors and loans, promising they will remember you when their script gets made.

Ofanya is a city of infinite desire and little execution.  The houses and towers are not destroyed, they were never finished by balladeers who are writing songs about love and death.  The shit and piss stinks in the streets as there are no sewers dug, no street cleaners.  Everywhere the thin starving artists plead with you that they cannot delay their art to move to another city, but they cannot complete their art as thy have to spend all day searching for food, firewood, and shelter.  Something must be done about this hell that is Ofanya.  With a little planning and cooperation this could be a great bohemia.  Ofanya just wants you to set up a bakery, where your labor will be repaid in songs of glory and monuments to your industry.  Ofanya wants you to build an apartment block, which would be covered in heroic murals in tribute to you.

Don’t ponder this ridiculous proposal for too long.  You will begin to compose an essay in your head, a masterful argument that will strike the people of Ofanya with reason and put them into a well ordered society.  While you prepare this powerful rhetorical thunderbolt, you will grow hungry and make your way to the woods to hunt for some walnuts or blackberries.