Blog Post (mirror)

Everyone living inside mainland China, and those who have friends living there, should have noticed the atrocious network blockage and censoring system called the Great Firewall abbr. GFW. This complex system utilized various tricks including but not limited to DNS poisoning, keywords filtering, modified redirect, delaying packages etc. to hijack internet traffic and thus censoring the content within Chinese boarder. Right now the available tools to battle this are often too sophisticated. People need to invest a whole lot of time to get them to work, some are very complicated even for computer geeks.

During trial and error I discovered a majority portion of affected user was just* being DNS poisoned. Therefor they can circumvent the censorship by simply using local hosts file to overcome the poisoning. While exploring the new Google Programming Language called "Go", I wrote a little piece of code to download the manually composed hosts file from the web automatically, hoping in a day or two this tiny program can update and replace the hosts file on your computer automatically in one-click. It then would at the very least help out some of my non-geek friends living in China.

Current feature:

automatic update using hosts provided from smarthosts --http://smarthosts.googlecode.com

What I'm going to do in the next few commits are:

auto update hosts in Windows (7), MacOSX, and Linux computers. explore and implement local proxy like function similar to python goagent project. With emphasizes on ease of use, zero config etc. Regarding the language, I am very excited about the syntax and some of its concepts like channels and slices. I sure will keeping using Go to do more stuff and I hope to explore new ground and form a better, cleaner go programming style while learning it.

Please follow the github link above for updated wiki/readme

在中国生活和工作的人们无法正常访问facebook，twitter和大部分Google平台，这都是拜防火长城所赐。网上的确有很多翻墙的工具/方法，然后几乎没有简单易用的，为了让广大的妈妈们成功登录facebook监视自己的子女，我尝试写一个程序，达到双击一下就搞定的效果。

软件是用Google的新编程语言Go写的，源代码的link在 这里

未来的一两天我将完成软件的0.1版本，然后将程序放在一个更平和易懂的说明页面下。如果你迫不及待想知道这个软件（将）能干什么，请往下看。

[更新：0.1版本已经发布，本程序自动下载最新的smarthosts然后更新您电脑上的hosts文件]

目前这个软件自动从网上下载一个hosts文件，通过覆盖你电脑上的hosts文件你将可以访问大部分原来都访问不了的站点，这是因为绝大部分的监视封锁技术都是靠DNS污染实现的。 这种污染将你打在浏览器里的地址强行拐到一个不存在的ip上，在你看起来仿佛这个网站就不存在一样。当然了，如果你遭受的刑罚不是DNS污染，目前这个软件还帮不上你，但不要灰心，紧接下来的版本将尝试套用类似本地代理服务器的技术，换着法儿让你访问facebook。

如果你有兴趣和能力，我非常欢迎你在github上联系我，写建议，感想，提交功能，patch，甚至协助编写等等。和任何其他开源软件运作方式一样，人多力量大。但愿不用多久，这个软件就能造福（几乎）所有在中国还翻不过墙的妈妈们（姐姐妹妹们也行）。