BoingBoing was recently added to some major block lists, including those that work at the national level in some Middle East countries and elsewhere. They now have a page of workarounds explaining how to access BoingBoing if your internet connection is filtered in some way.

Most web-based RSS readers still aren’t blocked, so if the site you read publishes full entries in their RSS, you won’t miss much (except non-cached images and other media that the feed reader doesn’t grab for you).

But if you want to just visit a site that’s blocked, you need a proxy server. But there are several problems with proxy servers. If you need one…

• You are probably blocked from accessing most well-known proxy servers
• You can get in big trouble for using a proxy server

Enter Circumventor. By installing Active Perl, OpenSA, and Circumventor on your unblocked, Windows-based home PC, you can set up your own proxy server, which you can access from anywhere using the URL Circumventor generates. You can also give the URL to your friends if they’re behind national filters that they can’t get around otherwise. Of course, if you’re in one of these countries, you can’t set up Circumventor - it has to be running on a computer with an unfiltered connection.

The strength of Circumventor is that no one else knows about your proxy server, so they can’t block it. Of course, if someone is reading your access logs from the filtered computer and sees that you’re accessing:

https://longweirdurl/http://www.blockedsites.com/blocked

then you’ll be in trouble. But that would be a lot of work for someone to sit around and scroll through all the websites everyone visits, so it’s not much of a risk.

Of course, your home PC has to be on all the time for this to work, so laptop users are out of luck. You’ll also be limited to the speed of the slowest connection in the setup.

I could use Circumventor to check my Gmail at work, but I don’t know if I’d trust it if my job was on the line or if I could get thrown in prison for using it.

My main hesitation is about security for the home PC on which Circumventor, ActivePerl, and OpenSA are installed. I’m assuming OpenSA opens the computer to all sorts of ways of getting 0wnz0red, and I’m not about to invite any hackage onto my machine. Any thoughts?