While the US Congress battles with US Internet companies that help China restrict its citizens' Internet access, independent computer specialists are developing technologies that could reroute Internet information and put it beyond the reach of government censors.
"It was sort of a moral imperative for us to take action and do something about it," said Lance Cottrell, president and founder of Anonymizer Inc of San Diego.
Cottrell's company is a leader in "anonymous surfing" software, which lets people go to Internet sites without revealing the location of their comp-uters. Because it works by redirecting Internet traffic through a private computer network, anonymous surfing technology can also be used to get around blockades erected by Internet censors.
Cottrell has built a profitable business by selling this software to private citizens and businesses. But now he's working on a plan to give away anonymous surfing services to the people of China and other countries that try to censor political and religious information. "This is not a
government contract," said Cottrell. "This is something we're just doing ourselves."
Meanwhile, a band of Internet volunteers headquartered in Cambridge has launched the Tor Project, which uses people's spare Internet bandwidth to help others bypass the censors. And in Canada, computer scientists at the University of Toronto are working on a similar project, called Psiphon.
PHOTOS: AGENCIES
Anonymizer and Tor have attracted strong support from the US government. US military and intelligence services are major customers of Anonymizer, because it lets them scan foreign Internet sites without revealing their identities. The Voice of America, a broadcasting service sponsored by the US government, uses Anonymizer to help people in Iran tune in, despite their country's efforts to block the signal.
The Tor Project is an outgrowth of research sponsored by the US Navy. "There are soldiers in the Middle East right now who use Tor to connect back to their servers in DC," said Tor project director Roger Dingledine.
Ironically, both systems make use of digital technology that the US government was fighting to suppress a decade ago. In 1993, computer scientist Philip Zimmermann faced a threat of prose-cution for publishing Pretty Good Privacy, a data encryption program that scrambles computer files so that only the intended recipient can read them.
The government tried to prevent the release of information on encryption out of concern that criminals and terrorists would use it to conceal their activities. But by 1996, federal prosecutors dropped the investigation of Zimmermann. Now the government sees encryption and anonymous Internet surfing as powerful tools for freedom.
Anonymizer, Psiphon, and Tor all work by concealing the destination of an Internet request. Ordinarily, when someone visits a Web site, he or she reveals the numerical Internet address of the computer he is using and that of the computer he is trying to reach. This makes it easy for a censor to see what people are reading and to block access to certain Internet addresses, like those for Voice of America.
Anonymous surfing programs let users route their data through private networks of proxy machines. These machines have addresses that can't be linked to any supposedly subversive Web sites, so government agencies won't block them. A Chinese surfer looking for information on the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement would not go directly to a Falun Gong site, but to an innocuous-looking proxy. The request is then relayed through still more proxy machines until it reaches its final destination.
"There's no direct connection between the user in the censored country and the Web sites he's going to," said Nart Ville-neuve, director of technical research for the Psiphon project.
The secret surfing programs also add a layer of encryption, ensuring that messages are scrambled in transit and are thus unreadable. Even if the government set up a phony Falun Gong site to trap its citizens, it wouldn't be able to identify visitors by the Internet addresses of incoming data requests. The addresses belong to the proxy computers, not the Chinese citizen.
Anonymizer has set up its own commercial network of anonymous proxies. Tor relies on volunteers to run proxy software on machines attached to the Internet.
The addresses of these machines are added to the Tor network, and data are automatically routed through them. There are about 400 Tor servers serving about 200,000 users, according to Dingledine.
But all these systems have a key weakness. Eventually, government censors will figure out the Internet addresses of the proxies and block them, thus preventing anonymous surfing.
Anonymizer addresses this by letting users subscribe to an e-mail service that sends out a daily list of the latest unblocked proxies. Cottrell admitted that government censors can get the same e-mails and move to block the proxies. But "it's a major effort," he said. "Our experience is, it takes several days."
Dingledine said that he hopes to develop software that would let users automatically find the newest open proxies. "Then we can start looking at ways to do network discovery in a way that's harder to censor," he said.
Dingledine is presently the only software engineer working full time on Tor. But Ken Berman -- manager of the Internet anticensorship office at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, parent of the Voice of America -- said that his agency may provide funding for an enhanced version of Tor, aimed at outwitting the world's Internet censors.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not