undefined
Bennett Haselton, 4/7/2003
If you want to, please enter your email address if you would like to receive updates about the circumventor software. This will include announcements about new versions and improvements. We may also occasionally ask users about experiences they have had with the circumventor software. We will never share your email address with any third party.
With these steps, you can turn your home computer into a miniature Web server that you and your friends can connect to when your Internet access is censored. If you are blocked from accessing a Web site, you can connect instead to the Web site running on your home computer, where you will be able to access a form that lets you type in the URL of the Web site that you want to see. Then the contents of that site will be displayed to you even though you never actually access the site directly.
Because these steps involve running a Web server on your home computer, they require you to have some type of "always-on" Internet connection, i.e. DSL or cable modem, in order to turn your home computer into a circumventor site. (People can still connect to your circumventor site regardless of what kind of Internet connection they have.) Also, you usually cannot install a circumventor on a machine behind a firewall or router -- which means you may not be able to install it if your computer is on a home network with several machines. You almost certainly won't be able to install it on a computer in a school or corporate network (but you can still install the circumventor on a home machine, and then use it from a school or corporate network computer).
These instructions work under Windows XP and Windows 2000 only. They will probably not work on Windows ME, or earlier versions of Windows. If you're not sure what version of Windows you're running, look under Start->Settings->Control Panel, double-click the "System" icon, and the dialog box should display your version of Windows.
Note: There are currently no Internet blocking programs that are able to detect the use of one of these circumventors, however, it is possible that blocking software companies may modify their software so that it becomes able to detect this technique. For this reason, if you are in an environment where you could get in trouble for trying to circumvent the network blocking, it is safest to use this technique in a setting where your activity cannot be traced back to you personally, such as a public terminal with no sign-in required.
Your machine must be able to receive incoming connections, in order to install the circumventor. Go to this page to test whether your machine can receive incoming connections.
In Internet Explorer, you will see a message that asks something like, "The publisher cannot be determined" and "Do you want to install and run this program?" Other browsers will display similar messages. Click "Yes" to allow the applet to run.
If the last line says "Result: success.html", then your machine can receive incoming connections; if it says "Result: failure.html", then your machine cannot. (For tech-heads: this page launches a Java applet that listens on port 1238 of your computer, and then attempts to open a connection from the Peacefire server to port 1238 on your computer.)
If the applet displayed "Result: success.html", then you can continue with the install.
You can install ActivePerl on your computer by clicking this link, saving it to your computer, and double-clicking the saved file. Make sure you install it to "C:\Perl" (that should be the default).
You can install OpenSA on your computer by clicking this link, saving it to your computer, and double-clicking the saved file. Make sure you install it to "C:\OpenSA\Apache" (that should be the default).
Download this file to your computer, unzip the contents, and double-click the "SETUP.BAT" file inside the "circumventor-setup" directory that is created. This will install a perl script called CGIProxy and set up an SSL certificate that OpenSA will use to encrypt communications when people connect to your computer. (If you didn't understand that sentence, don't worry -- you don't have to!)
After running the SETUP.BAT file in the last step of these instructions, a file should open in your browser saying "It's ready!" and giving the location of the circumventor you have just installed. If you do not see this message, check the file cgiproxy-setup-log.txt, which should be located in the same directory as the SETUP.BAT file that you ran. If you email us this file, we may be able to help figure out what went wrong.
After setting up the circumventor, you should be presented with an "It's ready!" page, giving you the URL that you and other users can connect to when you want to use it. When someone accesses that URL, they will receive a warning in their browser saying that the certificate does not match the site, or that it's not signed -- something like this:
However, you can ignore that warning and proceed to use the circumventor.
Note on using with HotMail and Yahoo Mail: If you want to access HotMail through the circumventor, when you get to the CGIProxy page, you must un-check the box marked "Remove all scripts (recommended for anonymity)", and then type http://www.hotmail.com/ as the URL you want to load. But if you want to access Yahoo Mail through the circumventor, you must leave the box checked marked "Remove all scripts (recommended for anonymity)", and then you will be able to access http://mail.yahoo.com/ and log in to your Yahoo Mail account.
There are numerous other sites that may not work because CGIProxy disables JavaScript by default. You can try to access these sites by un-checking the box marked "Remove all scripts", but this may not work either.
If you have any other questions or problems, you can email them to bennett@peacefire.org and we will try to figure out the answers if we have time.
This project was made possible by the existence of the following programs, which are generously given away for free by their talented authors:
