We've been discussing more and more movements from various governments towards censoring the internet, whether it's things as simple as "filters" of "bad sites" or more recent efforts by governments to shut down speech they don't like from people they don't like. However, as tends to be the case, technology seems to quickly come to the rescue. Late last week a new effort from J. Alex Halderman started to get some attention. Called Telex, it's a system for getting around internet censorship on a massive level, by using a variety of distributed nodes and disguising the type of traffic being sent over them. The idea is to try to make it effectively impossible to filter out certain sites.

So if you're in China, and you want access to a banned site like YouTube, you just type YouTube.com into your browser, and the Telex station will see that connection, and disguise it as something innocuous. You might be watching YouTube, but to a censor, it will just seem as if you're visiting a harmless, non-blocked site.