TORONTO: Scientists at the University of Toronto have developed a strong tool capable of circumventing government censorship of the internet. The program, called psiphon, has been developed by researchers at the Citizen Lab at the university's Munk Centre for International Studies, which is part of an Open Society Institute-funded project.
It will be released on 1 December and can be downloaded feely. It is targeted at countries which impose internet censorship and helps users to access news sites, blogs and other censored media.
The program works on the principle of social networking. When a person in an uncensored country downloads psiphon, that person's computer is converted into an access point and people in countries where internet censorship prevails can log into that computer through an encrypted connection and use it as a proxy server to access the censored sites.
Psiphon's creators say there will be no evidence on the user's computer to show that he or she had viewed censored material once the internet history is erased after each use. Monitoring agencies will be able to find out that the user is connected to another computer but they will not be able to make out which all sites the user had accessed.
Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto said censorship, which started with blocking pornography and Western news sites, has now come to include blogging sites, religious sites, health information sites and many others. “Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible extent so we're trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise that the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication,” he added.
The lab, which is part of a the four-institution OpenNet Initiative, started monitoring countries like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which had active censorship practices. However, it now covers more than 40 countries.
Developers said the program can be used to edit blogs, though it is primarily intended for browsing. It cannot be used for chat or VoIP and it works on both Windows and Linux operating systems. Development for a Mac-specific program is now going on.