This morning, GreatFire.org published a story stating that EdgeCast CDN, one of the more popular content distribution networks that handles content for a number of large websites, has been blocked by the Chinese national filter. As a result, a friend …
Open Rights Group Report: “Digital Surveillance”
The Open Rights Group have recently released “Digital Surveillance – Why the Snoopers’ Charter is the wrong approach: A call for targeted and accountable investigatory powers”. The report sets out various arguments as to why the proposed Communications Data …
Chinese Internet Filtering: The Curious Case of the Florida Pet Club
Of the various ways to filter the internet, manipulating DNS is probably the simplest and cheapest in terms of resources. DNS, the Domain Name Service, is the mapping between the human-readable URLs that we use, like https://www.pseudonymity.net, and the …
Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI’12)
Following on from the fantastically interesting FOCI workshop last year, I am co-chairing this year’s FOCI workshop along with Roger Dingledine of the Tor Project. The workshop will again be co-located with USENIX Security, which is being held this year …
Discussing Online Privacy in the Observer, with Tom Chatfield
I was recently approached by the Observer to take part in an email-based discussion with Tom Chatfield about online privacy and the direction that companies like Facebook and Google are taking us.
It was a lot of fun to write, …
Presentation on Mapping Chinese Censorship
I recently presented my work on censorship mapping to my colleagues at the OII, including a couple of maps with early analysis of DNS manipulation in Chinese cities.
The analysis is very preliminary, and there are considerable caveats even …
Freedom of Communication on the Internet Workshop (FOCI): Fine-Grained Censorship Mapping — Information Sources, Legality and Ethics
This year saw the first workshop on Freedom of Communications on the Internet, co-located with USENIX Security in San Francisco. My contribution, co-authored with Ian Brown and Tulio de Souza, focused both on the means for mapping censorship in …
Experiences of Chinese Internet Censorship
I was recently invited to speak at Dalian Technical University, in Liaoning Province in Northern China, and took the opportunity afterwards to spend three weeks travelling around China with my family. (Finally putting several years of studying Mandarin into practice, …
Freedom of Communications on the Internet (FOCI) Workshop
I’m on my way back from the Workshop on Free and Open Communication on the Internet (FOCI) that was held in the last few days at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Hosted by Nick Feamster, FOCI brought together a number …
Contentious Connections
I have a comment piece in the Guardian today about network neutrality and BT’s Content Connect service. The online version is here.
I’ll let the article stand largely by itself, whilst pleading the difficulty of putting the net neutrality …