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Porn-surfing by proxy Then he spent five hours on hard-core sex sites. I was pretty pissed off, says Hunter. I trusted that, as a person in certain vulnerable circumstances, he would act accordingly and behave himself. He didn't. Hunter blocked Mr. X from using his psiphonode, sent him an e-mail scolding him and posted a message to the Psiphon forum alerting other Psiphon hosts about the potential for porn surfers. The response wasn't pleasant. If you have these rights why should others not, wrote one user. If they want to search for porn, who are you to say they can not? Another wrote that Hunter's judgmental restrictions were just as bad as those of the Chinese and Iranian governments. Others sympathized with Hunter's dilemma. I can't understand why some psiphonites are so {bleep!} stupid to look for those sites, wrote one user. It's f**king human nature you b@stard! another responded. The flame war escalated. One Psiphon user accused another of having the IQ of a river shrimp. Eventually, the forum's administrator blocked all posting to the discussion thread. Hunter's experience with Mr. X - and the uproar that followed - aren't unique. The Psiphon forum includes several discussion threads in which users grapple with the thorny question of whether to give people in repressive countries access to the entire Web, warts and all, via their personal computers. One Psiphon host writes, I can accept that there are people who want to look for porn. But not with my bandwidth. Another complains that he has had to kick several Web surfers off his computer for accessing child pornography. Illegal Web activity, like viewing child pornography, is an especially tricky problem, because psiphonites connecting via a Psiphon user's computer essentially borrow the Web identity of their host. The last thing I need is a terrorist posting to some extremist bulletin board from my account, Hunter says. It would be so insanely easy and practically untraceable. Psiphon isn't the first proxy server program to provide surfers anonymity: Programs like Squid, Peacefire and Tor have long offered users the ability to cloak their online identity and circumvent censors. But unlike some other programs, Psiphon allows hosts to see exactly what their anonymous guests are doing with their browsing privileges, and its user-friendly interface has made it more popular than other proxy software. Psiphon's creators say the trust problem results from a misuse of the software, not from a flaw in the system. They argue that Psiphon was created solely for the purpose of helping friends and family members in countries with censorship, not for inviting strangers to hijack your computer. Ron Deibert, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and Citizen Lab's director, says that Psiphon hosts are constantly warned not to offer their psiphonodes for public or semi-public use. If they choose not to heed that warning, he says, they're responsible for the outcome. You create something and you hope people use it the way it's intended to be used. If they don't, that's their risk, says Deibert. If I'd used that least-responsible behavior as model for my decisions, Psiphon would have never been made. But some say that Psiphon's Web site doesn't do enough to communicate that the tool isn't meant to be offered indiscriminately. One Psiphon user, a Canadian software developer named Liu Liu, argues that the very existence of a forum on Psiphon's site implies that strangers can meet and form a faceless partnership to skirt the censors. If the psiphonite and the host already knew each other, they could simply communicate by secure e-mail, he said. However, Deibert says Psiphon will continue to put the control into the hands of its users. It's an individual choice, he says. If you're deciding to download Psiphon, you want to help people access information. What kind of information is up to you. Forbes Related
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