Update: Here's a critique of Psiphon from a crypto expert.
Mentioned in a NYT article by John Markoff about tools such as Tor used in places like China and Iran to route around internet censorship, this word of a new browser-based toolkit.
Political scientists at the University of Toronto have built yet another system, called Psiphon, that allows anyone to evade national Internet firewalls using only a Web browser. Sensing a business opportunity, they have created a company to profit by making it possible for media companies to deliver digital content to Web users behind national firewalls.
The danger in this quiet electronic war is driven home by a stark warning on the group's Web site: "Bypassing censorship may violate law. Serious thought should be given to the risks involved and potential consequences."
Psiphon is here, and on Twitter. Here's a snip from their launch press release:
At the heart of the new venture is Psiphon's Managed Delivery Platform (MDP), in which large-scale producers of content push their media through Psiphon's proprietary cloud-based system to consumers in denied environments.
On the user end, the free service is encrypted, requires no software to download, is multimedia capable, and can even work through mobile smart phone platforms, such as the iPhone.
Users can sign on to Psiphon in a variety of ways: through email invites from trusted friends and colleagues, for example, or through Psiphon's innovative "right2know" technology, which allows media producers to show consumers in censored environments content which is not available to them.
On the web: psiphon.ca
