My full-time job is working on software to help people in get around Internet censorship in countries like China and Iran, where the government filters what people can access on the Web. I can talk about the history of methods used by repressive government to censor the Web, and the parallel history of the tools for users to defeat that censorship. I will address some of the misconceptions that people have about the nature of circumvention software and the battle between the censors and the circumventors. And finally I will pose some of the (as-yet-unsolved) problems faced by the developers of circumvention software — problems that perhaps the geeks in the audience would enjoy taking home and thinking over.
About Bennett Haselton
Bennett Haselton has been developing workarounds for Internet censorship since 1996. He is the webmaster for Circumventor.com, a distribution network for tools to evade Internet blocking. He has also worked as a professional security tester and published research on Internet security and privacy. He gets a kick out of describing himself in the third person.
You can find his work at Peacefire.org
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