Internet Censorship Watch: By Pass the CENSORS With PSIPHON

CBC (Via Michelle Malkin): Tool to circumvent internet censorship set to launch

Researchers at University of Toronto plan to introduce a software tool on Friday that aims to help people in countries that censor the World Wide Web.

Psiphon (pronounced sigh-fawn), a web-based utility, lets individuals in a country that censors the internet sign on to a server that gives them secure access to web pages anywhere, bypassing government restrictions.

Its creators plan to launch the software at the Protect The Net conference at the university’s Munk Centre for International Studies, where psiphon emerged as a project of Citizenlab. Researchers at the facility examine the relationship between digital media and politics around the world.

“We’re aiming at giving people access to sites like Wikipedia,” a free, user-maintained online encyclopedia, and other information and news sources, Michael Hull, psiphon’s lead engineer, told CBC News Online.

Citing countries such as China and Iran among some 40 countries that censor the internet, Hull said that the way in which access to information is cut off is troubling.

“My problem with it is that there’s no transparency. Someone is making an arbitrary decision and there is no way to appeal it, even if you feel like you’re doing nothing wrong,” he said.

A good concept but Flap is positive that China and Iran are already working on a blocking hack to this software.

Psiphon works by letting people in uncensored countries download the free software to run a secure, encrypted server or node in the private network. The server administrator would pass the connection information to friends and family in censored countries – psiphonites – who could then log in through a web browser and navigate sites without restrictions.

Totalitarian governments fail with free speech discourse and freedom of expression.

Stay tuned……..let’s see if this works.

You can download the software here.

Flap agrees with Michelle: SPREAD THE WORD.

A new Canadian software tool aims to help people in web-censoring countries like Iran, where this woman was on the internet in a cafe in Tehran in August.

Technorati Tags: Psiphon, censorship, freedomofspeech