Peek-A-Booty source is available

The Peek-A-Booty team have posted the source for their great censorship-busting app. The idea is that public-spirited censorware-busters run a screen-saver that makes their computers available to act as a proxy for anyone who wants it, primarily those who live behind repressive national firewalls (cough China cough). The proxies discover each other and those who are looking for them using a Gnutella-like protocol, and when you want a page that is censored by your firewall, you ask one of your anonymous benefactors to pass it to you.

More than a censorship-circumventer, Peek-A-Booty has the potential to act as a distributed, self-evolving route-generator. If Alice has a route to CNN and Bob has no route to CNN, but Bob has a route to Alice, Bob can access CNN via Alice. When giant interchanges like MAE West go down, apps like Peek-A-Booty will take up the slack.

In other words: The Internet interprets damage as censorship and routes around it. Link Discuss (via Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Comments are closed.

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.