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February 13, 2006
Internet Hacking For Free Speech
While reading the Wall Street Journal over lunch I found this story that demonstrates computer hacking being put to good use. A Chinese high school student named Zivn, a frequent user of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, had noticed that he was no longer able to access the site--it had joined the ranks of the many websites blocked by the Chinese government. The Journal continues:
Then some friends told him where to find Freegate, a software program that thwarts the Chinese government's vast system to limit what its citizens see. Freegate -- by connecting computers inside of China to servers in the U.S. -- enables Zivn and others to keep reading and writing to Wikipedia and countless other Web sites.Behind Freegate is a North Carolina-based Chinese hacker named Bill Xia. He calls it his red pill, a reference to the drug in the "Matrix" movies that vaulted unconscious captives of a totalitarian regime into the real world. [...]
Roughly a dozen Chinese government agencies employ thousands of Web censors, Internet cafe police and computers that constantly screen traffic for forbidden content and sources -- a barrier often called the Great Firewall of China. [...]
In response to China's [continuing] crackdown, and to restrictions in many Middle Eastern countries as well, a small army has been mustered to defeat them. "Hacktivists," they call themselves.
Hacktivists can be found all around the world, of many different cultures--there's lots of lending of hosts' IP addresses to help Chinese citizens read forbidden sites without being traced, for example.
[But} Freegate has advantages over some of its peers. As the product of ethnically Chinese programmers, it uses the language and fits the culture. It is a simple and small program, whose file size of just 137 kilobytes helps make it easy to store in an email program and pass along on a portable memory drive.Mr. Xia says about 100,000 users a day use Freegate or two other censorship-defeating systems he helped to create. It is impossible to confirm that claim, but Freegate and similar programs from others, called UltraReach and Garden Networks, are becoming a part of the surfing habits of China's Internet elite in universities, cafes and newsrooms.
This is great stuff. I've taken enough computer science courses to know there are some very smart people in the field. It's nice to know that some of those very smart types who also happen to be somewhat (ahem) iconoclastic are using their considerable hacking chops for a very good purpose.
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