New Web Censor Evasion Toolkit Launches: Psiphon
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.Psiphon is here, and on Twitter. Here's a snip from their launch press release: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."
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 web: psiphon.caOn 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.
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From what I can tell you could do the same with apache mod_proxy and some rewrite rules... or am I missing something?
It's a for-profit, proprietary system? Two things strike me:
1) In regimes where people are tortured and killed for things they see and say, where every tech company so far has forked over user information (sometimes secretly, sometimes unwillingly, but given in nonetheless), do these people really think their potential users will trust them on the basis of a wink and a nod?
2) Many governments allow anonymous exchange of information, but no government will tolerate anonymous transfer of funds. Any new means of doing so would be coopted soon after by old-school money laundering operations, and shut down on that basis. As much as I would love to see a fully anonymous economic system, it will never ever ever happen.