Interest in web anti-censorship tool rockets after launch

A new online tool designed to circumvent government censorship of the internet already appears to be a runaway success, a University of Toronto researcher who helped develop the software says.

Some 30,000 copies of psiphon (pronounced sigh-fawn) had been downloaded by 2 p.m. Monday after it was made available at 1 p.m. last Friday, Michael Hull, the program's lead engineer told CBC News Online.

That rate of interest by far surpasses his highest estimate for the total number of downloads anticipated, he said.

"I thought we were going to have maybe 10,000 downloads," he said, noting that traffic to the site was still on the rise. "I was amazed."

Psiphon works by letting people in uncensored countries download the free software to run a secure, encrypted server or node in the private network. The server administrator would pass the connection information to friends and family in censored countries — psiphonites — who could then log in through a web browser and navigate sites without restrictions.

People in censored countries don't need any special software to use psiphon — only access to a computer with an internet connection and a web browser, even in an internet café.

Interest in the project — which emerged out of the Citizenlab at the university's Munk Centre for International Studies — is high, Hull said.

By Monday, nearly 800 registered individuals had posted some 1,200 articles to psiphon's discussion forums following the software's launch on Friday before about 125 people at the Protect The Net conference at the Munk Centre, which featured a live demonstration with a psiphonite from the United Arab Emirates.

"People are setting up their own psiphon communities to facilitate networks of trust," Hull said. "We're telling people to trust each other."

Most of the software downloads —about half — are from the United States, with Europe and Canada following, ahead of Australia, Germany, Great Britain and France, Hull said.

Some people in censored countries were initially downloading the software, but that has nearly halted after messages on the psiphon discussion forum emphasized that people seeking to circumvent government controls need only visit a psiphonode through a web browser, he said.