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Torpark Provides Route Around India Censors
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-07-17
 Security News RSS Feed
India's Department of Telecommunications has ordered Internet service providers to block several websites, including Blogger, Geocities, and Typepad.
An update to the post by Xeni Jardin at the Boing Boing blog listed more information about the blocking. One rumor now circulating contends that the government made this decree in response to the terrorist bombings at Mumbai on July 11th; that rumor has not been substantiated.
Another commenter noted how the Torpark project could help Internet users in India get around the blocks. If nothing else, the existence of Torpark would render India's decree moot if it works as advertised.
Torpark is a small executable file that creates a secure Internet connection via the Tor network, an anonymous communication system supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others.
Tor's virtual tunneling system allows users to connect to forbidden websites and maintain their security online. It prevents them from being tracked by websites or discovered through web traffic analysis. It does this by distributing the various steps taken from one location to another through several servers; no individual server ever knows the complete path that a data packet has taken, the project noted.
Torpark can be placed on a USB flash drive and launched from a PC with a USB port. Once launched, the Torpark browser, essentially a version of Firefox, opens. Browsing then takes place across the Tor network.
Once the Indian government realizes just how people can bypass such censorship, they will either remove the blocks currently in place, or they could go the opposite direction and move toward a Chinese "Great Firewall" model of censoring the Internet.
Clamping down harder would be immensely unpopular with the country's technology sector, and it would be unfortunate to see that happen.
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Tag: India
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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