Archive for the ‘censorship’ Category

Google Sidewiki enables right of reply

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

I think Google Sidewiki is great news for the web – in particular it is a step in the right direction to address a long standing problem of censorship on blogs.

Especially on political blogs, it is possible for the owners to remove and edit people’s comments or ban comments entirely – Sidewiki puts an end to that. Though I suppose it is still possible for mobs to vote comments down.

Here’s a nice example of it used to comment on a blog where comments are completely disabled.

Nice job Google.

(Of course, it was always possible to start your own blog and comment on anything there. However, unless your blog ranks you may as well be talking to yourself. Nobody will see it. This provides a venue for the other side of any story to be heard, right by the actual story.)

Note: Firefox/IE only for now, unfortunately.

Posted in censorship, stuff | No Comments »

Psiphon considered harmful?

Sunday, December 3rd, 2006

Psiphon is an new anti-censorship tool that has recently become available. It is supposed to allow anyone to operate a proxy (“psiphonode”) in an uncensored country, so that users in censored countries can browse material that would otherwise be blocked. The idea is that the censoring country will find it much more difficult to identify and block access to 100s of proxies, than to do the same for the particular site it wishes to censor. The connection between the browsing user and the proxy is encrypted so that the censoring government cannot tell what is being browsed. That’s the theory, anyway.

It’s an interesting idea but I think there are a few problems with it:

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Posted in censorship, privacy, security | 1 Comment »