How to bypass Internet censorship? – Open Source

Communities are absolutely vital for circumvention. Not only is a tool stronger if you have more people working on it, but a lot of tools rely on people donating their bandwidth to a network. You can set up your own virtual private network, you can run a relay in the Tor network. So there is a lot of opportunities to contribute to circumvention. When you want to bypass Internet censorship you have to use tools which are deployed in a country where there is no censorship. So it is important that there are many people in Western Europe or the United States to help other people in countries where the government censors access to the Internet. Free software and circumvention are very closely linked. I think there is a very strong argument that you should be after to see the source code of a software in order to determine how effective it is. And of course this works both ways, you know. The people who want to see the weaknesses in a software can also look at it. But the theory is that the more eyes on it, the safer it's gonna get. And I very much subscribe to that theory. One of the reasons that openness or freedom in software is important for circumvention is that it lets people review things and perform pure review in order to evaluate how well things will really work. It also lets people more readily determine how blockable something would be. There are a lot of tools still to be developed . And often you know it's hard to know... There is not a lot of payback for creating these tools in many situations. You develop a tool but do you know if it has been effective or not? I mean it's very very difficult to tell because the people that are using them by and large have limited access to the Internet or for various reasons can't communicate that they are using your tool. But there's amazing projects like Tor, that are doing like huge inroads into this area with free software tools. And I'd really like to see a future for circumvention that includes an expansion of the software development in the free software circus. So more free software tools were developed. Beeing that this has been going on for a while now there is this whole library of research. And so that people don't have to start from scratch anymore. So, I'm hopefull.