In parts of the world where repressive governments control the Internet with unassailable firewalls, netizens don't see the same web that people in other countries can.
Now, Google wants to give people in these countries a tool to circumvent those invisible barriers, and defeat censorship. Called uProxy, it is meant to be an easy-to-use, peer-to-peer gateway to the open Internet. With uProxy installed, somebody in Iran could use a friend's Internet to connect with him or her.
Though Google announced uProxy on Monday at the Google Ideas Summit in New York, N.Y., the tool isn't ready to be made public yet, and the Internet giant isn't comfortable announcing a release date. First, it wants to roll it out for a few "trusted testers" to improve it and make it more secure.
"The reason it is closed source at the moment, the reason we're not open sourcing it right now, is exactly that we don't want people to start using it before, actually, it's safe and secure," said Lucas Dixon, the lead engineer at Google Ideas who has worked on the project.
When it's ready, uProxy will be released in the form of a browser extension for both Chrome and Firefox that will allow two people who know each other, and are already in touch via chat, Facebook or email, for example, to share their connection.
The user in Iran, for instance, would be able to ask a friend in the United States via chat to activate uProxy. The U.S. friend would click on the extension, and the Iranian user would receive a notification. After clicking on the notification and accepting the invitation, he or she would then be connected to the Internet, via secure channel, through the U.S. friend's connection.
"It's basically a personalized VPN [Virtual Private Network]," Dixon told Mashablein an interview.
And it doesn't appear to need a lot of expertise to run it, as opposed to other commercial VPNs. Yasmin Green, principal at Google Ideas, described it during the launch as something that simply requires "two clicks on my side to bypass a repressive regime."
The other difference is that uProxy won't depend on a centralized server or a commercial provider, so it won't be easily blocked by a government or other regime.
Dixon notes that it's important to remember what uProxy is not and does not do. It doesn't anonymize traffic like Tor, it doesn't allow for file sharing, and it doesn't provide encrypted, secure communications like tools Silent Circle and Cryptocat.
uProxy, which was seeded by Google Ideas, but mainly developed by researchers at the University of Washington, isn't the first tool of its kind. There are numerous projects and kinds of software that promise to circumvent firewalls and censorship, like the open-source project Lantern, whose developers contributed to uProxy through Brave New Software.
Before releasing uProxy to the public, Google will let Internet freedom organizations like OpenITP, which itself funds and develops censorship circumventions tools, to audit the code, Dixon said. Then they will release the code, open source, for the public to see.
For Eva Galperin, Global Policy Analyst at the digital rights advocacy groupElectronic Frontier Foundation, Google's extremely cautious approach is a good sign.
"If we are worried about security and privacy of our tools," she said, "it is important that our tools be well audited and that our tools be open source."
uProxy certainly has great potential, but it remains to be seen when it will launch and how effective it will really be. Internet activists point to the cautionary tale of Haystack, another tool promoted to circumvent censorship in places like Iran.
It was at first widely lauded and hyped, before security researcher Jacob Appelbaum found serious holes in it. Vulnerabilities that could have put people in danger.
The tool was later disabled and abandoned.
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Image: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images
