Google Ideas announces new proxy tool to combat web censorship and surveillance

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The Google Ideas think tank is today announcing its latest initiatives through three projects that it started with the help of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Gen Next Foundation. The new projects were announced a summit in New York held by Google Ideas called “Conflict in a Connected World.”

At the event, Google Ideas announced three new projects, one of which is a new proxy tool that aims to provide safer and open web access to users in repressive countries.

With our partners, we will launch several new products and initiatives designed to help:

• Project Shield is an initiative that enables people to use Google’s technology to better protect websites that might otherwise have been taken offline by “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks. We’re currently inviting webmasters serving independent news, human rights, and elections-related content to apply to join our next round of trusted testers.
• The Digital Attack Map is a live data visualization, built through a collaboration between Arbor Networks and Google Ideas, that maps DDoS attacks designed to take down websites—and their content—around the globe. This tool shows real-time anonymous traffic data related to these attacks on free speech, and also lets people explore historic trends and see related news reports of outages happening on a given day.
• uProxy is a new browser extension under development that lets friends provide each other with a trusted pathway to the web, helping protect an Internet connection from filtering, surveillance or misdirection. The University of Washington and Brave New Software developed the tool, which was seeded by Google Ideas. To learn more about the challenges uProxy aims to address, watch our video.

Google is accepting signups for a restricted beta of the uProxy tool and you can check out the blog post announcing the new projects on Google’s blog to learn more.