A brand new plugin released by GreenHost aims to make censoring the web next to impossible. It’s called RePress and turns any WordPress powered website it’s installed on into a proxy server. The plugin was created in response to piratebay.org being blocked within the Netherlands due to a court ruling.

RePress uses phpproxyimproved as its HTML parser which is another piece of open source code that allows the proxy magic to happen. After installing the plugin, you’ll need to give it a unique URL that will be used when going through the proxy to the blocked website. I received the following message after trying to view one of the default websites that are added to the proxy list:
In order to protect your blog from cross-site scripting attacks, please log out of your WordPress administration backend before accessing any of the proxied site urls.
Please log out of WordPress by clicking on this logout link.Afterwards you will be directly redirected to the proxied website.
For security reasons. This will also delete all cookies for this domain (your remembered settings will be lost).
So if there is a particular website that you visit often using your site as a proxy, you’ll need to bookmark the URL and visit it only when you’re logged out of WordPress.
If you decide to give RePress a try, please give GreenHost some feedback on it via the following forum thread.
The threat that Piratebay, Megaupload etc pose to commercial interests (copyright theft) is not that big a deal to me on the personal level (even though I recognize it as “wrong”), and I don’t see where it is that much of an objective threat to the commercial sectors they’re ripping off, either.
Where this gets more worrisome, is that when Congress etc watches us commit our talent & effort to building defenses to protect lawbreaking activities, sees us glamorizing & lionizing an aggressive anti-business deployment of the Internet to attack perfectly legal & ordinary commercial activity … we are allowing & encouraging a serious threat to our own interests. Things we care about and are excited about, are being exposed to increasing risk.
Congress progressively gains greater power & ability to take steps to ‘collar’ the Internet, as the public watches these clever maneuvers – at our initiative – to enable Piratebay etc to continue engaging in lawbreaking. We lose public support. Citizens & voters steadily come to see the problem as rooted in the Internet, and even the Open Source culture, per se.
We look more & more like Occupy Zuccotti, with a haircut and underarm deodorant.
WordPress, and various communities built on the open & free Internet, should publicly speak out against the protection of outlaws. Otherwise, we are handing a ever more-menacing club to interests & powers, who will use it against us.