Yesterday, I blogged about a new for-profit 'net censorship evasion tool called Psiphon. A member of the anonymity development community reached out with concerns. I'm blogging them here in the interest of presenting the full range of views on this subject from people in the community. — Read the rest

Update: Here's a critique of Psiphon from a crypto expert.

Mentioned in a NYT article by John Markoff about tools such as Tor used in places like China and Iran to route around internet censorship, this word of a new browser-based toolkit. — Read the rest

Wickr, a private, secure messaging company, has teamed up with Psiphon (previously), a spinout from Citizen Lab (previously) to allow its users to communicate even when they are behind national firewalls.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Onion Router (TOR) project have teamed up to release a new privacy-enhancing Firefox plugin called HTTPS Everywhere. It was inspired by Google's new encrypted search engine, and it ensures that whenever you visit a site that accepts encrypted connections, your browser switches into encrypted mode, hiding your traffic from snoops on your local network and at your ISP. — Read the rest

Marc Hedlund sez, "Wesabe just open sourced a project called Grendel that makes it easy for web apps to encrypt data using the user's login password, and only decrypt that data when the user is logged in. Let's say you're using a word processing web app and don't want your documents stored plaintext — the web app could use Grendel to easily encrypt your docs for you, using OpenPGP. — Read the rest

Danny O'Brien's got a doozy of a lazyweb idea: "Here's a way to mash-up two of the most talked-about Internet issues today. Opera launched their web-server-in-a-browser, Opera Unite, today. Iranian protestors are looking for proxies to get around Iran's blocking.

So why not write a Opera Unite service that acts as a simple, quick-and-dirty proxy for Iranians? — Read the rest

Ron Deibert of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab says,

The first Information Warfare Monitor/ONI Asia major investigative report has been released — Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's TOM-Skype platform, written by Nart Villeneuve, Psiphon Fellow, the Citizen Lab, at the Munk Centre for International Studies, the University of Toronto.

The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has just release Psiphon, a censorship-defeating program. Like EFF's Tor, Psiphon uses ordinary users' computers as re-routers for Web requests, bouncing requests for blocked and censored material to computers outside the censorwall.

The code for psiphon is announced as being released under the GPL, the most common and preferred open/free license, but I couldn't find a source repository. — Read the rest