Permanently under construction.
This page contains a list of preferred external ISP accounts, together with the details of their configuration. Note that any account with ssh will allow use of the first of the methods below. The list of accounts I've prepared are those who responded to my open request that they permit the account to be used for bypassing censorship. That means they've consulted their legal people. Other ISPs may not wish to commit themselves, but will probably let you them it for that purpose anyway (if they even notice it!). If you only want to do ssh, then you can probably find even cheaper accounts to use.
Some accounts are free, but most cost between $US10-$US17 per month ($US1 = UAD3.68;SAR3.75;CNY8.28;SGD1.67) to maintain (cheaper if you pay annually). They all say they have ssh access, a web page (with CGI) for you, a C development capability and a standard shell. With some help from those who get each account, I will give detailed instructions to allow at least one of the techniques for bypassing the censorship to be used for each of these accounts. I will support this via email or the proxy-methods mailing list. I will support you if you want to try something different to the best of my ability, but I can't buy myself one of each of these accounts just to find out what your particular problem is. You'll understand that (as a general rule) the free accounts will take more work to set up and are not likely to be a permanent solution. Send suggested accounts to me and I'll take a look at how (or if) they can be set up.
Future prospects for any account you choose from this list are good. By that I mean your censoring ISP will probably not be able to limit your access easily. You will not be using their censoring web proxy at all, so your accesses will not be easily logged and restriction of your access via your web browser requests is not possible at all. You will be able to specify the port your external 'gateway' uses to listen for your requests, so port blocking by your country/corporation will not be effective (unless they block everything and proxy the rest). The UAE, for example, would have to implement a new form of packet filtering, by destination address, to have any effect on your access. In that event, you will need to cancel the account, change external ISPs and set up again; this is easy anyway. This would be the main reason for choosing to pay on a monthly basis, rather than the discounted annual basis. There's no way to offer a guaranteed way around this possibility.
In the final analysis, I expect there won't be a huge number of people doing it, so the destination IP address filtering won't happen, and everyone will be happy surfers forever after :-).
And right at the end, when censors realize they simply cannot censor the Internet, there will be no problems at all.
In addition to those listed below, see the list of shell providers at eggxpress.
echo 'TMOUT=0; export TMOUT' >>.profile
A bit expensive for what you want to use it for at ~$17 per month.
This is a free account which has most of the desired attributes.
Here are some other free shell accounts (I haven't tried them, and I shamelessly stole them from Craig!). They prolly won't be ssh-capable, but might be useful before committing yourself to actually paying an ISP, so you know what to ask for etc.
irc4all has a list of proxies which can be used with the ssh forwarding technique mentioned above. They're mostly blocked if you attempt direct access.
virtual avenue has another list of indirectly accessible proxies - with the occasional accessible one (check the list of blocked ports on the proxy list page).
proxies4all has an excellent discussion going on this subject.
proxies3 is a good place to check out; most of the normal proxies listed are old and no good for the Middle East, but there's a separate section for 'uncommon port' proxies which may be useful. He's probably correct that they get blocked when they appear on his page :-(
a good link to some basic concepts
The Censorware Project has some good information, in particular here
James Marshall has some good introductory tutorial-type stuff (and some good ideas you can use if you take the advice above and get an account outside your censored environment!).
Plumpy describes the ssh techniques mentioned above rather well.
A free ssh for windows. Thanks for the pointer, Julliou.
| host | port |
|---|---|
| 151.133.223.1 | 80 |
| 194.85.132.86 | 3128 |
| proxy.ortv.ru | 8080 |
| blue.pompano.net | 8080 #access controlled - don't use any more |
| s2.optonline.net | 8080 #access controlled |
| www.thefourthr-fw.com | 8080 #notlistening |
| q.netunlimited.net | 80 # access controlled |
| cache01.pathcom.com | 8080 #unknown host |
| magusnet.com | (many ports, not 8080) |
| sq.acomp.usf.edu | 3128 |