Communications of the ACM
Telex Promises Path Around State-Sponsored Net Censorship
University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman who helped develop Telex, a system that enables Internet service providers to provide ways around network censorship.
Photo courtesy of J. Alex Halderman
Researchers at the universities of Waterloo and Michigan have developed Telex, a system that enables Internet service providers to provide ways around network censorship. The technology "has the potential to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race," says Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman.
Telex currently exists as a single server in a laboratory, and the researchers have not developed a deployment strategy, but they hope the project inspires future research on censorship circumnavigation. "We've even tested it using a client in Beijing and streamed [high-definition] YouTube videos, in spite of YouTube being censored there," Halderman says.
Although proxy servers have previously been used to bypass online censorship, they also can be blocked, requiring new proxy servers to be established. Telex avoids the problem of blocked proxy servers by creating a proxy without an Internet protocol address. After installing downloadable client software, a user that wants to access a blocked Web site can connect to a non-blocked site outside the censor's network, making it appear to be a permitted connection to the censor.
From InformationWeek
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