Well coincidentally the Inquirer website is today covering a story about the great (Firewall) tunnel of China. It links to a technology that may help.

Inquirer Story

I am reliably informed by someone who lives in a certain Islamic state that borders onto Iraq that SurfUnBlocked works wonders for accessing YouTube and Google Video. Very secure and apparently leaves no trace for nasty mullahs to come and annoy you about your preferred choice of camelporn.

http://www.torproject.org/ is a popular solution for these issues...

If you have access to a server outside the "firewall zone" you can create a dynamic tunnel using SSH (Secure Shell) and use this as a SOCKS proxy from within your browser.

The server should be running something Unix-like (e.g. Linux) and not be blocked from viewing web pages itself. Sourceforge.net shell accounts used to be able to do that.

Other than that, use TOR - but NEVER EVER LOGIN TO ANYWHERE OVER TOR, because there are LOTS of anonymous TOR exit nodes operated by spammers, crackers and mafia - even government - which monitor (unencrypted) traffic e.g. to your mail server and might log (and abuse) your passwords!

TOR is pretty much the easiest way to bypass just about any stupid censorship technology set in place. For libertarians, Freenet is also something to look at (fundamentally different technologies serving different needs, but I'm sure someone would have Fitna in there somewhere).

The reason for the block being Fitna, of course.

If that is the specific issue, then BitTorrent, eMule and Liveleak all host Fitna. Heck, *I* host Fitna on BitTorrent. If that's all your friend is looking for, I'll YouSendIt to him.

More generally speaking, someone with a WinXP or a WinServer box might want to set up Terminal Services and let our Indonesian friend RDP in. *nix fans can do the same thing (and won't have to do magic stuff to make it work).

Alternatively, he can pony up some cash (well, credit card, actually) and use Anonymizer or some other such service.

You'll want to check your friend's tech-fu skills, and if he's up to it, see if the ISP is blocking specific IPs, or URLs. If they're not blocking Google, then he might have limited access to some vids through Google Video. Google's cacheing system might help there also. He might have to use www.keepvid.com as a supplement.

But yes, if you're looking for a general purpose system to do general Internet stuff, TOR is your best solution. Incidentally, you can use TOR to login to sites that are SSL secured, I should think.

The problem is that it's not the government that's doing the blocking. It's done at the ISP/telco level, and if they block your ports, it's a lot more painful.

Hamachi-like solutions could work as well. Assuming you know someone else using it (which is why TOR is so popular; you don't need to know the others).

Thanks, x, for the tor tip. I use it here in China successfully (except for the slowness), but I had no idea about the log-in spies. I may be in danger already.