What's in a Proxy?

On my travels to Singapore I encountered governmental censorship first hand. It was just that small technical detail of typing in the Singapore proxy in my browser before the lecture. How does this work? A Singaporean website explains: "A proxy server refers to the local server, which connects an Internet user to the Internet. It serves to store frequently accessed Web pages, screen out connections to restricted web sites, etc." So, there is a central government server that all local Internet users have to go through. Here then, the government can blacklist sites. I asked the technician at Nanyang University who typed in the proxy numbers what he thinks about such suppression of WWW content. "Oh, I think it's great. We don't have to see child porn." (I meant to ask him if they would type in www.childporn.com to get to it.) Just think of the meaning of "proxy": "the authority to represent someone else. A person authorized to act on behalf of someone else." This sounds so innocently benevolent.

But look at China. And look at what the US serch giant Google does there... Try searching the Chinese version and the US version of Google for “Tiananmen” (as in Tiananmen Square).  Chinese Google vs. US Google. And DieDie Weng pointed me to this BBC article that speaks to Chinese censorship of it's bloggers. It also addresses the fact that Google allowed for this kind of censorship of its search features. China, in addition to the use of proxies, blocks IP addresses through what is called The Great Firewall of China.