March 3, 2006

Blogspot Blocked in Pakistan: Some workarounds

Technically speaking, I have tried various ISPs and found the packets being blocked at Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) routers, a subsidiary of government owned Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL). I am asking for my friends using cybernet and fascom for trace routes as these ISPs have redundant links bypassing PIE.

Most people think that they wanted to block blasphemous content, but did it in a highly unprofessional manner and ended up blocking all blogspot blogs. This is a government organization after all.

Some Solutions

There are various solutions to this issue and I would not repeat all the solutions here instead you can find the complete list of solutions here:
http://www.zensur.freerk.com/
http://cetamac.blogspot.com/2006/01/other-ways-for-browsing-blogspotcom.html
(via CDN)
http://www.boingboing.net/censorroute.html

Some interesting discussion at Spider Blog:
http://spiderisat.blogspot.com/2006/03/blogspot-and-other-sites-blocked.html (via CDN)

I'll just mention some of my favourite workarounds:

Google Translate Proxy Hack

During my stay in UAE (where, uncountable sites including CDN Proxies are blocked), I looked at various ways to bypass the blocks. Etisalat has even blocked all common proxy and web server ports (80, 8000, 8080, 3128, and many more) web based proxies, so you can't count on anonymizer, etc. I found Google Translate Proxy Hack, which works very fast and reliably and
is not blocked neither in UAE nor in Pakistan.

For easier access of the blocked sites for my non-technical friends, I have created a page, where they can enter the URL of the blog to start browsing it via this trick:
http://ovais.khan.tripod.com/blogspot_blocked.html

Firefox Specific Integration

If you use Mozilla Firefox, add this link as bookmark and then use the smart keywords feature to link it to a shortcut like gproxy and easily browse any blocked site by entering "proxy URL" e.g., "gproxy http://ovaiskhan.blogspot.com" in your location bar. Let me know, is you need any help on this.

I am also working on a firefox extension that should make access to blocked sites using any web based proxy easier.

Access via web based proxies

http://unipeak.com/
http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html
http://anonymizer.com/

Access Blogspot via Coral Content Distribution Network (CCDN)

An easy way, is to access the blogspot blog via the Coral CDN proxies, by simple adding ".nyud.net:8080", to the end of teh blogspot URL. e.g, for my blog: http://ovaiskhan.blogspot.com, it would be: http://ovaiskhan.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8080.
Same goes for the blog posts.

The issue with this approach is that you need to rewrite the URL each time, which is not the case with other web based proxies. WebLeOn however has a firefox extension that has access via CCDN in the right click menu.

Update:

March 14, 2006: httProxy has been released. See this blog entry or httProxy Site for details

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