[liberationtech] Google Unveils Tools to Access Web From Repressive Countries | TIME.com

[Nick]

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 :(