Reply from MAFIAA Fire

Hey Angus,

Thanks for contacting MAFIAAFire!

Sure, we are most happy to answer questions about the addons, and tech people can check them out for themselves as well as it's open source.

>   The immediate impact of this is that I cannot select a country-specific proxy, for example a UK proxy allowing me to view BBC programming via the BBC iPlayer 

No you cannot, and for good reason. It would make it easier for particular countries to stomp down on proxies, this way they dont even know if their countries proxies will be used for sure.

UK proxies are anyway avoided because we want to make sure everyone can get to sites like Newsbin if they need to, which is supposed to be banned in the near future.

We do not use French proxies for the same reason.

>  A repressive regime, China or Syria or Israel, can set up a proxy server (or many) and MAFIAA Fire selects it randomly  

It is possible, but unlikely.

The reason it's unlikely is we will "cycle" the proxies, so even if one of their proxies end up on our list, it wont be there long because on the next cycle a new bunch of proxies end up on the list and the old are out.

We randomly chose our proxies from many places of the internet (which we don't disclose where), the chance that the Chinese setup a proxy, put it in the right place for us to find it, it passes all our tests and beats out the other 1000s of free proxies to come on our list are pretty tiny.

But yes, it is possible just as given enough time a monkey sitting at a typewriter can accidently type out one of Shakespeare's entire plays.

>   is MAFFIA Fire selecting its proxies randomly Or is it filtering which countries, ISPs etc are legitimate for hosting proxies - in which case which countries and which ISPs? 

Yes, we do pick proxies randomly and yes we do filter proxies depending on which country they are hosted.

France, Denmark, Italy, UK and a few others cannot come on our list. If SOPA passes the US proxies will also be excluded.

Basically, the countries that offer proxies to the full, uncensored internet end up on our list.


Whats your blog address?

Cheers!

Ze