Censorship and the Great Firewall

I just arrived in China for my vacation and noticed one thing immediately: All kinds of useful sites are blocked. Google Search and Maps, Gmail and Facebook. This is a major pain in the ass for doing anything from looking up directions to uploading pictures for those back at home, not even to speak of any human rights aspects.

My initial approach was using OpenVPN on my phone, but that doesn't seem to work - Facebook is still blocked, etc. What does help is ssh -D <PORT> <HOST>, but even that seems to get slowed down after some use. It's enough …

P2P DNS

I don't really like the direction of the "official" project, especially the part where they decided to use a central authortiy, so I started my own. This is a true distributed approach, for everything else we don't need to develop anything new.

The basic idea is that each and every node of the network caches all the domains we have. Before you cry foul, let's look at how much space this will really need.

Our DNS record has several parts:

• The domain itself. At 8 bit for one char, we'll assume a generous average length of 50 chars, which leaves …