Daniel Castro of The Information Technology & Innovation Fund recently published a paper supporting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) currently being debated in congress. In that report, he claims that research performed by us supports the domain name system (DNS) filtering mechanisms mandated by SOPA. This claim is a distortion of our work. We [...]
While exploring the structure of national networks through our Mapping Local Internet Control project, we decided to combine our national network data with Google’s AdPlanner data to estimate the overall locality of web site traffic in individual countries. The most interesting result so far is that we estimate that 96% of all page views in [...]
I was recently quoted in a story in the New Scientist about a new attack on Tor. The quote was a combination of somewhat sloppy wording on my part and a lack of context on the reporter’s part, so I’d like to provide context and more precise wording here. The quote is: “There are lots [...]
Belarus is holding an election today. This election is particularly important because Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, sometimes referred to as the ‘last dictator of Europe,’ has allowed a fair degree of freedom throughout the campaign, including giving free airtime on national TV to opposition candidates, during which they were allowed to criticize him without censorship. However, [...]
For the past year, I’ve been working on a study on distributed denial of service (ddos) attacks against independent media and human rights sites with colleagues at the Berkman Center. The resulting report will be out shortly, but one of the main conclusions is that independent media sites are not capable of independently defending themselves [...]
Here’s a guest post I wrote yesterday for the MIT Technology Review about filtering and circumvention during the protests in Iran.
China 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 [...]
Ethan 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. [...]
