Surfing in Tehran

February 10, 2009 8:25 AM

My friend is in Iran and wants to get through to blocked internet sites on her Mac. Does anyone have any experience doing this through a proxy? So far nothing she has tried has worked.
posted by milagu to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Assuming you're (or someone else) is willing to help, have you tried Psiphon?
posted by Adam_S at 8:34 AM on February 10, 2009

http://proxy.org/ has a huge list. I usually find one that works. Can take some trial and error. Of course, this main site might itself be blocked for her, but you could forward some URLs from the site to her.
posted by wastelands at 9:05 AM on February 10, 2009

You could try this:

http://www.freeproxy.ru/en/free_proxy/cgi-proxy.htm
posted by KokuRyu at 9:09 AM on February 10, 2009

I used Tor on my mac when I was in China.
posted by losvedir at 9:19 AM on February 10, 2009

Anonymouse
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:20 AM on February 10, 2009

I'll second Tor. Personally, I wouldn't use anything else for a situation such as your friends.
posted by Sufi at 10:17 AM on February 10, 2009

I used the gladder plugin for firefox when I was in China and it worked like a charm. The plugin has a list of proxies and will automatically pick the fastest one that works.

I don't know how tech savvy your friend is, but if you/she has ssh access to a machine outside the country it's pretty easy to set up an ssh tunnel and use that as a proxy. It would probably be faster than the free proxies or Tor as well, but ymmv depending on the connections and locations of the machines involved.
posted by benign at 10:42 AM on February 10, 2009

I used Anonymouse when I was in China and it got around Golden Shield adequately, it was slow and crappy though.

gladder looks interesting, but I can speak for it as I am back in the States currently.
posted by BobbyDigital at 10:53 AM on February 10, 2009

Use BitVise Tunnelier and SSH to let her SSH into your system via remote desktop, and use your computer as her computer.
posted by TomMelee at 4:48 PM on February 10, 2009