U of T’s Psiphon Ready for Prime Time

Software designed to mess with the internet filtering that China (and others) uses to control it’s citizens is about ready to roll out. This is a very cool project from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab that I wrote about back in February will allow users living is unenlightened countries to freely surf the wilds of the internet. The software app, Psiphon, will permit users to proxy through volunteer computer systems while munging any identifying information of the originator. From the intro in Psiphon document,

Censorship of the Internet is a serious problem in the world today. Countries such as Iran and China, filter the content of the Internet. Content such as women’s rights pages would not be accessible from an Iranian Internet connection. Setting up a proxy server is a solution that is often used to get around the censorship, because they allow users to view the Internet through someone else’s connection. Meaning that if the host of the proxy does not have content filtering, then neither will the content the remote users is viewing. However, in order to reach the target audience within such countries, the addresses of these servers are mass emailed to email addresses which are known to be from that country. This process of mass emailing a proxy
address means that many people who are involved in blocking Internet content will also receive the address, causing the server to be quickly blocked as well. Psiphon was designed to help fix this problem.

To make things tougher for oppressive regimes the traffic will all run over TCP port 443 (SSL).

“Unless a country wanted to cut off all connections for any financial transactions they wouldn’t be able to cut off these transmissions,” Professor Ronald Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, told the paper.

The code will support multiple platforms and has been designed to be simple to use for non-technical users. Stay tuned.

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[tags]Psiphon, Citizen Lab, China, Censorship[/tags]