[Air-l] censorship work arounds

[Charlie Balch]

Interesting suggestion but haven't proxy servers and peer-to-peer
connections been around a long time?  What makes this different?

A quick look at SourceForge found 8,444 hits for open source software on
Proxy Servers:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=proxy+server
Such as these on the first page
http://sourceforge.net/projects/anonproxyserver/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fear-proxy/

 
You might also consider VNC which leaves no tracks but does require the host
and client share screens...
http://tightvnc.com/

Charlie Balch
In Dissertation Hell
LSU

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Barry Wellman
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2006 7:47 PM
To: communication and information technology section asa; aoir list
Subject: [Air-l] censorship work arounds

 _____________________________________________________________________

  Barry Wellman   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology   NetLab Director
  Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue    Toronto Canada M5S 2G8    fax:+1-416-978-7162
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
        for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
 _____________________________________________________________________

November 27, 2006
Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor By CHRISTOPHER MASON

TORONTO, Nov. 21 - Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a
team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking
activists, or "hactivists," have created the latest, and some say most
advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government
censorship of the Web.

The program, called psiphon (pronounced "SY-fon"), will be released on Dec.
1 in response to growing Internet censorship that is pushing citizens in
restrictive countries to pursue more elaborate and sophisticated programs to
gain access to Western news sites, blogs and other censored material.

"The problem is growing exponentially," said Ronald Deibert, director of the
University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which designed psiphon. "What might
have started as censorship of pornography and Western news organizations has
expanded to include blogging sites, religious sites, health information
sites and many others."

Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country
(psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person's computer into an access point.
Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer
through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain access to
censored sites. The program's designers say there is no evidence on the
user's computer of having viewed censored material once they erase their
Internet history after each use. The software is part of a broader effort to
live up to the initial hopes human rights activists had that the Internet
would provide unprecedented freedom of expression for those living in
restrictive countries.

"Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible
extent so we're trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise that
the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication," Dr.
Deibert said.

When it opened in 2000, the Citizen Lab, which is one of four institutions
in the OpenNet Initiative (opennetinitiative.org), was actively monitoring a
handful of countries, mainly China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that censored the
Internet. But citing increased filtering by governments, the lab now
monitors more than 40 countries.

The program's designers say existing anticensorship programs are too
complicated for everyday computer users, leave evidence on the user's
computer and lack security in part because they have to be advertised
publicly, making it easy for censors to detect and block access to them.

"Now you will have potentially thousands, even tens of thousands, of private
proxies that are almost impossible for censors to follow one by one," said
Qiang Xiao, director of the China Internet Project at the University of
California, Berkeley.

Instead of publicly advertising the required login and password information,
psiphon is designed to be shared within trusted social circles of friends,
family and co-workers. This feature is meant to keep the program away from
censors but is also the largest drawback because it limits efforts to get
the program to as many people as possible.

The software is also designed to allow users to post on blogs and other Web
sites like Wikipedia, which has been a problem for some other anticensorship
programs. By requiring only login information and no installation, psiphon
is intended for anyone with basic computer knowledge because psiphon
functions much the same as any typical browser.

"So far it's been tech solutions for tech people," said Dmitri Vitaliev, a
human rights activist in Russia who has been testing psiphon in countries
where the Internet is censored. "We have not had very good tools so everyone
has been eagerly awaiting psiphon."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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