Psiphon Released!

Posted on December 1, 2006 by Phillips Academy

Congratulations to Professor Ron Deibert (a/k/a “profd”) and his entire Citizen Lab team on today’s release of their new application, psiphon. The festivities here in Toronto include lectures at noon, as part of Protect the Net – Toronto, and then the world-wide release of the application from 3 – 7 p.m., all at the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto. The release of psiphon has already garnered extensive press coverage.

In the words of the CL team, “psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.”

Wired's Sneak Peek into ONI's Next Phase

Posted on November 13, 2006 by Phillips Academy

We’ve just gathered a key subset of our global team of ONI researchers to review the filtering data we’ve gathered from around the world. WIRED’s Mark Anderson sat in on part of the meetings and has a sneak peek. We’ll have a book out on this topic come Springtime.

Mapping Internet censorship in Iran, Finding New Blocked Sites

Posted on June 16, 2006 by Phillips Academy

In partnership with the OpenNet Initiative (particularly Ron Deibert, Nart Villeneuve, and the fabulous Citizen Lab crew), Richard Rogers and Govcom have developed a cool visual of how online censorship works in Iran. The net result of a link analysis the team performed was the identification of 30 sites found to be blocked that we had not known to be blocked previously.
Expect more in the way of visualizations — like the global map of filtering online — out of ONI, the CL, and partners over the next year-plus.

New ONI Map, Amnesty International Campaign

Posted on May 29, 2006 by Phillips Academy

Our OpenNet Initiative partners at the Citizen Lab of the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto have created a new way to view censorship online: an updated interactive map. This new visualization tool is a central aspect of Amnesty International’s recently-launched campaign against online censorship called Irrepressible.info. CBC reports, as does BBC.

(Bravo to Ron Deibert, Nart Villeneuve, and company for their work on this useful and cool tool.)

Circumventing Internet filtering

Posted on May 20, 2006 by Phillips Academy

At the Berkman Center, we don’t work on making tools that allow the circumvention of the Internet filtering that we study (along with collaborators at the University of Cambridge, Oxford Internet Institute, and the University of Toronto). But our partners at the University of Toronto do. Much anticipated: the announcement of Psiphon. Here’s the new FAQ about the forthcoming toolset.

ONI Belarus Election Monitoring report

Posted on May 4, 2006 by Phillips Academy

The OpenNet Initiative has released its first Internet Watch report, which demonstrates the disruption to dissident Internet sites during the recent Belarus elections. (The NYT covered the story in brief.) The Internet has an increasing impact on politics, and many regimes that are not so keen on that impact have been taking notice.

Expression under Repression at WSIS

Posted on November 17, 2005 by Phillips Academy

A breaking report from on the ground in Tunisia on the filtering topic at the World Summit on the Information Society: the Expression under Repression session and a phalanx of secret police who showed up.

In case you missed it, here is the freshly-released, extensive ONI report on Internet filtering in Tunisia. The short form is, as expected, the filtering regime is extensive and sophisticated, and includes political speech, blogs, and many other forms of online content, each replaced in the user experience with a misleading 404 error block page.

Clark Boyd of the BBC has an excellent report today, citing ONI’s Derek Bambauer and Nart Villeneuve.