The Peek-A-Booty team have posted the source for their great censorship-busting app. The idea is that public-spirited censorware-busters run a screen-saver that makes their computers available to act as a proxy for anyone who wants it, primarily those who live behind repressive national firewalls (cough China cough). The proxies discover each other and those who are looking for them using a Gnutella-like protocol, and when you want a page that is censored by your firewall, you ask one of your anonymous benefactors to pass it to you.
More than a censorship-circumventer, Peek-A-Booty has the potential to act as a distributed, self-evolving route-generator. If Alice has a route to CNN and Bob has no route to CNN, but Bob has a route to Alice, Bob can access CNN via Alice. When giant interchanges like MAE West go down, apps like Peek-A-Booty will take up the slack.
In other words: The Internet interprets damage as censorship and routes around it.
(via Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)
