The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab has just released an open source application which allows users from countries where there is Internet censorship to utilize anonymous servers located worldwide. The system is a far improvement from the over burdened anonymity software called TOR.

When I was in Manila for the Free Expression in Asia Cyberspace meeting back in April Nart Villeneuve, had conducted a technical workshop where he shed light on the latest developments in this regard where at that time it was in alpha stage of development, psiphon went into beta release in July and finally on December 1st entered its public release after aggressive testing throughout the world.

psiphon acts as a “web proxy” for authenticated users, retrieving requested web pages and displaying them in a user’s browser. using a secure, encrypted connection to receive web requests from the main servers (psiphonode) down to the end-user (psiphonite). There is no connection between the user and the requested website, as psiphon transparently proxies the request through the psiphonode’s computer allowing the psiphonite to browse blocked websites seamlessly This ensures anonymity and also a great tool to circumvent censored websites.

The end-user simply has to apply on the psiphon forum for a URL and password provided by one of the administrators of a psiphonode (server) once you go to the URL and log-on you can browse the web freely without any restrictions of censorship which makes this system great tool for users in Pakistan you can use it to circumvent the censorship enforced by the Govt of Pakistan.