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."
A HTTP Proxy with SSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
People still care (Score:3, Insightful)
Reaction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Private initiatives like this are cool and all (and have proven very effective in the past), but it would be nice to see our governments taking a much stronger stand regarding free-speech. Free speech is the absolute foundation of democracy and freedom.
Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Opressive Country to-do list (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Opress
Reaction?-DTV. (Score:1, Insightful)
That reminds me. How's that DirectTV working for you guys?
Unlikely to have much impact in practice (Score:4, Insightful)
But, it seems that I need to communicate with someone in China first, and offer my computer up to them, and then we both need to install something on our computers, and I give him a userid and password.
Isn't this just too clunky to work?
Re:Canada... (Score:4, Insightful)
The US keeps making laws I have problems with, like the Patriot Act, but then I see the polls which show that most people support them.
Ethnocentric (Score:0, Insightful)
international meddling, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
What would the Canadian government think if people in countries with different drug laws started intentionally mailing their drugs, which they consider legal, into Canada? Better yet, what would Canada think if such an action was sponsored by the government of the offending country (Psiphon is coming out of a publicly funded university in Canada).
As another example, currently a hot topic up here is gun violence. Many of the guns get into Canada from the US, where the gun laws are not as strict. Certainly, and rightfully so, the Canadian government would be offended if the US government funded a program with the goal of getting more guns into Canada.
I agree both drugs and guns *can* be much more harmful than information, but if the consequence of having that information is jail sentence in a Chinese prison, then enabling them to access it is something that should not be taken lightly.
Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
An interesting op-ed piece [timesonline.co.uk] I read today suggested that this is a war between Freedom and Fundamentalism. As we are seeing with the current Congressional Hearing involving Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc, Capitalism doesn't much care either way for Freedom or Fundamentalism, but is calculated solely on risk and reward - even if you purport to "do no evil". To look at Western politics around the world, and more topically the effects of those Danish cartoons which are not being published, most people don't have much of an opinion here either.
As has been said here previously, free speech only continues to exist when people exercise it. There is much uninformed opinion in the world, and even our leaders are increasingly elected on the basis of limited amounts of tightly controlled information. Does this lead us closer to Freedom and Democracy?
The Fundamentalist has a narrow agenda, is easily inflamed, readily invokes fear to reinforce their message, and has little respect for all who disagree. Those who favour Freedom will always suffer at the hands of Fundamentalists - Freedom is Fundamentalism's single worst enemy, and the uninformed Free will happily trade minor freedoms for any illusion of security against perceived threats. Against this slow but steady onslaught, Freedom's only weapon is exercising available freedoms - even to risk one's own life if necessary.
While it is the duty of the Free to selflessly attempt to liberate the oppressed, Capitalism guides us to minimise risk now and build short-term rewards. In the face of rising global Fundamentalism (whether Christian or Muslim, Capitalist or Socialist), Freedom dies by a thousand cuts.
It will do us all good to see more fearless initiatives like this one from Canada.
Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL? (Score:2, Insightful)
How about you announce how it works??? (Score:2, Insightful)
You can be certain the Chinese firewalls will just start to block 443 and ban encrypted http... What have they got to lose!?
team america? (Score:2, Insightful)
I see this report as America admitting that sometimes, censorship is a prerequisite to peace. And not all news is acceptable in all places at all times.
In relations to this project however, my worry is how this would affect diplomacy.
Moral absolutism (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't write the above (though feel free to disbelieve me), but I know I've struggled with the same question. It's quite true that the CCP's efforts to protect China's conservative values, through censorship, enjoy wide support among the population--just as a majority of French and German citizens support their governments' suppression of Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial, and arguably rightly so.
Certainly I personally wouldn't want to live under such a government, but then, apparently a majority of Chinese wouldn't want to live under ours. Who are we to say they're wrong in their desire to be so nannied?
Thoughts?
Re:international meddling, eh? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL? (Score:2, Insightful)
*cough* (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
The more there are, the better. No single point of failure, no single point for governments to attack. Fragment away.
Re:this hose is gay (Score:1, Insightful)
This is quickly turning out to be a new twist on Godwin's Law on usenet discussions always degrading into namecalling and nazi references: Any
Come on and face it. Pedophiles are not the greatest threat to mankind. They've always been around and as long as they keep to the net, no children are physically harmed. Stop limiting everybodys freedom on the net in order to make some often rather futile moves against online pedophiles. Use all those misspent efforts to go after the real life pedophiles and those helping them (sleezeball photographers making kiddie porn etc.). This will do much more in preventing harm to children and it will cut off the feed of kiddie porn at the source.
A much bigger threat to mankind are the repressive regimes bent on controlling how people think. Making it possible for free thought and expression to spread and flourish and thus paving the way for those regimes to fall, are far more important than preventing a few pedophiles from sharing their filth.
This is why software like this is nessesary and why the risk of abuse by pedophiles, nazis and other 'undesirables' is an acceptable risk.
