China, Myannmar, Iran: surfing in these countries can be dangerous for political opponents. Psiphon software, developed by a Canadian university, can evade the censors of the Internet in non-democratic countries.
This is a recurrent question of Internet users in China: how to circumvent the Great Firewall , the censorship on the Net erected by the Chinese authorities. They may now acquire Psiphon. This software allowing to evade the Net censors, was developed by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in association with the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and Harvard University.
Ron Deibert, creator of the system, decrypts how it works:
“The only way to bypass filters is to connect to a computer in a democratic country, then make a request via this computer, which then sends you back the information”.
Clearly speaking, the user in the censored country does not install any program on his PC. The citizens of democracies are the ones who download the software, thus becoming a node connection. Then they quietly pass the necessary information (IP address, username and password) to their correspondents in the countries monitored. They can access an encrypted line, reflecting their messages as vulgar trade, banking or shopping on eBay. Provided always that the volume of on line exchanges are important enough for the user under surveillance to blend easily into the flow of commercial transactions. In other words, as stated Ron Deibert, “if you are a dissident known and there is little exchange on the network, as in Uzbekistan or Myannmar, you’d better not to use it at all.”
Ron Deibert has recently created the company Psiphon Inc., to expand the scope of the project. “Upon release of the software, we had great media coverage, with CNN, al Jazeera, BBC, and we were bombarded with emails from countries censored saying” please, I do not know anyone in West, connect me to a node “…” says the director of Citizen Lab.
Thus, Psiphon Inc. will install nodes for powerful users (associations, human rights organizations) that can provide service to residents of non-democratic regions. But install and operate thousands of nodes is expensive. Therefore Psiphon Inc. will market its service to the media and large companies seeking to assist financially this citizen project.
1 July 2009 at 14:21
All of these years I’ve been unable to manuever around the “linebacker” of the job protection. Now I can pass this knowledge onto my lil bro’ so he won’t have to go throught the same struggles. Keep bringing the Info!!
Petit
1 July 2009 at 15:53
You could use a spell checker; basic rule “I” before “E” except after “C” so NOT Reciever
Under Psiphon “Defintley” in the same sentence as Toronto University does no good to anyone!
Jack Miller
30 June 2009 at 17:21
The censorers could defeat this pretty easily by simply blocking transmission over the Psiphon port number. If I were to censor a network I’d only allow access to port 80 (default HTTP). This would circumvent access to 99.9% of the proxies. Sure you could run it on port 80 but a lot of ISPs monitor for servers on that port and will consider it a violation of service.
Colin (again)
30 June 2009 at 21:02
True but in the meantime it’s a great tool for people in countries where the internet is heavily censored i.e. not just China but Iran, Russia and others.
P2P would also be a great idea I don’t see how you could enable to view web pages though.
JR
30 June 2009 at 17:12
Why don’t they just call it what it is … a VPN. This isn’t something groundbreaking. It’s not BAD – I think it’s a great idea. But who wants to go around giving out their IP addresses to everyone? How about taking this and making it P2P – where the peers do the work of sharing the addresses?
Colin
27 June 2009 at 22:43
How is this better than Tor or a progression or advancement of a regular proxy server? It appears to basically be a password protected proxy server.
I’m not a user, but Tor apparently must be installed as a client, which doesn’t always work. I think this is a middle ground between a fully anonymized p2p network and a service like Anonymizer, which is easier to install and use for more people compared with a web proxy.
In any case, one should avoid a monoculture. Give people three ways to get through the firewall instead of one, just in case China has some bright software engineers working for the censors. Besides, competition is almost always a good thing — I sure don’t get this “gosh golly gee the perfect tool has already been invented go away” attitude.
27 June 2009 at 18:13
I am glad that this program may help the Chinese people finally be able to surf the net and find more than what their Government wants them to know. I just HOPE this guy that made the program is very careful helping this guy in China…because if the Chinese authorities find out what he is doing and that he is actually trying to circumvent their censorship laws….it could be very bad news for him indeed.
29 June 2009 at 17:20
Think you misunderstood….the guy in China who is looking for “help” doesnt know the guy or guys who made the Psiphon program.
It does have a lot of potential though sadly my use is more lowbrow curently as Im only assisting my little brother check out his MySpace page at work…..:)
29 June 2009 at 18:24
Well I just hope that this guy in China also keeps in mind that the Chinese Government would not make things very easy for him if they found him trying to circumvent their laws. Just something to keep in mind. It is not like he would get a “slap on the wrist” either I’m afraid but people in China like anyplace else are willing to take risks to have the freedom to choose what sites on the web they want to visit. I just hope he is careful in doing it. That was all I was saying.
