Monday, October 18, 2010 *Censorship Circumvention Tools Aren't Widely Used* *Users in authoritarian regimes either don't know about them or aren't interested.* By Erica Naone Tech humanitarians have put a lot of effort into producing tools like Tor and Freegate that can be used to access the Internet freely from anywhere, fighting the restrictions placed by the governments of such countries as China and Iran. But according to a new study from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, not many people are using the tools. What's more, the researchers found that the most popular circumvention tools aren't the ones designed to protect dissidents. Instead, most of the people who are avoiding censorship restrictions are using simple proxies to do so, which connect users to blocked content but don't typically take steps to conceal the identity of the person accessing the information. The researchers are now working to figure out how to encourage adoption of the tools that better protect people. The researchers found that in countries that filter the Internet heavily, no more than 3 percent of the Internet-using population turns to censorship circumvention tools to get around restrictions. And even this estimate is high, they say. It's hard to measure usage under these circumstances, and the figures may include people who aren't in countries where Internet traffic is filtered. The numbers might also count people multiple times if they use multiple tools. "It's a worrying finding," says Ethan Zuckerman <http://ethanzuckerman.com/>, one of the lead authors of the report and cofounder of the blogging advocacy group Global Voices. "I think those of us in countries where Internet access is virtually unfettered tend to assume that there would be massive, pent-up demand to access blocked content. But it's easy to forget--it's hard to want what you don't know about and have never had. [...] Continua qui: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26574/?nlid=3655