Big River: Bandwidth, Security, World University, Relaxation Response

More bandwidth leads to
more online security, and
more people-to-people
teaching and learning arises -
with or without security -
in all languages and subjects,
freely via the world wide web:


World University and School ~
worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/World_University


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Let's 'wire' the developing world for high speed bandwidth and especially video-capable handhelds, beginning with the One Laptop per Child countries: Rwanda, Ethiopia, Colombia, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, USA (Birmingham, Alabama), Uruguay, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Cambodia, & Papua New Guinea.


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In general, circumvention (end-user security) tools work, but they slow connection speeds down. (These are all good, and some are free: Ultrareach, Psiphon, Tor, as well as Dynaweb and Anonymizer).


Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Circumvention Landscape Report: Methods, Uses, and Tools

Published March 05, 2009

Authored by Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, John Palfrey

DOWNLOAD PDF

Abstract

As the Internet has exploded over the past fifteen years, recently reaching over a billion users, dozens of national governments from China to Saudi Arabia have tried to control the network by filtering out content objectionable to the countries for any of a number of reasons. A large variety of different projects have developed tools that can be used to circumvent this filtering, allowing people in filtered countries access to otherwise filtered content. In this report, we describe the mechanisms of filtering and circumvention and evaluate ten projects that develop tools that can be used to circumvent filtering: Anonymizer, Ultrareach, DynaWeb Freegate, Circumventor/CGIProxy, Psiphon, Tor, JAP, Coral, and Hamachi. We evaluated these tools in 2007 -- using both tests from within filtered countries and tests within a lab environment -- for their utility, usability, security, promotion, sustainability, and openness. We find that all of the tools use the same basic mechanisms of proxying and encryption but that they differ in their models of hosting proxies. Some tools use proxies that are centrally hosted, others use proxies that are peer hosted, and others use re-routing methods that use a combination of the two. We find that, in general, the tools work in the sense that they allow users to access pages that are otherwise blocked by filtering countries but that performance of the tools is generally poor and that many tools have significant, unreported security vulnerabilities.

The report was completed in 2007 and released to a group of private sponsors. Many of the findings of the report are now out of date, but we present them now, as is, because we think that the broad conclusions of the report about these tools remain valid and because we hope that other researchers will benefit from access to the methods used to test the tools.

Responses from developers of the tools in question are included in the report.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2009/2007_Circumvention_Landscape_Report

Relaxation response ... relaxationresponse.org/steps ~ MMmmmm, and information and ideas just keep flowing around the world ...