More Light! More Light!

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

Proxies 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.

Whether 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.

How fortunate that someone was there that single time to film it!

Watch to the end and relish the beauty of the last sentence. Via Boing Boing.

Why?

Alex Barnett is someone who writes amazing ideas about technology, and he’s written why he would vote for Obama if he could. It’s not too long. One of the reasons that I’m starting to shed my cynicism about the process and get excited is that these smart nuanced positions that Obama takes don’t see to be entirely empty rhetoric. There’s some meat there. I don’t know if the guy can implement any of it, but trying is a damn sight better than not.

I always tell my friends to vote based on ideas. Vote for who you really want, because your little vote only matters to you and matters in an aggregate. That’s why when I had some crap choices I was one of the guys who voted for Nader.

But if you think about this election as a horse race, I’d urge you to take ten minutes to watch Larry Lessig’s presentation on “winnability.”