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 of computer scientists, activists, lawyers and policy makers to discuss the impact of anti-censorship technologies and to think about future directions from a number of angles.
It’s always interesting to see experts on the same topic from different fields together, and FOCI was no exception. Despite occasional diversions into policy-speak or tech-talk that left half the room baffled, I came away more impressed with how often we had managed to cross that barrier.
The technical side of the crowd seemed to have the benefit of more time to present, and so there were thorough discussions on the nature of filtering mechanisms and their technical capabilities as well as details of anti-censorship technologies, particularly Tor. Roger Dingledine gave some interesting, if slightly statistically questionable, numbers regarding Tor usage in various countries during the recent events in the Middle East.
An estimate from Hal Roberts, based on surveys of activist bloggers, was that 3% of worldwide internet users employed some form of anti-censorship tool, including web-based proxies.… Read full post
