Slashdot Mirror
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.
but I don't know if I would do this for anyone I didn't know well personally. Sounds like a security risk to me.
have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
...that this can work. It seems too easy to detect and filter content from the 'proxy', what am I missing ?
I wonder what the biggest distrobution vector will be; friends and family known through real life in other countries or friends though online games/worlds in other countries...
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
"Canada that does not censor Internet content"
5 4220
not yet anyway!
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/24/0
{PhhhLLLTTTT WAP}
Give people the tools to make their own changes, instead of forcing change on them.
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.
Dominant Meme
2) On the other hand, I'm sure there *are* plenty of people who could make enthusiastic use of web browsing from some stranger's IP. But I'm sure they'd never get you in serious trouble, right?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The media is lapping this up. I just read about it on a blog for a CITY TV technology journalist, and was going to submit it to Slashdot, when I saw it had just been posted.
I used Tor for a while, but I think I'll try Psiphon and see if it's better.
Oh You POS
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.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
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?
Not that sort of censorship silly - BAD censorship. You know - the stuff we don't mind...
Their flash animation that is supposed to explain how psiphon works has got to be one of the all time worst flash animations EVER.
lol. I want my 30 seconds and 15 IQ points back.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
As far as I can tell, this is nothing new-- there are a variety of publicly available programs that have done the same thing since as early as 1996, when China and Singapore first announced their intentions to censor the Web. One such tool is CGIProxy, but there are others. Or is there something else about Psiphon, am I missing something?
why no just use the onion network?
Like using a whitelist instead of a blacklist. Only approved sites & services can be used by the citizens. This doesn't seem to hard to get around.
BAD censorship
Which means all censorship. Your point was?
Global warming is a cube.
I'm simplifying, it's more complicated than this.
Also the French went through just as much change between 1793 and 1815 - the Revolution and Napoleon. And (since this is not any kind of rebuttal Godwin's Law is not invoked) what about Germany between 1933 and 1945?
Pining for the fjords
There.
Somebody had to say it.
No download links anywhere, not for source code or executable on any platform.
Until the product actually exists "in the wild", China and the University of Parinoia have nothing to fear but enthusiasm.
I appreciate the idea behind PSIPHON and the PR, but until there's a PRODUCT any discussion is just jaw flapping, not discussion of PSIPHON.
whats so special about this "Psiphon" ? its just another proxy server that is password protected (like squid) or another variant on an authenticated VPN
why this needs a whole article on Slashdot ill never know, i thought this was a geeks site and wee all know about socks,vpns,tunnels and the like
"its not a text editor, its a dynamic structured ASCII string assembler with multiple line support and a word correctness validator"
http://psiphon.civisec.org.nyud.net:8080/
...our new anonymous Canadian overlords... or I would... if I knew who they were... never mind.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
>BAD censorship
>
>Which means all censorship. Your point was?
Whoooosh.....
I can see your point, re slander (though I think you mean libel), kiddie porn etc... and I personally don't know how true it is that "Canada doesn't censor the internet" (I got the impression that the writer meant "doesn't censor the internet to the extent that China does")... but anyway. Child pornography is evil, and using it as an argument against freedom of expression is like putting fish into a barrel before you shoot them. The fact is, despite the best efforts of fascist governments like those of China, Germany and the USA, the internet is still a relative bastion of free speech/freedom of expression. Like Voltaire sort of said, "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." Some governments do their best to stop people saying what they want, but most of us can get round that. For example, if you want to put up a site that denies the holocaust, you won't be able to do it in Germany... but it's simple enough to use a provider in another country. And a lot of countries have laws that don't inconvenience child pornographers. And this is good, in a way. I don't mean it's good that kiddie porn merchants can conduct their business with ease. But it IS good that most of us can use the international aspect of the internet to communicate whatever we want, no matter how much it may piss off the Man.
The sad thing is, people in China don't have it as easy as us. They generally can't justg use a service provider in another country to bypass their government's diktats. Hopefully, this latest service will chip away a bit more at the info-wall surrounding them. Chip chip chip, and one day the whole thing will come tumbling down.
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.
I believe there was a person in Canada who had some sort of legal punishment inflicted on him for owning child pornography in the form of Japanese manga. However, he had hardcopies, so I don't know whether the law that he broke applies to the internet too in Canada.
