Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Innocuous
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2013 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
The friendly people of OpenITP let me co-work there sometimes, so I got to sit in on a chat recently in which Karl Fogel mentioned Telex. Part of how Telex would help censored users is by making their eavesdroppers think they're requesting innocuous websites, but actually, pow! It's Wikipedia's page on Tiananmen Square.
When Karl mentioned "innocuous" websites, I kept thinking -- CNN. Facebook. GMail. But no, actually, the Chinese government doesn't much love it when you go on those sites. I had to switch my brain around; "less committed to freedom of speech than my employer, and possibly willing to sell me out" does not equal "a-ok to a state-level censor." Right. "Innocuous" is more like samsung.com, or the website for the city of Leipzig.
