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[Russell Howe]

neil wrote:

> The quick answer is, I don't know. I'm assuming this - - The OS, 
> whatever it is, is locked down enough to not allow any modifications - 
> this is likely to change as a policy between 'cafes' but in general is a 
> fair assumption.

When I was last in China (end of 2001), the internet cafes I went to 
weren't locked down at all. I had putty, downloaded ICQ, mozilla, etc 
and set myself up quite nicely.

Bear in mind the people who you're setting up with this kind of stuff 
could end up bringing attention to themselves and getting themselves in 
bother if the authorities take a dislike to what they're doing.

Especially if the authorities notice a large amount of SSH/IPsec/banned 
words in cleartext coming/going from the PC.

I'm pretty sure the internet cafes were just using some domestic DSL 
line or somesuch, so they'd be subject to the same monitoring as anyone 
else (possibly more, if the authorities know that a certain customer is 
running an internet cafe). There was also talk of internet cafes in 
China needing to be licensed, although I don't know if they've yet gone 
through with that and if so, how many are actually licensed.

Your best bet for anonymity is to run some kind of non-logging proxy, 
which renders pages as images, so that if the user requests 
news.google.com, they don't get HTML, they get an image which they can 
read just fine, but which:

a) Isn't trawlable by packet sniffers
b) Looks like any other image on a webpage
c) Looks like normal HTTP traffic (since it is)
d) Has an imagemap or somesuch which allows links to be clicked on.

However, I don't know of any software which can do this, much less do it 
well. Shouldn't be *that* hard to do with mozilla and maybe a way of 
controlling the X cursor by HTTP requests :)

It'd be something fun for a 3rd year CS project, I think.

-- 
Russ
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