Software Aims to Circumvent Internet Censorship
Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed new software called Telex that is an approach to circumventing Internet censorship. More and more countries are practicing internship censorship, and with increasingly sophisticated tools. The Telex concept is to place anticensorship technology into the Internet's core network infrastructure through cooperation from large Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who would deploy Telex stations on paths between censors' networks and popular, uncensored Internet destinations. The software leverages censors' unwillingness to completely block day-to-day Internet access, and secretly converts innocuous, unblocked websites into proxies. Telex is easy to distribute and difficult to detect and block.
Transcript
00:00:00 a growing number of countries are practicing internet censorship and they're practicing censorship with increasing technological sophistication if you're in China now you can't get to Twitter you can't get to YouTube you can't get to Facebook if you Google for tianan square uh the connection will hang up this is the the dark future we want to avoid uh the future in which the
00:00:24 internet rather than being a tool for freedom is only a pipeline for propaganda and the official Party Line we're developing a system called Telex that tries to provide a state level response to state level internet censorship so the way Telex works you are sitting in a censored country trying to access some band website the Telex software on your computer instead makes
00:00:51 a connection to a nonblocked website uh Somewhere In Another Country what's really happening behind the scenes is the Telex software adds um a kind of invisible marker to the connection that is a signal uh to another piece of technology that we've placed into the internet's Network infrastructure in non- censoring countries and when they see a connection to a non-censored
00:01:18 website um that has one of these invisible tags from the Telex client software they take the connection and reroute it to the sensored site the user is really trying to access the end goal of all of this is to make connecting to the internet an All or Nothing proposition for censoring countries they can either allow traffic to go out of their country and know that people are
00:01:43 going to be able to circumvent whatever censorship controls they have in place or they can pull the plug entirely that would be a very high price to pay for just about every country that's interested in censorship someday in the future I envision Partnerships with many large isps and throwing the switch on Telex stations uh at a large number of of
00:02:08 high-speed backbone links um at that point we'll really be accomplishing our vision uh of uh making internet access and All or Nothing proposition for censoring countries