Collage Challenges Internet Censorship

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    Date: 
    24 August 2010

    Ph.D. student Sam Burnett has developed Collage, a tool that relies on user-generated content sites like Flickr to help citizens in countries oppressed by censorship communicate more openly.

    The basic idea is to hide censored content in seemingly innocuous photos that are hosted on user-generated content sites like Flickr.

    The landscape of internet censorship has changed drastically due to more refined and sophisticated censorship techniques. This has particularly been the case in China, over the last decade, where the infamous “Great Firewall of China” has been set up. He says this has been the impetus to a rise in techniques to try and circumvent internet censorship.

    According to Feamster’s article, an infranet system can provide countries and companies with the capacity to work around censorship firewalls as it “uses a tunnel protocol that provides a covert communication channel between its clients and servers, modulated over standard HTTP transactions that resemble innocuous web browsing.”