Free Speech Fanatism ? (Score:5, Insightful)
We forget so often that the chinese government isn't stupid, and maybe not even evil. They have reasons for why they do what they do. You may disagree with the reasons, of course. But let's not forget that preventing large-scale civil unrest is among them. Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong. But are you ready to gamble a few million lives on that?
The french revolution took maybe 100,000 lives (40k alone went to the guillotine), in a country of about 40 mio. people. Now imagine the body count in a 1200 mio. people country. Add modern firearms and tanks. 3 mio.? 4 mio.? maybe 5 mio. people could die during an all-china civil unrest.
If the chinese leaders are wrong, they are oppressive tyrants who've killed thousands. But if the free speech advocates are wrong, they are rebellion initiators with millions of dead on their consciousness.
China is moving towards more freedom, though at glacial speeds. That is probably too slow. But the demands of the western world for essentially immediate total freedom are very certainly too much, too fast. Change needs time, and a look into our own history books would tell us what the stakes are.
Re:Reaction? (Score:5, Insightful)
The censors are always shutting things down.
I agree with the sentiments that publishing these ideas are a double edged sword. Its good to inform and have things coming from enough sources to get to the people and bypass the censors but it does give the gov. a heads up.
We will see. Or maybe yuou guys will and I wont
Re:Ethnocentric (Score:3, Insightful)
Very well, if that's so, and good luck to them, and I hope they're happy behind their firewall. For those few who don't support censorship, this project exists. It's not as if anybody's forcing them to use it, after all.
Re:Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
"in what sense is our protection of free speech in the West categorically superior to the prevailing Chinese attitude that censorship may sometimes be necessary in order to preserve culture and maintain social order(?)"
Are you not aware that the Chinese regime has, since their invasion of Tibet in 1950, systematically destroyed all aspects of Tibetan life: Tibetan national identity, unique Tibetan language and script, unique Tibetan buddhism... not to mention turning Tibet into a giant Chinese nuclear missile site and nuclear dumping ground, ripping off Tibetan natural resources and promoting Chinese migration into Tibet, turning Tibetans into a rightless and stateless minority in their own country!? Preserving culture?? Maintaining social order?? While a large number of ethnic Chinese may find the CCP's dictatorship and the accompanying censorship as an acceptable tradeoff for being finally able to engage in "bourgeouis" activities, at least their party-approved mainstream culture hasn't been under systematic eradication since the end of the "Cultural Revolution" around 1976. If the majority is willing to remain under dictatorial rule and not care about the rights of others or the imprisonment and torture of innocent freedom-caring people at the hands of their regime, even that could be argued to be their right. Chinese accepting to live under Chinese mob rule.
However their regime nor the Chinese as a nation have absolutely no right to hold their neighboring Tibetan and Uigur nations under brutal Chinese military occupation with the "Final Solution" looming close to those oppressed non-Chinese peoples.
OK. Think for moment about the French, and then spare a moment for the Tibetans who are guaranteed to face imprisonment and quite likely torture as well for simply speaking against the ongoing Holocaust in Tibet, or just saying "Tibet should be free again"! In China, the regime has "laws" (and plain all-pervasive and ruthless paramilitary machine) that severely punish people for challenging in any way the regime's most transparent and ridiculous falsehoods denying the ongoing Holocaust...!
Should cultures which allow such things to take place be respected?
Are we obligated to "liberate" China's citizens from their cultural taboos against desiring privacy?
I'm curious, but what "cultural taboos" do the Chinese people have against desiring privacy?
Re:How it is better? Is it a solution? (Score:3, Insightful)
So go ahead call me a troll if you want, but I see many news agencies and papers doing much worst then google and no one talk about it. This kind of auto-censorship is being around almost always and has hidden many truths from you people (not someone who is in china), you're the affected.
Ohhh, but those censorship are OK, since they are not mandated by the government. You want my opinion, bullshit, those are not okay and are much worst then google applying to china's law. We have a saying here that goes like this "in Roma like the Romans", and that is what google is doing.
So I question, what good is free speech if no one has the guts to speak what people need to hear? What good does the law does, when there are other ways to suppress the news, by using either money or political pressures?
It is my opinion that google is doing more good by having a censored Chinese version than if it had no appearance in china at all. They are being clear that there is censorship and making it clear for the people that they are being oppressed by someone, while in the case of free speech in the western side of the world we are indeed being oppressed without anyone noticing.
Re:international meddling, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
So much so, in fact, that he can't tell the difference between free speech and free drugs (that is to say, basic rights and freebasing). Which worries me.
It's not enough simply to excercise your own increasingly limited rights in such a beautifully softspoken manner, while being careful not to tread on the feet of oppressive regimes around the world.
If you stand for freedom--not the flag-waving, foaming-at-the-mouth Americanised version, but actual speech-in-the-wind freedom--you stand for it everywhere, and you aid it everywhere, governments and institutions be damned.