Electronic Frontier Foundation - Network censorship and surveillance is a booming business. Censorship schemes continue to fragment the Internet and new censorship proposals are constantly introduced around the world, including in liberal democracies. (Lately governments have gotten fascinated by the idea of forcing ISPs to censor particular sites from the DNS, so users can't find them even though the sites are still there.) Censors usually assume that most Internet users don't know how to bypass the censorship (or, often, that many users won't even realize the censorship is going on!).
Unfortunately, the censors are often right, at least in broad strokes: many Internet users get used to censorship and rarely or never try to bypass it. And censorship doesn't always take the form of simply blocking sites and services. But there are still major efforts to beat technical censorship by technical means, and motivated users can generally take advantage of them. Millions of people are at least occasional users of censorship circumvention services, but it's a perennial challenge to broaden this pool and give people the tools to maintain uncensored access over time.
Earlier this spring, I took part in a week-long book sprint event in Germany to create a second edition of How to Bypass Internet Censorship. The outcome of the sprint is a 240-page book, available by print-on-demand, for HTML browsing, and as a PDF or ePub download. This book gives details on a wide range of tools for a wide range of audiences, with information on the risks and limitations of particular approaches. It also suggests ways for people on uncensored or less-censored networks to help out. Read More
