Breaking the Wall of Internet Censorship

Description

On January 28, 2011, the Egyptian government - after three days of massive anti-regime protests, organized primarily through social networks - switched off 93 percent of the nation's Internet. This made obvious the top-down vulnerability issue of the Web: individual users are connected mainly by virtue of Internet service providers. Block Internet service, and Internet access disappears. An alternative is emerging in the form of wireless mesh networks: simple systems that connect end users while automatically routing around blocks and censors. Computer scientist Aaron Kaplan is a cofounder of the FunkFeuer initiative, an Austrian wireless mesh networking project that plants Wi-Fi antennae on rooftops - used by the American government in one "liberation technology" program and now part of the EU-funded project CONFINE: Community Networks Testbed for the Future Internet. Kaplan here presents the potential and limits of this open-source technology that is realizing the dream of a free Internet.

Runtime

15 min

Subjects

Genre

Date of Publication

[2013], c2012

Database

Films on Demand

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