The goal of the Peekabooty Project is to create a product that can bypass the nation-wide censorship of the World Wide Web practiced by many countries.
from: http://www.peek-a-booty.org
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About the Peek-A-Booty Project
The concept and the code
Our mission
The free, easy and quick exchange of information possible on the Internet is seen as a threat by governments in countries where a free press and freedom of expression are not considered to the parts of their people’s rights. Such a government would have two options. The first would be to completely ban use of the Internet. This is an impractical measure, as it would close off that country to business opportunities and technological innovation. The preferred option is to make use of filtering computers and software – called firewalls in technological parlance – that make only those Web pages approved by the government available to their citizens.
In layperson’s terms: firewalls act as intermediaries between users and the rest of the Internet. In countries where the Web is censored, the only way to access the Internet is through the firewalls. A user enters a URL – the address of a Web page – into his or her browser. This URL gets passed to the firewall, which checks to see if it is one of those banned by the government. If the URL is not on the list, the firewall forwards the request for the Web page and the contents of the page are relayed back to the user, who can then read it. If the URL is on the banned list the firewall refuses to forward the request and sends a page back to user indicating that the page he or she requested cannot be viewed by order of the government.
In addition to barring access to specified Web sites, firewalls can also monitor the data that passes through them. They can be configured to look for content that the government considers inappropriate or subversive and either make a note of who requested the content or simply break the connection.
21 countries currently censor the World Wide Web. These countries are populated by a hundreds of millions of people who have been denied access to information by their goverment. We want to create software that will give these people the free access to information on that Web that we enjoy.
more information:
http://www.peek-a-booty.org/pbhtml/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1