As Iran cracks down on encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and Telegram in response to protests, Iranians are turning to lesser-known circumvention tools such as Psiphon to bypass internet filters. Psiphon has already been targeted by malicious actors, including for use against Syrian opposition members in the past, however, and is not a fool-proof solution (Motherboard).
Access Now explains how online censorship works in Iran and why circumvention tools including Psiphon are vulnerable to disruption by direct targeting of servers and other digital infrastructure. Access Now is calling on people outside Iran to show support by signing a petition calling on tech companies not to enable the government’s censorship efforts (Access Now).
World Bank, WeRobotics and Open Aerial Map have launched an Open AI challenge to automate analysis of aerial imagery of Tonga captured in 2017. The ultimate goal is to develop machine learning classifiers which can be used to speed up baseline analyses and assessments in future disasters (WeRobotics).
Digital security expert Troy Hunt takes a look at the security of India’s controversial Aadhar biometric data collection program. He finds that it is not as secure as authorities have claimed, and makes the point that security is better understood as a spectrum rather than a binary of “secure” or “not secure.” (Troy Hunt).
Muhammad Noor of The Rohingya Project penned an op-ed on the organisation’s plans to generate blockchain-based digital IDs for the Rohingya community, which he calls “a new experiment in humanitarianism with an ambitious goal of the large-scale ethnic identification of possibly millions of people across the world.” Many of the technical details – including what the benefit is of using blockchain over other technologies, who will provide the blockchain nodes, what data will be collected to allow individuals to be identified and how it will be secured against misuse – are unclear at this stage (Thomson Reuters Foundation, The Rohingya Project)
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