geekosystem

Several news outlets are reporting that the Ethiopian government passed legislation criminalizing the use of voice over IP services like Skype on May 24th that has unto now gone widely unreported by the international press. The law appears to have given the Ethiopian government wide ranging control over electronic communication in the country, including the power to imprison individuals for up to 15 years for using a VoIP service.

Tor has long been embraced by web privacy advocates as a solution for browsing the Internet mostly anonymously in an era when this has become increasingly difficult to do. While Tor isn't perfect at hiding the identity of its user from certain methods of detection such as end-to-end correlation, its system, which consists of software that allows people to bounce around from node to node through a directory server (this set of graphics explains it in more detail), is pretty good at obfuscating the identity of a given web user, provided she is smart about turning off cookies and the like. At present, setting up Tor is a somewhat involved process in that it requires installing software and syncing it up with one's web browser to ensure that it's doing its job. (Tor does offer some self-contained browser bundles for download which make the process a little easier.) But according to a recent Technology Review article, there's a project in the works which could broaden Tor's user base and improve the network's performance: Developing wireless routers with Tor installed, "mak[ing] anonymity something that can happen everywhere, all the time," in the words of Tor project developer Jacob Appelbaum.