Psiphon Now Available For Download

eldavojohn writes "Project Psiphon has been released for public download under the GPL. CNN has coverage of the Canadian research project that 'works by first allowing a person in a country like Canada that does not censor Internet content to set up a user name and a password for a person in a country that does — China, for example.' While this idea is certainly nothing new to Slashdot, the fact that software like Psiphon is becoming publicly available is interesting. For a quick simplified 'How it works,' Psiphon has a Flash demonstration." Not a moment too soon, apparently. China is moving to assign IDs to bloggers, to register their real identities and track their statements online.

Excellent!

[Jennifer York]

This is a fantastic service! It would be a great way for the troops in Iraq to get their message out; since they recently had a big crack down too. China is not the only place where you can be prosecuted / persecuted for what you write online.

Not only good for people in censored countries...

[B11]

But also for Americans. More and more of us are going to schools, universities, and workplaces that install and use content filtering/firewalls. Where I work most of /. isn't blocked (obviously), but curiously enough, the games and ask sections of slashdot are blocked. Most blogs and web forums are blocked as well. The sad thing is, a major part of my job is research, and more and more important information is coming via those venues (at least in my field), and other sites that being blocked.

Yeah...

[jandersen]

Brilliant. But you don't win freedom or anything else by hiding somewhere and spreading nonsense on the internet. If you want things to change, the way forward it to go out there and take the risks. The ones who don't have the courage very rarely have anything real to say. Look at our own history in the West: it is littered with examples of who changes were brought about because of the struggle of those who had vision and courage. The same thing is happening in China, and not at all slowly when you compare to how things went in Europe. Just look at what has happened in the last 20 years; did people in eg. UK ever go through such enormous changes in so short a time?

Re:I think this is great...

[itlurksbeneath]

Yep - I can think of at least one legitimate use for me. Working for a large nameless and faceless corporation, they do content filtering on the firewall and sometimes some suprising things get blocked. The FreeTDS [freetds.org] site was blocked for some dumb reason, for example. Being a UNIX system administrator, I do a lot of research on security and hacking methods (I wear a white hat, for sure) and frequently get blocked by the firewall because I'm looking up stuff on sites it labels as "hacking related". I mean, duh, the crackers and script kiddies can get to all the information about how to compromise my systems, but I can't see the same information to figure out how to safeguard them?

I could set up my own authenticated server on my home box (Ubuntu) and proxy through it for unfettered access. Granted there'd be a speed hit because of the upload limit on the cable box, but it'd be better than having to send myself notes to download stuff at home and bring it back to work the next day on my pen drive.

Who is helping the Chinese government censor?

[br00tus]

The Hippocratic oath that doctors take includes the statement "First, do no harm". What country has the corporations that are creating the architecture to allow the Chinese government to censor material? The answer is the US - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Cisco and other corporations have been who have implemented this censorship for the Chinese government. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to say you are setting up "free zones" in "free countries" to help evade censorship, when the people who control the capital in the US are the ones who have implemented the censorship in China. If this were a free country, the obvious answer would be to just have these corporations stop implementing the censorship in China. Instead, that, which is the only solution that makes any sense, is not even thought of, and instead these PR "free zones" are set up, so that Chinese people can attempt to evade (at their own personal risk) the censorship which is set up by US corporations, including the US corporations like Yahoo who helped China hunt down dissidents like Shi Tao. This stuff is a joke, if you want to stop censorship in China, stop implementing it in the US.