Tearing Down China's Great Firewall

quadsoft writes to tell us The Toronto Star has a look at three University Toronto computer geeks who are working hard to circumvent the internet censorship problems like those found in China. From the article: "But the computer smarts of Ron Deibert, Nart Villeneuve, and Michael Hull, combined with their passion for politics and free expression, have led them to develop a highly anticipated software program that allows Internet users inside China and other countries, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Burma, to get around repressive censorship and not get caught."

Comments

Go over the firewall with satellites

[mcostas]

If we provided people in China with satellite internet terminals, like this then the firewall would be completely out of the loop. And since the antennas are directional, it wouldn't be too hard to conceal your RF signals and would be difficult to jam.

I Live in China and hack the firewall every day

[jjn1056]

I don't see the big deal. Most people around here know that you just need to get a secure connection to a proxy server in a non censoring country and then you can access the web without trouble. A guick google search will turn up lots of companies that offer web proxing for a very small charge (avoid all the 'free' proxy lists since many of then are honey pots).

Unless the gov't is specifically spying on you this is more than enough.

U.S. censorship of private emails to/from Iran?

[Kadin2048]

Can you give any evidence or substantiation to the claim that the U.S. Government is censoring your emails to or from Iran?

I have never heard of the USG actively censoring private email that wasn't to or from a serviceperson or that wasn't directly national security related (e.g., all the email to and from submariners and probably other Navy personnel afloat passes through censors who remove sensitive or geographically revealing information). Even then, they're pretty obvious about it.

If this is actually happening, yours is the first case I've heard of, and while I don't claim to be all-knowning (or even close to it) I consider myself pretty well-read in terms of current events ... so I think it's fair to say most people would also be surprised.