Thread by @danicat83

Hey all. I have a project called DATASUS that is supposed to help researchers all around the world having access to the Brazilian Healthcare public data sets. The problem is that their FTP blocks access from IPs outside Brazil. #datasus
github.com/danicat/datasus

The project is dead until I find a scalable solution for that that isn't saying "buy a VPN" for everyone interested on it (it is what I have been doing). I've halted all the developments on this project because of this issue and it has been a long time.

I want to expand it and port it to #python and #golang, for instance. But there is no point in doing that until the problem above is fixed.

I've tried to create a proxy using @googlecloud, but apparently I can't get an external IP that is based in South America, even by selecting the region. Maybe the ftp.datasus.gov.br server use some weird blacklist/whitelist rule.

My next try was to try figuring out how to use a dark net exit node to do that, but maybe that's a bit too much 😅

I need ideas from people smarter than me. Please help! Let's make these datasets available to researchers all around the world!

PS.: I know my original code sucks, I was messing around just to have a minimal viable product (MVP). A full fledged refactor to be published in CRAN and PyPI is expected once this problem is solved.