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“We’re rewiring the Internet for freedom.”
- dfps 9y agoUntil this month, when I saw this I would have first thought of China and Russia and those others. But now I'm starting to think about North America. (The article begins) For the last two years, a team of engineers and researchers has quietly been working to develop new technology for Internet freedom. Today, we are pleased to share results from the first large-scale field trial of refraction networking, a fundamentally new way to help people around the world learn and communicate online in the face of censorship. We served more than 50,000 users, for more than a week, by deploying refraction networking at partner ISPs.
- otoburb 9y agoRefraction networking depends on an incentive scheme where the costs of cutting off all outside TLS access is too great a burden to bear for censoring networks or countries. However, some countries are actively working to build enough self-sufficiency and content that a smaller and smaller minority of their users will ever "need" to reach beyond state-observed wall gardens. The effectiveness of technologies like refraction networking can be amplified if paired with compelling content only accessible outside tightly controlled cyber-borders. Unfortunately, this is much harder than it sounds. I'm glad to hear that "larger, longer-term trial deployments" of TapDance are in the works.