My concerns:<p>* "proxy-less" is a bad term, it sounds like they're still using a proxy, it's just using https encapsulation along the way to hide this from the first few hops.<p>* The participating entry-nodes (proxies?) could be systematically determined with a scanner for future blacklisting or investigation by someone trying to stop this circumvention of censorship.<p>* You have to trust the people running the entry nodes, if they have the key to decrypt your traffic. This sounds like a design that governments can use for monitoring.
I understand how this might work technically, but don't see why an ISP or heavily trafficked web-business would be motivated to deploy and maintain one of these Telex stations over the long term. You'd be adding an extra point of failure, cost for maintenance of the Telex stations, most likely some latency, and you'd have to cover the cost of bandwidth for traffic not headed to your website... all while running the risk of being blocked by the censoring country.
If anyone else didn't know about Public-Key Stenography, this paper[1] showed up almost everywhere in the search results.<p>It is heavier on the math than I would like for my "wha?" level curiosity, but given the audience here it may be a hit.<p>1 = <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/pubkeystego.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/pubkeystego.pdf</a>
It seems that the system relies on a single private key for secrecy, but deploys it widely - to every participating ISP. It seems difficult to believe that you could distribute a key like that and have it stay private, especially with so much active state sponsored cyber espionage going on.<p>I suppose you could solve this by generating a good number of key pairs and only deploying new secret keys to ISPs when there was evidence of disclosure, but if the government in question eavesdropped instead of blocked I'm not sure you'd find out quickly enough. It's unclear what advantages you'd get by eavesdropping, presumably little if it's really just used as a tunnel to tor.
How will this stop governments from forcing ISPs to block sites? Its ridiculous to assume that the governments censoring content will let ISPs provide a loophole through which their users can access blocked sites..