MIT’s Technology Review discusses the importance of anonymity software to political speech online, where it can save people in repressive regimes the threat of prison, or worse, for expressing their opinions on government and culture on the internet.

Dissent Made Safer discusses Tor and its importance for political dissidents in Zimbabwe, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and other countries.

Tor is an open-source Internet anonymity system–one of several systems that encrypt data or hide the accompanying Internet address, and route the data to its final destination through intermediate computers called proxies. This combination of routing and encryption can mask a computer’s actual location and circumvent government filters; to prying eyes, the Internet traffic seems to be coming from the proxies. At a time when global Internet access and social-networking technologies are surging, such tools are increasingly important to bloggers and other Web users living under repressive regimes.

Many pages of detailed information should satisfy your curiosity about Tor–and perhaps even encourage you to install and use it, in order to support those whose lives could depend on it.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Free Culture, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.