[AktiviX-discuss] China blog advice

Garcon du Monde gdm at fifthhorseman.net
Sun May 17 23:01:40 UTC 2009


hi alan et al,

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 12:24:34PM +0100, Alan wrote:
> Hi all, I have an activist techie specific question for people here if  
> you don't mind me asking.
>
> I've been asked to help advise and setup an activism/informational blog  
> for someone based in China. It's not going to be directly critical of the 
> government but it is about showing alternatives and providing  
> information. They still want to be careful about where it's hosted and  
> the author's privacy.
>
> So to my questions
>
> - is there free hosted blogs that are recommended for activist type  
> content in China? Obviously terms and conditions get changed all the time 
> with these setups, so it's likely we would pay for a server and run the 
> blog there so which hosting providers would you recommend? Or what  
> country should the hosting be based in?

best freedom of speech laws seems to be the usa, afaict. activist
groups that currently do blog hosting that i know about are
inventati/autistici at no-blogs.org and also immerda.ch although that
is on a request basis. aktivix may also be able to help - we are in
the process of trying to set up some blog software (see recent posts)
although this is dependent on time/committment/help at the moment, so
not clear when it will be available for "public" usage. that said, it
may well be pretty easy to set up a single blog if required (and could
act as an impetus to getting the system sorted ;-)

> - how can the author protect their privacy? I suggested installing TOR  
> but is that enough? She might be using computers where she cannot install 
> software.

there are various issues, i guess. one is govt surveillance of the
individual, second is the website itself - and access to it (either
for publishing or viewing). tor is one way but another way would be
tunnelling a connection through a different computer somewhere outside
china. there are systems other than TOR that also do this (often
reliant on a friend outside china who has a computer that can be used)
or in some scenarios it is possible to make publishing go through a
different ip - but tbh, i don't know enough about the great firewall
to really comment that much.

> Thanks for any suggestions on this

i'm also bouncing this to aktivix-tech in case anyone there has any
further ideas.

solidarity,

	--gdm

> Alan (Rampart)
>
>
>
>
>
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