John Miedema

You’re free to read, right? On the web, in Canada? Maybe China has a great firewall, but Canada? How many of you work behind a firewall that does not let you access web mail and other web content? We let that slide because, well, we are employees who should follow company policies. Would you feel the same if your employer did not let you read personal letters or certain books during your lunch hour?

What can you do about it? One idea. The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. Among other activities, they developed the psiphon censorship circumvention software. Using the software, people outside the firewall can let in people inside the firewall to browse the web anonymously and without restrictions. Curious that the psiphon website is down for remodeling this week, but other similar software packages like PHProxy are available. I suppose this kind of software can also be used in restrictive workplaces if you have an outside server to install it on. Wonder if anyone has tried that?

Freedom to Read keeps alive awareness that books are removed from the shelves in Canadian libraries, schools and bookstores every day and free speech on the Internet is under attack. The 2010 campaign is running this week. In honour of that event, I have temporarily replaced my Reading Gallery with images of all the posters used since the campaign started in 1984. Each time you refresh my homepage you will see a randomly selected image from that collection.