/.
I, for one, would prefer to not see an explosion of ideas caused by a free and open internet, and the subsequent martial law in China that would definitely happen (and possible crushing of students again by tanks). But perhaps I am the only one on
"despite the best efforts of fascist governments like those of China, Germany and the USA"
Excuse me, could you deliver a USA example while you hide behind your A/C moniker?
I agree that nearly every government in the world imposes some sort of censorship in some form of communication, I wouldn't put the de and us in the same boat as China.
(and yes every pun and innuendo in that statement was intentional).
Easy, tiger.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Asarcasm
:%s:work:/.:g
I setup a personal VPN server at home, then tried tunneling X over it via an SSH connection to see how feasible it was to browse from home while at work. Nifty, except I also knew my office had stealthed VNCs installed on all the machines, thereby rendering any such circumvention completely moot. Fine for your personal machines when you're worried about your provider/government. Not so much when you're worried about what you do on your employer's machines or any machine you don't have absolute control over for that matter.
I think that most people who rant about China filtering the content of their internet users are forgetting one thing.... China is not our country. They have the right to run their society any way they see fit. We tend to look at the world in a particular way, and if it doesn't match our ideal of the way things are supposed to be, we think we have the God given right to change it. Do we really have that right? How would we feel if an outside interest group decided that we needed to be changed and that our laws should be circumvented? When Yahoo stated that they would obey Chinese law and filter content, that's the price they had to pay to do business in that country, just like any foreign company would have to follow our laws when doing business here. I don't blame them for that, they want to make a profit like everyone else. The bottom line is this... China has it's laws and their citizens have to obey those laws, just as we must obey the laws in our own country. Giving the average Chinese citizen the ability to circumvent those laws is not doing them a service since the Chinese government turns dissidents into organ doners.
Well, you could read their FAQ, but since others have posted the same, I'll reply.
The primary this is easy to install and use. The software package will be designed for easy installation on most operating systems. If you have a friend using a state-filtered 'net connection, then it will be can help them without understanding the specifics of port forwarding, encryption, or web servers. Ease of use allows ease of distribution.
Second, the software encrypts the data, unlike port forwarders and CGIproxy, AFAIK. Hopefully, the DNS lookups are also handled by the Psiphon proxy, since the DNS name often reveals the browsing history. Port forwarding and some proxy services to not handle DNS lookups.
I would say the primary reason for the existence is ease of use. The harder something is configure, the less likely people will be to use it. (See flashing 12:00 clocks on old VCRs.) As more countries and organizations lock down information distribution on their network connections, I am glad to see more accessible avoidance options available.
CGIProxy requires a server and is not stand alone
PsiPhon is supposed to be installable on any PC connected to the internet in an uncensored country.
Plug and go, if we ever see it.
I suspect that liablity lawyers have gotten in the way at UofT.
I really love the mental acrobatics it takes to go from "free speech" to "kiddie porn is constitutionally protected." Censorship hyperbole FTW!
I didn't make the statement but I can probably sort of enplane some of it..
China is in fact mauist ostensibly communist they replaced a dictatorship with a all powerful oligarchy
Germany was Nazi, sort of a mash up between Fasciest and particularly brutal form of racism, though they have after the second world war become a nominally socialist country.
The US is fascist in so much as the defining characteristic of fascism is Corporatism basically primary political power is wheedled by a consortium of industry leaders. there are of course ancillary social movements that have some affect on us policy but could not be said to hold sway over any of the primary levers of power.
My keyboads not woking popely.
excuse the typo i was rushing and didn't proof read.
My keyboads not woking popely.
The primary this is easy to install and use. The software package will be designed for easy installation on most operating systems. If you have a friend using a state-filtered 'net connection, then it will be can help them without understanding the specifics of port forwarding, encryption, or web servers. Ease of use allows ease of distribution.
Actually, CGIProxy has had automatic installers for several years, for both Unix and Windows. The Windows installer includes a secure Apache server and Perl, and is by design trivial to install for non-technical users-- no need for knowledge of port forwarding, encryption, or web servers.
CGIProxy does not currently encrypt the data itself, but as long as it's installed on a secure server, traffic between it and the user is already encrypted.
