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Bypassing Internet censorship: A roundup

First, news about the latest anti-web censorship tool.

Psiphon is a new Web censorship 'bypass' tool developed by researchers at the University of Toronto, Canada. Psiphon is able to go around government censorship of the web, according to researchers. It will be released on 1 December.

Reporters Without Borders lists 13 countries that it accuses of suppressing freedom of expression on the net, including Syria, China and Vietnam.

Psiphon works on P2P networks. When a net user in an uncensored country downloads Psiphon, his/her computer then becomes an access point. Thus, users then give their friend circle a unique web address, login and password, using which restricted users can easily browse the web through an encrypted connection to the proxy server.

Problems with Psiphon's solution: A Digg user points out a loophole with Psiphon – he says:

by publicizing an SSL proxy as such, isn't this Canadian company just opening themselves up to backlash from the Chinese government? Sort of like what Napster did? Everyone and their brother was using IRC, and then Napster came along and made it simple for any doofus to go out there and download pirated music. This looks to be the same sort of concept - only instead of the **AA, they'll be pissing off the Chinese government.

Now let's do a roundup of resources for bypassing Internet censorship:


1. HOWTO bypass Internet Censorship
(last updated 2006-09-14)


2. How to disable censorware? (Parental controls, etc)


3. List of Anti-Censorship Proxies


4. Popular proxies
Anonymouse.org
Pkblogs.com

5. Downloadable software to bypass censorship (Like Psiphon)
Use Tor


6. Wikipedia’s detailed look at Internet Censorship


7. Wikpedia’s detailed look at Proxy Servers

8. Net censorship: How to bypass China's Great Firewall
Richard Clayton, a computer security researcher at the University of Cambridge, claims to have devised a way to penetrate " the Chinese wall" by ignoring the reset TCP packet returned by Chinese routers to maintain connection. Mr. Clayton says that if those packets are discarded instead of being returned as expected, then the firewall becomes utterly ineffective.

(Via Boing Boing)

posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:29 PM