This is really quite straightforward and there are loads of pages out in the Interweb Thingy that explain how to do this, but I still screw it up whenever I try to do it from memory. The idea is explained here for Ubuntu and here for Windows+Putty ("Putty makes Windows usable").
The key things I forget are:
- You mustn't use a port above 1024 unless you are root or sudo the ssh command
- You don't use local host as the general http proxy, you set it as the socks 5 proxy (the last one in the list in Firefox)
- You must connect as <remote user>@<web host address> and enter the two passwords when you run ssh in a terminal - the first to switch user to root, the second to login to the remote host on the ssh session.
Apart from being useful in China, this is useful in the UK too, for example to access services like Pandora, which are blocked to users from less developed countries. You probably don't want to stream audio if your web hosting company per byte of data. Much better to use Spotify or Last.fm. But you get the idea. If you want to get streaming content you may be able to use this technique that dispenses with a proxy server.
Someone was saying that actually the Chinese don't really care about their citizens reading subversive stuff on the web if it is in English: they just want the yokels to be kept in the dark about what democracy and free elections are all about.
Once again, if you read this, could you see if you can create a comment. If you can't then tell me. I tightened up the comment settings because I was getting spam, and now nobody every seems to leave a comment, even a spammy one.
