Canadians To Douse Chinese Firewall

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."

Comments

A HTTP Proxy with SSL?

[Leknor]

How is this better than Tor: http://tor.eff.org/ or just an HTTP Proxy that supports CONNECT for SSL traffic?

Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL?

[ozmanjusri]

There is no need to fragment support for these projects when excellent ones are already in place.

The more there are, the better. No single point of failure, no single point for governments to attack. Fragment away.

Reaction?

[Sneetch]

While it makes me feel good to hear about this... won't the censoring nations have something to say about an organized and publicised effort to help their citizens break the law?

Re:Reaction?

[ihatewinXP]

I am actually reading this froim China right now - and im kind of surprised.

The censors are always shutting things down. /. hasnt been blocked totally but discussions and linked articles have.

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 ;)

Censorship

[Mark_MF-WN]

Wasn't there talk sometime back about the US government directly providing means for people living in censorship-ridden nations to bypass their national firewalls? Whatever became of that?

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:Censorship

[0-9a-f]

An interesting op-ed piece 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.

Unlikely to have much impact in practice

[JakartaDean]

Let's see. While the Chinese are unlikely to block port 443, they could monitor sites for which the percentage of 443 vs. port 80 https requests exceeds a reasonable threshhold.

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?

international meddling, eh?

[DeveloperAdvantage]

As a Canadian, although I do sympathize with those in China trying to get around their censorship, I am concerned with one country developing a tool with the explicit stated goal of trying to undermine an internal regulation of another country. In effect, it provides the user with information which is not allowed in their own country.

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:international meddling, eh?

[DanielJosphXhan]

As a Canadian myself, I would like to note that the parent poster is patent product of our paternal sociopolitical society.

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.

Moral absolutism

[pomo monster]

The following anonymous comment currently sits at -1, Troll: "Have you ever considered that it's a bit ethnocentric to try to 'save' Chinese from their own conservative culture? ... The fact is that most Chinese support censorship."

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?

Free Speech Fanatism ?

[Tom]

As much as I am a friend of free speech, I don't forget that we live in countries that had a few centuries to adapt to the concept, and it was far from painless. From the french revolution to the american independence war, and a hundred smaller clashes.

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.