Recently I’ve been bothered by the concepts such as censorship, Arab Spring, crowd discussions.
Many of the censorship tools in-use are just tools built by engineers who are not political, just building tools. Just doing their jobs. Often the desire to fulfill a challenging objective can blind the engineer to the possible uses — or the engineer simply doesn’t care (i.e. has bigger issues to care about than some foreign country’s citizens’ free speech).
I have an Idea I’d call Qloak (compression of “Quacking” and “Cloaked”, and “Quacking” based on what Chinese guys call gossip) that would allow:
- twitter posts to get through firewalls and most paywall wifi APs
- foursquare checkins to also get through
- ability to check whether an app needs to self-destruct, flushing history
A lot of this technology is the way I used to configure the “ext” system as a phonebook at a past employer; as well, acting as the head of a TOR or a VPN connection may consistently get through.
I don’t judge Eqypt, or Libya, or China, but I worry over the limiting/chilling/hushing aspect of some engineering talent mis-applied.
I would prefer that more people are in the conversation.
Countries, Companies, people who claim to support freedom of speech should act to support it. Build a TOR gateway. Support free opinions in other countries. Listen to everyone, even the Gay, the Religious Fanatic, the Type-B personality, the Nature Fanatic, the Raging Republican — whatever grouping you put people into, those people will be oppressed in other countries. Listen to them, however much you may disagree.
Yes, if I built an App for this, I would give away free signups to anyone at an email with a domain such as .cn, .ly, etc.
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