Reporters Without Borders Paves Access to 9 Banned Websites in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and More
Reporters Without Borders has made copies of sites banned in several countries in order to allow readers access to previously censored "independently-reported news and information." But the nonprofit organization hasn't stopped there.
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Reporters Without Borders has made copies of sites banned in several countries in order to allow readers access to previously censored “independently-reported news and information.” But the nonprofit organization hasn’t stopped there.
They also got Google and Microsoft involved, making “the economic and political cost of blocking the mirror sites” a price that many countries would not be willing to pay.
BBC News:
Reporters Without Borders has set up mirrors, or copies, of nine websites that are banned in 11 countries, allowing people there to see them.
They include the Tibet Post, which is blocked in China, and Grani.ru, which is blocked in Russia.
The group said it would maintain the sites for several months as part of Operation Collateral Freedom…A spokesman for the campaign group explained that it had set up “proxy/mirrors” – essentially replica websites updated in real-time – on Amazon Web Services, a division of the online retailer that sells cloud-based computing services to third parties…In addition, mirror copies have also been placed on similar cloud platforms run by Microsoft and Google.
This means the news websites can now be accessed via the tech giants’ internet protocol (IP) addresses rather than their own, and the hope is that the authorities will be discouraged from trying to block these new links at their source.
Read more.
—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata
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