Internet censorship...

..."Getting stuck with a Scandinavian version of Google is seen as a small
price to pay by those trying to hide their digital traces and
circumvent censorship on the net.

'I've a button in Firefox [the web browser] I click and my [data]
packets go off encrypted to a network of volunteers and private
computers around the world,' says Danny O'Brien, international
outreach co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a
digital rights pressure group.

'I get randomly routed through one of them and when I go to Google it
might talk to me in Swedish, but this is a way of getting round these
national [blocking] filters.'" reports Chris Nuttall
in San Francisco for the Financial
Times. Tor is
one tool that can cover your tracks. Welsh may even be better than
Swedish, or how about Latin or Sanscrit? My Latin master used to send
telegrams (those were the days!) in Latin and had to explain to the
Post Office that Latin is not a code but a language. The Post Office
did not allow secret codes in telegrams at the time.

"The
goal of onion routing (OR) is to protect the privacy of the sender and
recipient of a message, while also providing protection for message
content as it traverses a network. Onion routing accomplishes this
according to the principle of Chaum's mix cascades: messages travel from
source to destination via a sequence of proxies ("onion routers"),
which re-route messages in an unpredictable path. To prevent an
adversary from eavesdropping on message content, messages are encrypted
between routers. The advantage of onion routing (and mix cascades in
general) is that it is not necessary to trust each cooperating router;
if one or more routers are compromised, anonymous communication can
still be achieved. This is because each router in an OR network accepts
messages, re-encrypts them, and transmits to another onion router. An
attacker with the ability to monitor every onion router in a network
might be able to trace the path of a message through the network, but
an attacker with more limited capabilities will have difficulty even if
he or she controls one or more onion routers on the message's path."
says the Wikipedia. There are many bloggers who could do with some of these tools in countries such as China, Egypt and Pakistan, so pass the word please.