14 DAY TRIAL // At its Ideas conference, Google announced several tools designed to make it easier for people around the world to bypass censorship and attempts to stifle free speech.
One of those tools is uProxy, a browser add-on that, as the name suggests, acts as a web proxy, diverting traffic through countries where the site you're trying to access isn't blocked.
Like many other proxy tools, it works by redirecting all browser traffic through a third-party computer. Instead of your browser connecting directly to the server hosting the site you want, it goes through a proxy server in a different country and then connects to the original source.
What's different about uProxy though is that it doesn't rely on a dedicated proxy server; rather, it uses peer-to-peer connections.
So your browser connects to the browser of another uProxy user in a country where the site you want isn't blocked and then relies on that Internet connection to access that site.
This is somewhat similar (though less secure) to how TOR works. The beauty of this method, assuming uProxy is used by a decent number of people, is that there's no proxy server to block so it's really hard for anyone to block a connection through it.
It gets even more interesting under the hood, since uProxy uses WebRTC Data Channels for the connections between browsers. That's a very novel use of WebRTC, a technology initially created for web audio and video communications.
The Data Channels component, as the name suggests, is designed to carry arbitrary data rather than audio or video feeds, and it was made for things like file transfers, text chat, and so on.
But because the technology is proving a very solid way of passing real-time data asynchronously between browsers, it can be used for anything, including for rerouting Internet traffic between two computers.
Tools like uProxy underline the power of WebRTC and of the modern web as a whole. WebRTC is already supported by Chrome and Firefox, to some degree, though the technology still needs to mature.
"When most people think about WebRTC, they think about audio and video communications, but the ability to do robust, secure peer-to-peer data exchange from the web platform could have even more potential. A lot of interesting things will be possible when every web page can be a P2P app," Google's Justin Uberti commented.