29 June 2009 at 19:05
word Im sure he’s aware………..the program was created with all of this in mind that one would have to literally begin blocking sites by IP address in order to squash the problem.
For the program routes their web traffic via the IP of the one running the program obviously in a country with no censorship restrictions.
For example lets say your IP address is 88.106.20.546 he would simply be connecting to 88.106.20.546 plus whatever port you designate lets say 12000 so it’d be http://88.106.20.546:12000
The govt would have to virtually ban all foreign IP addresses to stop the problem completely and they could NEVER EVER know what sites you visited unless they hacked into the PC of the person hosting the program and looked for the logs.
So other than using a sneaky method Im not sure what they could use as evidence to bust him with? Connecting to a suspect IP address? Attempting to violate the laws?
Like I said they cant ban all the IP addresses of the world and thats what makes the program so beautiful.
27 June 2009 at 18:05
@ Bob Kane & Dhartung
———————-
Tor is useful in “civilised” countries, but in oppressive regimes they could just arrest you for possessing the software at all – hence approaches like this that don’t need any specific software.
It’s not clear from the article whether Psiphone would be vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, though.
27 June 2009 at 17:20
Nothing stops them from adding a host, but if a million people run the app, then that’s a million addresses that the censors have to identify and block. And since the host addresses will not be publicly posted, it should be somewhat tricky for the governments to stay on top of this.
More info here.
27 June 2009 at 17:47
Nothing stops them from adding a host, but if a million people run the app, then that’s a million addresses that the censors have to identify and block. And since the host addresses will not be publicly posted, it should be somewhat tricky for the governments to stay on top of this.
I understand that, but there is the question of how to distribute information about the proxy “nodes” which seems to make its use problematic. Can it really scale to a million people?
27 June 2009 at 15:47
what does it do, exactly?
Not an IT professional, here…
27 June 2009 at 16:54
That address is passed on to people who know people who know people.
I guess what I don’t understand is how that doesn’t stop the firewall folks from adding your host to the list, once they get word about it, and in that respect it seems it wouldn’t be any different from any other web proxy?
27 June 2009 at 13:20
Try Tor. It works like a charm for everything, including sites like the BBC and VOA that are hard-blocked. (The reason for the block, incidentally, is that the BBC etc. are producing news content in Chinese, which makes blocking them a priority.) Also, assuming you’re running Firefox, the Torbutton plugin will make using Tor a heck of a lot easier.
I don’t really get how psiphon is superior to Tor, except perhaps from an authentication standpoint, but then again I’m not the techiest of people.
27 June 2009 at 13:57
How is this better than Tor or a progression or advancement of a regular proxy server? It appears to basically be a password protected proxy server.
I’m not a user, but Tor apparently must be installed as a client, which doesn’t always work. I think this is a middle ground between a fully anonymized p2p network and a service like Anonymizer, which is easier to install and use for more people compared with a web proxy.
In any case, one should avoid a monoculture. Give people three ways to get through the firewall instead of one, just in case China has some bright software engineers working for the censors. Besides, competition is almost always a good thing — I sure don’t get this “gosh golly gee the perfect tool has already been invented go away” attitude.
27 June 2009 at 12:15
So if you’re in Iran and you want to get to the BBC, how do you find out about this firewall-bypassing URL? Social networking. There are lots of people in other countries willing to help and they’re sharing the addresses via their different social media accounts. Rohozinski said that more than one person per minute has been signing on to the Psiphon service over the past few weeks.
Perhaps being blocked out from the Internet will just cause Iranians to become more determined to find new ways around the firewall, and they’ll continue to speak out that much harder against the current administration.
Molly Keener
27 June 2009 at 11:31
Freedur.com – cool proxy site to bypass China Firewall. Freedur.com is faster and so much easier to use then the other crappy web based ones.
All my favorite sites youtube, gmail, facebook open correctly using freedur. I use it also at work – they have a portable version so you don’t need to insall anything.
Just put it on your USB stick.
27 June 2009 at 06:19
Psiphon is not the first software trying to crash Internet censorship in countries such as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but it is the first to require no downloads by the user.
More significantly, it’s the first to work on mobile browsers, such as those on cellphones.
Arthur
26 June 2009 at 21:52
I don’t care if they use this software to download pornography material. We could consider pornography as a sub-product of democracies BUT, if one day they go for illegal ch1d p0rn, who will be prosecuted for this?
26 June 2009 at 19:34
People living in countries were internet is filtered do not use this service only to share informations with the world out there. Instead they often go online unfiltered to download all the porno they cannot have in their countries.
Bob