Replies

Excerpt from a slashdot thread: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/07/2252220&tid=153&tid=95

Re:Distributed Annonymous WebProxy (Score:4, Interesting)
by bahamat (187909) on Saturday January 08, @05:16AM (#11295762)
(http://digitalelf.net/)

I'm the sr. sysadmin for Anonymizer and we have a contract with VOA to provide free proxy service to Iran.

It's based off of PrivateSurfing (which you can try out for free at the Anonymizer [anonymizer.com] homepage, sorry you can't surf /. with it...Rob hates me). Added features for the Iran proxy is full time SSL, URL encryption, Farsi language support, and we switch the proxy website about once a month (every time the Iranian government blocks us). We perform checks on the service from within Iran to see if our site is actually blocked (yes, it works), and we maintain a database of all known e-mail addresses that we can detect as being located in Iran. Every time we switch the proxy site we send an e-mail informing them of the new free proxy location so the citizens of Iran can find it. The sites are also broadcast via radio and TV into Iran by the VOA. To be honest, we're usually about a day behind the blocks, due mostly to time zone differences.

The systems that run the Iran proxies are dedicated and used quite heavily. Much more than any of the servers that we have for everything else. The loadav is pretty high, and we're working on upgrading them in the next few months to increase capacity.

Most of our customers are under NDA so I don't mention where I work much, but the VOA [anonymizer.com] is one of our very few public contracts due to it's anti-censorship nature.