Canadians To Douse Chinese Firewall 342
FrenchyinOntario writes "Researchers at a University of Toronto lab are getting ready to release a computer program called Psiphon, which will allow Internet users in free countries to help users in more restrictive countries (like China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc.) to access the Internet by getting past the firewalls and getting around "rubber hose cryptoanalysis" which is a drawback of other anti-firewall programs as it reveals a user's tracks if discovered by authorities. Operating through port 443, Psiphon will allow users in monitoring countries the ability to send an encrypted request for certain information, and for users in secure countries to send it back to them. The UofT's Citizen Lab hopes to debut Psiphon at the international congress of the free speech group PEN in May."
Six/Four? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Canada... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL? (Score:3, Informative)
They claim it is a feature - that you have to have a relationship - like an immigrated family member - with the owner of the system. That should reduce abusive uses to about zero, which should make it a lot more palatable for regular people to run, and a lot simpler, than an onion router system.
Re:Opressive Country to-do list (Score:5, Informative)
"Unless a country wanted to cut off all connections for any financial transactions they wouldn't be able to cut off these transmissions," said Professor Ronald Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab.
rtfa kthnx
They already have a program that does this (Score:3, Informative)
Can you say "open Proxy"? (Score:5, Informative)
Peekabooty (Score:3, Informative)
Re:international meddling, eh? (Score:1, Informative)
This is different from a public anonymizing proxy (Score:4, Informative)
The difference is that this is a piece of software which runs on an individual person's computer.
This is more like peer-to-peer than it is like 50,000 people using a well know proxy.
The Chinese government can easily go to google and search for well known anonymizing proxies
and block access to them. What the govt can't do, is find out every IP address on the internet
running this software and block it. The downside of this software is that Chinese users must have
a friend on the outside to run the software, but the upside is that it's vastly less likely that the
Chinese government will be capable of blocking access to it.
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
It's not a government initiative, and it's in Canada, not the US.
Obligatory definition (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL? (Score:4, Informative)
China's internet censorship [wikipedia.org] works at several levels. It includes content-based filtering (banned terms [businessweek.com] in the text of what you are sending, including "human rights", "democracy" and "Dalai Lama"), so any attempt to bypass the filtering has to be encrypted. It also includes DNS-based filtering so some DNS lookups return the wrong IP addresses, and of course it also includes IP-based filtering that prevent Chinese users from accessing the BBC or Wikipedia, for instance.
Tor [eff.org] can be very effective at bypassing most of these protections, and you can choose to run it on port 443 (https) to avoid port-based filtering. Also, you can limit the amount of bandwidth you want to donate to other nodes, and the default outgoing policy prevents connections to port 25 so you can't use a Tor node for sending spam.
On the client side, using SwitchProxy [mozilla.org] for FireFox is helpful to maintain a list of proxies, including a local Tor instance, that works as a SOCKS proxy, and a list of open proxies [google.com] (SwitchProxy can automatically change proxy every X seconds).
Re:Tor: Not the answer. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Yes they willl. But there is hope. (Score:3, Informative)
Fedex might do better, I don't know, but their service area is limited to a few major metropolitan zones, and cost is imposing.
I think illegal smuggling is probably the most reliable and cost-effective way to ship data into China by sneakernet. Hand off to a friend at the airport, whatever.
Re:Yes they willl. But there is hope. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:international meddling, eh? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html [un.org]
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
It doesn't appear to mention drug or guns in there. (Or indeed, titties and/or beer).
P.