Digital Journal Mavericks: The Man behind Global Internet Freedom
From Digital Journal:
There’s a quiet movement of activism taking place on the Web. In an effort to provide every nation with unfettered access to websites, some tech experts want to banish censorship from countries such as China and Iran. Leading the charge is the Open Net Initiative at the University of Toronto, and theses libertarians have developed a powerful piece of software to let someone in a restrictive society gain safe access to the uncensored Web.
The Open Net’s Ron Deibert helped develop Psiphon since late 2006, and the free software has been downloaded more than 160,000 times. Psiphon helps computer users get around censorship; in countries like China, for example, the government blocks websites and moderates the Internet. So every time a Chinese Web surfer hits the Internet, they see a very different (almost scripted) version of it because sites must be approved by the communist government. To get around this, someone in the West can download Psiphon and send an invite to a Chinese net user who can then connect first to the PC in Canada, for example, before connected to the Web. By changing the country, Chinese censors are fooled into thinking the computer is based in North America and the Chinese Web user is not censored.
Origin: David Silverberg, Digital Journal
