Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Psiphon - A good start for an open society
Even though this particular topic has been circling around the web since its release on December 1st, I felt compelled to spread the good news to the world of information that the fight for free access to the Internet has taken a turn for the better. Despite a small step in the on going struggle with many repressive regimes who are bent on controlling the power of information, nevertheless this a step to a significant paradigm shift in counter-censorship movement. With the advent of the Internet, many people have dreamt that this tool would open up the human society like once the printing press helped the desperate Europeans crawling out slowly from the Dark Ages. However nothing ever work like the ideal concept, censorship of the Internet is still an inescapable reality in many countries which at the end its citizens have to pay the price of ignorance for the sake of the "totalitarian social harmony", imposing antiquated laws by the relics of bunch dry old men. Who are cowardly grabbing on to their degrading power base, against the tide of technological change.
However today is different like once the Internet has done to open us up to the wealth of knowledge now we been given this tool
Psiphon is a censorship circumvention solution that allows users to access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored. Psiphon turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere. Psiphon is a circumvention technology that works through social networks of trust and is designed to help Internet users bypass content-filtering systems setup by governments, such as China, North Korea, Iran, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and others.
Psiphon was originally implemented in Python, but has been re-designed and re-written in C++, and designed as a cross-platform, user friendly proxy server tool which uses a https protocol to transfer data. With a user name and password, people in countries that use Internet content filtering can send encrypted requests for information to a trusted computer located in another country and receive encrypted information in return. As https protocol is widely used for secure communication over the Internet (from web mail to internet banking), no government can block the usage of https.
So what does all these techno mumbo jumbles means? Well unless your country got a digital fortress like China with their super American made Cisco firewall hardwares and an army of trained hackers to hunt your ass down for their human organ trafficking market, then rejoice because there is absolutely no way that your government can stop these Psiphon social network node to "brute force" exploiting the worldwide packet transport of https.
Personally I believe that this method is bloody brilliant, though this method of proxy hoping might have been around since the conception of the web, but once you put a social network element into a mix and then you got one good roundhouse kick to the man. This should be a good lesson to all the repressive government regimes, the Internet belong to the world. Just because you happen to have a few miles of fiber optics buried behind your backyard and a few optical switches, please stop pretending like you own the Internet it just seem very pathetic. What a sweet revenge from the founder of the Internet protocol themselves who knew that once the world have learn to adopt the protocol there is no turning point from there and hence this a perfect example of be open or go back to the digital dark ages where you came from.
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