Jonathan Chait: Democrats, don't put it in writing

Jonathan Chait articulates my own views on the difference between Democrats and Republicans. The same can be said of liberals vs. conservatives in a lot of countries. Modern liberals are pragmatists - they look for policies that work. Modern conservatives seem to want to apply the same simplistic solutions to every problem.

Conservatism and liberalism are not really mirror images of each other.

Conservatives venerate the free market and see smaller government as an end in itself. Liberals do not venerate government in the same way, and we do not see larger government as an end in and of itself. For us, everything works on a case-by-case basis. Should government provide everybody's education? Yes. Should government manufacture everybody's blue jeans? No. And so on.

Open thread

Since the previous one is getting long, and has scrolled off the front page..

LA Times censors newsroom Internet feed

Just in time for my own censorship troubles, Juan Cole links to this report on Boing Boing.

This is the first example I've heard of a Western newspaper censoring its reporters' Internet feeds. The companies that sell censorware services deliver a notoriously biased and Orwellian system. For example, sites like Peacefire and Boing Boing, which report on the bad judgement in these services and expose their technical failings, are classed as "proxy avoidance."

[...]

Some of these companies also provide censorship services to repressive governments, like those in China and Syria.

[...]

A reader writes:"[...]To top it off, the censorware is stupid! Just last night I was looking up some info on praying mantids and one of the sites was blocked. It happens all the time for totally innocuous things."

How to surf freely and privately

I've finally set up a reliable hack around the Great Firewall of China, and I'd like to record the details here for reference. The solution is quite simple when you know how. Please note that circumventings controls on Internet access may be illegal in some countries - use at your own risk.

Infrastructure you need:

1. Access to an Internet connected server that's outside the jurisdiction of the entity you're trying to circumvent.
2. Your own laptop or other computer where you can install client software.
3. The ability to establish SSH connections between your laptop and your server.

Software needed on the server:

1. Download and install the Privoxy web proxy.
2. Make sure your server can accept SSH connections.

Software needed on the client:

1. All you need is SSH. If you use Microsoft Windows, you can try PuTTY, although I haven't tested this myself.

In fact, any Linux distribution will be useable out of the box for both server and client, with the exception of the need for Privoxy on the server side. Do the standard install on the server, and ignore all the special features of Privoxy. You only need it to act as a proxy, and you can ignore most of the other features for now (you might want to investigate them later for other reasons).

To begin surfing safely, establish a tunnel between your laptop and your server. This SSH command forwards the local port 8118 to port 8118 on the server. If you used the default Privoxy configuration then this should be fine. Replace the "root@myserver.com" with the correct username and server name:

ssh -L 8118:127.0.0.1:8118 root@myserver.com

Set up your web browser to use a manual proxy configuration, with the proxy host as "127.0.0.1" and the port as "8118". Use this for both http and https connections.

That's it. Now you can surf the entire Web, even from within China, or from within company networks that use NetNanny or some other censorship tools. You can also surf from within the U.S.A. secure in the knowledge that the Department of Homeland Security can't monitor your traffic (at least not if your server is outside the U.S.).

How does it work?

Don't let Privoxy's billing as a privacy tool fool you. I'm actually using it as a simple proxy in this case. Normally Privoxy is loaded on your personal computer and filters cookies and other annoyances from the data stream as you surf. In this case I've installed it on my server as the simplest way I could find to get it to forward web traffic for me. The port-forwarding SSH tunnel forwards all of the web traffic to Privoxy on the remote server, and the Privoxy instance on the remote server surfs my behalf.

The connection between the laptop and the server is encrypted, so there's no way for somebody monitoring the traffic to know what I'm looking at. They will know that I'm sending a lot of traffic to a certain server in Helsinki, so if you are in a situation where that will cause problems for you, beware.

Greetings from Qingdao

Greetings from beautiful Qingdao. I arrived here about ten days ago after three weeks of travelling around China. This will be my home for the next couple of months.

Qingdao is a clean and scenic seaside city. It's one of the prosperous coastal cities, but less hectic and much less poluted than Shanghai or Beijing. This will be the site for the Olympic Sailing Regatta in 2008 and, even though I'm not really into sailing, I think I'm going to try to arrange to be here. I've met a lot of really great people and I'm amazed that I'd never heard of Qingdao before six months ago.

I had planned to just study and try to meet Chinese people while I'm here, but I've been roped into teaching English. I gave my first lesson yesterday to a class of twenty 10-year-olds. It was a blast, but wow do they tire you out.

One continuing problem is Internet access. It seems that many of the sites I normally visit, including all of the *.blogspot.com domains, Wikipedia, and a number others are blocked. My attempts to get around this using the University of Helsinki proxy have been unreliable. In any case, the proxy is intended to give students access to university resources such as online journals not to circumvent censorship, so I don't feel entirely comfortable using it that way.

I have my own laptop and should be able to set up a tunneling service between it and my personal server located in Helsinki, but getting the laptop online is a pain as well. Unlike Shanghai Wifi is quite limited here and Internet performance in general has been patchy.

I'll try to get the problems sorted out but until then there won't be too much blogging. I like to do research on the topics I blog about, and it's frustrating when every second site doesn't work.

Thanks for keeping the site alive while I'm away and feel free to use this as an open thread to keep the discussion going (since the earlier one must be getting to be a nuisance by now).