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Immunicity.org Registered
Following a round of UK wide Internet censorship a young software developer registered this domain and made use of the virtually defunct Proxy Auto Configuation featureset available in most browsers.
With a simple 30 second config change those in the UK who were previously subject to censorship could again reach any website on the Internet.
Traffic identified as censored was routed via proxies whilst uncensored traffic was routed across the users normal Internet connection.
The truism that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." rang resolute
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Arrest & Takedown
On August 6th 2014 the City Of London Police took the unprecedented step of arresting a proxy site operator and seized their domains.
Within days similar services were launched, eventually the only one left standard was RoutingPacketsIsNotACrime.uk which morphed into the PacketFlagon HydraProxy software suite.
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Back in the hands of anti-censorship activists
The City of London Police either failed to understand the implications of not renewing the immunicity.org domain or simply didn't realise that it would expire.
As soon as it did Brass Horn Communications took back control of the domain and returned it to an anti-censorship service.
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Immunicity.org Founder Is Charged with Fraud
After 2 years of legal wrangling the City of London Police finally press charges against the founder of Immunicity.org whereupon the Crown Prosecution Service decide to take it to court.
These charges are; one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property and six counts of possession of an article for use in fraud.
We believe that these charges are vexatious as the domains in question were simply mirrors and many, such as this one, are already back in service.
The dangers of a centralised PAC proxy became evident following our retrival of this domain so we started developing a truly decentralised PAC solution.
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PacketFlagon Released as a Local PAC Daemon for true decentralisation
go-packetflagon is a lightweight HTTP server that runs locally on your computer that allows you to create and serve PAC files just to your PC or to other computers in your home.
It does not rely on any centralisd infrastructure (even if GitHub has issues we have alternatives) and even if the PacketFlagon infrastructure or domain were seized (unlikely) this would have no effect on the software.
We would encourage everyone to stop using the centralisd PacketFlagon proxies and instead start using the go-packetflagon software coupled with a local SSH tunnel proxy or Tor.