Through the site in the article or this url
http://psiphon.ca/download/psiphoninstall.msi
CGIProxy requires a server and is not stand alone PsiPhon is supposed to be installable on any PC connected to the internet in an uncensored country. Plug and go, if we ever see it.
Actually, CGIProxy is installable on just about any machine, regardless of OS. For Windows, there is an automatic installer that includes a secure Apache server and Perl, so the package is, in effect, stand-alone. The installing person does not need technical skills. It's already "plug and go".
I am responsible for admining this sort of censorware.
If your company blocks gaming sites, yet your job requires gaming sites, you should use the proper avenue to get permission to view gaming sites. In many orgs, our manager will need to tell your security department that you need the access.
If, on the other hand, you use proxy servers or other technology to willingly and knowingly circumvent your company's policy and security controls, you could wind up fired. Don't be a dumbass.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
>But also for Americans. More and more of us are going to schools, universities, and workplaces that install and use content filtering/firewalls.
/. during the work day. And unless his policy states that you can circumvent their firewall, then while you are at work it would probably be nice if you abided by your bosses rules.
The counter to this argument is budgets. Most schools recieve their funding for high-speed bandwidth through a grant. The provisios of that grant state we need to apply a content filtering system to protect our children. As the primary monitor our districts traffic through the firewall, I see and hear these arguments all the time. I do not think it is possible to lump 'schools' or even 'universities' with 'workplaces'. Yes we all have to work here too, but a school is an entirely differnt (public funds, publically voted budget etc.) than a work place or even, to bring this on topic a police state. An employer has every right to say, no you can't chat on AIM or
I think many people would be very upset if we asked the public to subsidize the 12K+ a year we spend on our 100mbs fiber connection, funds that are completely covered under the E-rate grant. With out e-rate funding there would be no-way to pass the tech budget, and in a country where our technological skills are falling behind everyday, I think (and my boss concurs) that suspending students, revoking priviledges and being a general BOFH (not my choice BTW.) is a very appropriate response to users who violate district policy (they have to click accept every time they log in). If we don't crack down in this manner, and many of our students and faculty find us (and call us) rude and nasty names, but the consquences are, from a wider perspective, are deffinately not worth completely opening our filters. Proxy bypass sites like these, while I agree are great for the dissemination of information to people who's connection to public information has been oppressed, should not be taken as a giant glossy lets F*** the filters solution. Especially in schools those filters are in place for a reason. Workplace is a grey area and so is university, but please don't lump schools in with businesses.
-deadturtle
Encryption is very important to someone circumventing authoritative measures. When you are facing jail time for crimes against the state, you want to be sure that your activities are hidden. Wikipedia is not going to be running on SSL anytime soon, so this is a useful feature. Why are you so against new software models, jsm? The slashdot summary did not say it was the first time it was being done, so what's your beef? Or do you look down on any software forking? Listen, that's the beauty of open software. Anyone can take the code and make changes as they require. Plus, any use of OSS which fights against oppression is okay in my book, even if it is, as you say, 99.999% redundant.
I'm in China. This is how I tapped the cersorship, by having a TOR(http://tor.eff.org/) installed. With this software, I can access all banned sites i know. The software has a few flaws, one is that it lacks of fast proxy servers, which anyone of you unchecked freemen can be; Another is its windows version has a very resource-consuming GUI which is based on QT library.
So here i hope more people can establish more proxy servers for the software and join to the development of the software. That will make us and everyone else in the world who has been restricted better accessible to the internet.
China, in fact, is very fragile.
Easy there, cowboy-- I'm not against any new software models, and I don't look down on software forking; I never mentioned either, nor anything about any 99.999% . From my site, it's easy to tell that I have long supported OSS, and even intentionally write my software to be easy to modify. Please do not put words in my mouth.
The story summary says "the fact that software like Psiphon is becoming publicly available is interesting." That is what I was correcting, because such software has been publicly available since at least 1996. Although, apparently, it needs better marketing, since many people don't seem to know about it.
Yes, encryption is very important. That's why CGIProxy and (probably) others support it.
I havent really done much reading about the tech aspects but isn't this essentially what the Cult of the Dead Cow did with six/four many many moons ago?
