Proxy War

Finally managed to squeeze in some time to pen down my thoughts after 2 months. My sincere apologies to all of them who follow my blog meticulously and had been soliciting me for my next article. In the last couple of months myriad of things happened- ranging from my long waited India trip to India’s “phoenix” win in the 1^st cricket test. But I would focus today’s article on a very intriguing and interesting article I read in ‘The Economist” Dec 2006 edition. The article talks about Chinese government and their relentless fight against deluge of information, creeping into the country. China being a communist country obviates the public from free-flow access to sensitive (pun intended) information which the government thinks might compromise communist manifestos and act as a catalyst to social dissent. China is running the biggest censorship program known as the ‘Great firewall of China’ or ‘Golden Shield’ to hunt down proxies and block them from broadcasting data into the mainland. Sites like Anonymouse.org redirects data from the censored sites and enable people living under repressive regimes to get a hindrance free access to Information. Anonymouse.org is not the solitary reaper. It’s a part of large and growing constellation of computer servers known as proxies, deployed at diverse places to outmaneuver the censors working to protect un-democratic regimes. There is a whole group of community called ‘Anti-Censorship Community’ fraternizing the ‘Information is everybody’s birthright’ cause. Whenever the Censors detect new proxy they block it and the ‘Anti-Censorship Community’ creates another one. This process can best be described as ‘Cat and Mouse game on the web’. An American NGO called ‘Tor’ and lot of outspoken human-rights activists in China are vehemently opposing this policy of the un-democratic regimes. I sincerely wonder “What is the rationale and thought process of preventing someone from accessing the cornucopia of information lying in the World Wide Web...Isn't it an amorphous form of incarceration”…Can someone answer??