Despite the provenence of the story, I'm still suprised there was no mention of Google's cooperation with repressive elements of its own government through PRISM and the like. Or (though this is probably far too optimistic) a mention of whether surveillance as overarching paradigm is compatible with the sort of self-representation they offer here.
But anyway, I look forward to seeing more details about the "uProxy" extension. I wonder why they didn't just donate servers to the Tor project, if they were really serious about protecting people, but maybe there will still be something interesting that comes out of it. The idea of helping an anonymity network being as simple as downloading a browser add-on is obviously attractive, though the suggestion that it's for friends who have troubles implies that it's unlikely to face the sorts of scaling issues that non-dark(ish)net networks have to contend with. I also wonder how anonymous it is for the relay side - whether it's really just an interface to Tor bridge nodes, and therefore the relay can't see everything their "friend" is up to, or if it's a straight proxy. I would guess the latter as their emphasis seems to be completely about helping people hop out of their country's repressive internet policies. It's a pity there was no journalism beyond parroting a press release. But that seems to be unjustifiably expensive for most organisations these days :( -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected].
