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Psiphon (Philterproof)

The University of Toronto is set to release a piece of software named "Psiphon" today which is designed to help people in countries with Internet Censorship bypass internal Firewalls in order to access banned websites, such as Wikipedia.

Now, from a certain perspective I think that this sort of thing is fabulous, as censorship in any form is simply unacceptable! (Eris would be very pleased that Canuckian universities are working so hard to spread discord.)

However, this effort also strikes me as very ironic in a number of ways:

1 - Hackers have been using proxy tools to circumvent firewalls forever. The technology is definitely neither new nor original.

2 - The entire effort assumes that a user in a censored country can access a website that they can either log in to or download software from. By publicly promoting their effort with a fancy website and a publicized released date they have given time for censors to block their website as well. The file (literal and proverbial, as the case may be) isn't much good to the prisoner if you try and smuggle it into the prison while announcing to all the guards just what's hidden in the cake.

3 - The news has been filled with stories over the past couple of weeks that indicate that Canuckian ISPs are going to start filtering certain content. I cannot express how deplorable such content is, however, I also cannot accept censorship in any form. Once a single webpage is banned (*oops, it's already happening... let's see, 1984 was... hmmm... 22 years ago, oh dear...) for our "protection" it won't take long for more and more content to follow. Which leads me to wonder if Internet users in Canuckia are soon going to require a tool developed in our own universities? (My advice is to download this program as soon as possible, just in case you ever need it! Do some research on "proxy servers" while you're at it, you never know when such information may suddenly become unavailable.)

4 - How many kids are going to smuggle this program into schools to help circumvent school network security? (Every darn one of them I should hope!)

*This only works if you attempt to view this site with a non-american I.P. address.

Posted by Dylon on December 1, 2006 1:04 PM | Permalink

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