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http://www.canada.com/Psiphon+knock+down+Great+Firewall+China/1557681/story.html
Psiphon May Knock Down the Great Firewall of China
2009 May 1st
by Vito Pilieci
The Ottawa man who led the team that recently busted "GhostNet," an international network of cyber espionage, has launched an attack on "the Great Firewall of China."
Rafal Rohozinski, chief executive of Psiphon Inc. and lead investigator in the discovery of GhostNet's cyber spy servers - most of them based in China - launched a service on Friday that allows people in China and other nations with government censorship of the Internet to get around the firewalls.
The service called Psiphon is not the first to try to crash through Internet censorship in countries such as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but it is the first to require no downloads by the user.
More significantly, it's the first to work on mobile browsers, such as those on cellphones.
Rohozinksi said millions of people in emerging nations only have access to the Internet over cellphones, and the number is expected to increase to the billions over the next few years.
Precisely how Psiphon will attract users is confidential, but Rohozinski said the company will flood countries that have Internet censorship with links to servers in Canada, the United States or other nations with more web freedom.
Anyone looking for blocked content online will easily be able to find one of Psiphon's links and be redirected to an uncensored server, he said.
He knows the censoring governments will shut down the links as quickly as they're found, so the company will create so many that, it hopes, the governments will give up in frustration. The links to Psiphon's protected servers will change constantly and the server list will be randomized to stymie government attacks.
"We had a hunch that one way of being able to breach the Great Firewall of China was to create the attack of the ants," Rohozinski said. "Instead of giving them one big target to look at, we will give them so many different targets that the resources they need to use in order to shutdown the ants will be greater than the benefit derived from so doing."
The company has also developed widgets for Facebook and its overseas equivalents in Farsi, Mandarin, Burmese and other languages.
"Once someone finds a (link) they can spread it around their social network," he said.
According to Reporters Without Borders, an international lobby group for press freedom, China employs more than 30,000 people who monitor Internet connections, e-mails and chat sessions of civilians.
Popular services such as Wikipedia, Youtube, iTunes and many others are blocked.
Rohozinski admitted the new service has the potential to become a political hot potato, but he said he is not breaking any laws as many countries that use Internet-censoring technologies have no legislation or rules that specifically state what should or should not be blocked.
No one from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade would return calls seeking comment on Psiphon or any impact the service may have on Canada's political ties abroad. |
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