Peter Cummuskey
Kinda sounds like a hyper-expensive version of Tor.
Adrien
This is poorly described.
Firstly, clients (browser) don\'t send pages, they retrieve them from the server. The server certainly isn\'t going to insert a tag.
I could believe the client could include a request header. However, to include a request header over an SSL connection, would require these \"telex\" machines to be able to see the unencrypted data. This suffers from the same problem any proxy finds when snooping on SSL, including having to on-the-fly generate spoofed certificates (that are trusted by the client) to mimic the real site\'s certificate. At best there will be countless certificate warnings for clients, but I guess that\'s no big issue.
What is more likely, is that the client overloads something into the SSL/TLS negotiation protocol, before any crypto is even set up.
Keep in mind that any intermediate keeping track of this exchange needs to be in the middle of both forward and reverse routing paths. Something that\'s not actually that common on the internet backbones. Packets from A->B commonly traverse different routes than B->A, so this won\'t work in those cases.
As for the claim of making it impossible to censor. That\'s patently incorrect. Using the same techniques, such ploys could be observed and blocked (and worse).
Stein Varjord
I have no clue about the functionality of this, but in my humble opinion, the fight against censorship is a good idea.
Citizens of obviously repressive states will of course have strong tools for change with an internet that is impossible to censor. That alone is enough reason to want it. In addition I do not trust that no other institutions, like seemingly \"free countries\" might want to try their influence, which, even if it was to be in good will, is a wrong thing to do.
There is of course lots of bad stuff on the net that I would prefer was not there, but the same is the case, in varying degrees, no matter where in society you look. Cleaning up one arena, if that was possible, only would create a false sense of security. Protection against bad stuff cannot be achieved by filtering the World. It must be achieved by learning to cope and trying to change the World into something better. Censorship of information makes nothing better, no matter what the intention is.
G Craig Vachon
Doesn\'t AnchorFree already do this for more than 5M users in China?
mhenriday
Just in time ! I see that the British Prime Minister, one David William Donald Cameron, is calling for an examination of whether the web and so-called social media should be censored or disabled in emergencies. No doubt my own government here in Sweden will, as is its wont, be closely watching these initiatives on the part of a nation ever ready to go to war for «human rights» and «democracy» in other parts of the world. Thus we may very well need to avail ourselves of the opportunities offered by Telex much sooner than we think - get cracking, you boffins !...
Henri
qwester
Security is not censorship. Today\'s political correctness mandate demands necessary discretion in the normal conduct of governance. Else we will have mob rule and anarchy and little else. China\'s control of the internet is to minimize the London type conflagrating protests that are spreading, via cell phone, across all of England.
Todd
Great for individuals versus ISPs, and Big Brother governments but what happens with - parents wanting to prevent their children from going to sites they feel are inappropriate - or companies who would rather employees focus on work rather than online gambling sites, porn sites, bomb making sites etc. - or secure government networks where I would not want employees going wherever on the web and putting the system, network and confidential data at risk.
There is and will be a legitimate need to offer some controls and restraints over what systems are able to connect to what sites. There will need to be some extra thought put in so sites can securely self identify and it can be electronically determined if access is acceptable.
Russell
I think that China would just block any https requests to websites outside the country. After all why would Chinese citizens need to do this anyway? They can\'t use foreign banks or anything that really needs https
Randolph Lee
The concept that we could have uncontrollable, untraceable, unmonitorable communication via the internet is one of the very, very few things that give me hope for humanity to avoid what is shaping up to be a future worse that the worst dystopian vision ever imagined.
Marc Tytus
This is positive if the government is trying to censor access to websites, but if the site owner censors their user-uploaded content (YouTube deleting uploaded videos, for example), or the government requires a website owner (Google, for example) to remove content, well then this wouldn\'t make a difference, right? Because the material isn\'t there to access, whether or not the user was able to gain access to the site.
So this is great technologically but in the near future, considering the direction we\'ve been moving in, this won\'t be as helpful as the article title and image made it seem to me at first.