Wow my sarcasm detector must be on strike - my bad
Global warming is a cube.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psiphon
Not a moment too soon indeed. I witnessed today that the Iranian govenrment is restricting access to Wikipedia (in all languages). While personally I use torpark (a version of Portable Firefox with Tor network integration built-in) and getting past their firewall takes a single click, I feel for the masses who are not very technologically adept, and have suffered heavily from these censorships. Indeed, Wikipedia was slowly but surely gaining momentum in Iran, and I was helping a group of university scholars who were mostly computer newbies and could hardly comprehend concepts such as an internet forum, not to mention a wiki, become familiar with wikipedia and contribute some of their articles to the Persian Wikipedia. We had identified and contacted 120 experts, in 38 categories, and we were hoping that with their contribution, Perian Wikipedia (which already has more than a 100,000 articles) would fill the void which has always existed in Persian libraries, a complete Encyclopaedia in Persian.
The other day, an official from the ministry of IT was telling the state TV that the number of websites banned in Iran are less than the number of a person's fingers! Well, at least when the Iraqi minister of information was lying in broad sunlight in everyone's face, we all got a good laugh out of it. Iranians OTOH are mostly completly free from any sense of humour!
--
Ironically, the "Your Rights Online" section is the only one blocked where I work.
But I thought Canada just started censoring access. Isn't that what we learned last week?
So, if a provider (ie, psiphonode) had an Internet connection
that with some blocked sites (eg, kiddy porn, etc.), wouldn't
those limitations flow through to the user (ie, psiphonuser)?
If so, then those who fear sharing their bandwidth should be
able to rest easier, knowing that only stuff that they could
themselves access is accessible to their overseas user.
Now, how to block access to such sites, locally...?
My first thought was that this was Triangle Boy all over again (except without Safeweb on the other end, but that was sort of immaterial anyway).
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
It's been a while since I laughed that much! I can't believe this! Please check the Flash!
I fail to understand how that constitutes "child pornography" except in some puritanically legalese sense of the term.
I see your point, but I think it's rather misguided. Let's see if I can explain why in a meaningful, organized way.
/. could find information on hacking into computer systems and defacing websites. It's out there. The thing is, just because dangerous information is there doesn't mean people will look for it or, if they do, it doesn't mean they'll act on it. How many people do you know who would build biological weapons if they could? (That's rhetorical, I really don't need to know.)
You argue that the Chinese people are better off being fed nothing but what their government wants to hear because (1) if they heard anything else they'd get disgruntled, (2) they have no means within their government to make change except for bloody revolt, and (3) it's better that they live in an oppressive regime. That's a bit of a value judgment there at the end, but it seems that the rest of your argument basically boils down to, "their society is broken and if we try to fix it people will get hurt."
You also seem to think that censorship isn't abuse. OK, maybe not in all cases. I don't let my daughter watch the evening news, let's say, because a young child doesn't need to see some of the graphic images they show. But the reasoning there is that the young child has not developed to the point where she can properly process such information -- presumably by the time she's, say, 14 or 15 I'll expect her to keep abreast of current events, at least as much as you can expect that from a teenager. Regardless, the same thing doesn't apply to a 45-year old Japanese business man. He is denied information not in an attempt to protect him but rather in an effort to control him -- to prevent him from discovering how mistreated he is.
You argue that's better because with so many people you need to have unquestioned loyalty, unlimited authority, or else everything devolves into crime and waste. But what about the rest of the world? Surely there are at least 1.7 billion other people on the planet. The only difference between those 1.7 billion and the population of China would be the regime which they're under. And to say that the Chinese regime must use censorship to control it's people is to say "because it is the way it is, it must be the way it is." If there was no reason for the Chinese people to be disgruntled, there would be no reason to censor their information.
As for our country and access to harmful information... Well, we don't have censors. We HAVE access to harmful information. If any one of us chose we could find, as other have, information on how to make home-made explosives, for example. At the very least, everyone here on
Anyways, you argue that the regime must use censorship to remain in power, and my point is that's exactly why the regime needs to change. It's not about this law or that law, it's about basic human dignity and self-determination.
Some forms of "fake" child pornography is (or recently was) also illegal in the United States. Weird rules like drawings of dick in the mouth is perfectly fine, but drawings of dick in the ass will get you thrown in jail.
another option is to install a proxy on your home PC. there are more than a couple of opens source applications.