Here’s a guest post I wrote yesterday for the MIT Technology Review about filtering and circumvention during the protests in Iran.
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Filtering and Circumvention in Iran
17-Jun-09China Bans the Letter ‘F’
12-Jun-09China recently mandated that Green Dam, a client side application that filters pornography and political content, be installed on all computers manufactured in China starting July 1, 2009. One way the application blocks access to sites is to kill the browser window when it tries to visit an offending site. The above video demonstrates that […]
Grey Surveillance Talk
20-Jan-09Ethan Zuckerman wrote up a talk I recently gave on looking at Google’s AdWords as a network of grey surveillance.
Viral Conversations has updated its FAQ to no longer suggest that companies let reviewers keep products and to suggest that reviewers disclose within reviews if they are allowed to keep the products they are reviewing. In a previous post, I pointed out that the site’s policy of encouraging companies to gift reviewed products to reviewers […]
Peter Li from the Global Internet Freedom Consortium has responded in the comments to my post about snooping by Chinese circumvention tools: We apologize for the confusion here. The anti-censorship ranking service is provided by one of the GIFC partners. It only publishes the popularity ranks of destination websites users visit through our anti-censorship tools. […]
Update: The site hosting the data for these tools has now removed the faq entry offering to sell the data. Please read my subsequent update for responses from the tool developers and further thoughts. Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall […]
Update: Viral Conversations has changed the language in their FAQ not to encourage gifting of reviewed items and to encourage reviewers to disclose whether they are keeping reviewed items. I just ran across a new site called Viral Conversations. The basic idea is to serve as a brokerage between companies with products they want reviewed […]
For a long time, the only free source of data about site traffic online has been the Alexa Top Sites list, but the data for the Alexa list is based on the very skewed sample of folks who run the Alexa toolbar, and who the heck runs the Alexa toolbar these days? When I’ve needed […]
OpenDNS and Firefox Search
07-Sep-08Doc asks why opendns has broken the search from the address bar feature of his firefox. The problem is that the address bar fail over to google relies on the dns request failing, but opendns requests never fail. Instead, if an opendns server gets a request for a non-existent address, it display the opendns search/advertising […]
Midnight Piggybacking
14-Aug-08So I’m sitting here at my excellent local Memphis honda repair shop getting Little Tokyo’s oil changed. In addition to being locally run, honest, and professional, the shop has wifi, so I can sit and work (or blog!) while getting my car fixed. The wifi wasn’t working today, so I asked the owner if he […]
