[liberationtech] Circumventing audio/podcast censorship?

[Steven Clift]

I received a couple of private replies from LiberationTech. Others?

I am plotting a quick and possible proposal to this fund:
https://www.opentech.fund/requests/internet-freedom-fund

I know a lot about:

1. Live radio streams with news
2. News podcasts on-demand
3. The difficulty people have finding fresh (this hour's or this day's)
news in audio.
4. Low cost app marketing and dev
5. My existing 1 Radio News app user base - http://1radionews.com - in all
types of countries including repressive regimes
6. The missed opportunity to reach people in lower bandwidth places/3G by
compressing audio on the fly

What I don't know a lot about ... yet:

1. What news audio is and is not being blocked and where? (According to one
China firewall checker BBC and VOA RSS podcast feeds are blocked but not
NPR and CBC for example.)

2. How you might build proxies and VPNs into an app if attempts to connect
are blocked?

3. The best set of open source tools for transcoding audio streams from 48
kbps and higher down to 16 kbps AAC+? And where to cost effectively host
the transcoding server(s)? (Ideally we'd have an existing code base to
contribute enhancements back toward.)

4. Whether this fund has any interest in audio, how competitive it is to
receive funding, etc.? (Is the effort to required to submit a proposal a
waste of time?)

Thoughts?

Suggestions?

Possible project advisors?

Thanks,
Steven Clift
Radio app: comments at 1radionews.com
NGO: clift at e-democracy.org


On Dec 9, 2017 7:04 PM, "Steven Clift" <clift at e-democracy.org> wrote:

I am considering and audio-related Internet freedom project.

Some questions:

1. Does anyone know if the great firewalls of the world block lots of audio
streams or podcasts? Who knows a lot about this?

2. Are there existing projects working to make censored audio more
available to people under repressive regimes?

3. What are great examples of diaspora produced podcasts that are getting
decent home country distribution?

Thanks,
Steven Clift

P.S. The proposal would extend my 1 Radio News app - http://1radionews.com
- beyond the English news from 65+ countries to additional languages and
efforts to build access and use in less free countries.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/attachments/20171218/1a4e5871/attachment.html>