Re: PRESS RELEASE: GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL

[John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>]

> Xs4all Internet will rotate the IP-numbering of the website www.xs4all.nl
> to ensure that it's 3100 userpages will all remain available for any
> internet-user.

While you are at it, you could move just the censored material to a
separate IP address from the rest of the archives, and issue Web
redirects for requests sent to the old address.  In fact it might be
interesting to redirect readers to various mirror sites automatically,
at random and in rotation.  Thus, when someone connects to your web
site to read censored material, they will be automatically redirected
to one of dozens or hundreds of other places where the material can be
found.  The German censors will likely find it impossible to block
access to all those sites (and each such site can also be changing its
IP address periodically).

It's my impression that the draft Mobile-IP protocols will make it
possible for a site to use IP addresses from all over the Internet.
Mobile IP is normally designed for permitting a physical host to move
to various physical locations while retaining a fixed logical IP
address (corresponding to its "home" location).  It can probably also
be used to permit a physical host at a single physical location to
respond to multiple logical IP addresses at multiple virtual "home"
locations.  See http://www.ietf.org/html-charters/mobileip-charter.html,
or search for "Mobile IP" in a web search engine.

The Mobile IP protocols require strong authentication in order to
"move" around the network securely.  We hope this will prevent them
from being used to subvert Internet hosts.  However, in the presence
of *cooperation* from a variety of Internet sites, they can also be
used to make the physical location and Internet-address of actual
stored information invisible to the requesters of that information --
and to the censors attempting to block access to it.

Curiously enough, the National University of Singapore has implemented
Mobile IP for Linux!  See http://zaphod.ee.nus.sg/mip/.  Even in the
backyards of the most egregious censors, freely available technology
for combatting censorship is being built and distributed.  (A second
Linux implementation from http://anchor.cs.binghamton.edu/~mobileip/
is also available.)

	John Gilmore