Top 10 technologies to beat tyranny

2. Blogs
Shaun Nichols: Perhaps it's the journalist in me, or perhaps it's the unruly new-world colonist in me, but I consider free speech to be hugely important and I fought long and hard to get this at or near the top of the list.

With the maturing of the web and the growth of site providers, the concept of the blog has exploded in the past decade to become a central element of the web as we know it.

In recent years, the blog has also proved itself an invaluable tool for giving ordinary citizens a voice and allowing them to speak their minds. Almost every week, it seems, we find critically important news from some part of the world that is only emerging through blogs.

With state agencies now tightly controlling the press in so many parts of the world, blogs are often the only way that the rest of the planet can find out what's going on in a region and how the people are truly getting on.

So much effort now is being put into getting computers into remote and impoverished areas of the world. I believe that shortly after those efforts are established, someone needs to offer a programme which gives those same populations free hosting and access to self-publishing tools.

Iain Thomson: Shaun was indeed vociferous in his arguments on this one, but should blogs really be this high one wonders?

On one level blogs really have become the new political pamphlet, but with a much wider scope. If Thomas Paine had been alive today I suspect he would be turning the air blue with purple prose to stir up his readers. One hopes he wouldn't be tempted to add LOL to some of them as well.

The importance of the blogosphere in shaping national moods is growing, and restrictive states are clamping down on bloggers if they don't follow the party line. One of China's leading bloggers has said he is giving up because of the constant worry that he might end up in prison for expressing his views.

Blogging is particularly effective in states that control the media. Since the traditional forms of communication are compromised, people automatically look outside at blogs for an alternative slant on what's going on. They just have to find bloggers they trust.

Here in the West the media poses a different problem, since they are the ones outing anonymous bloggers. A UK court recently ruled that there was no right to anonymity for bloggers, leading to the shutdown of an informative police blog.

1. Web proxies
Iain Thomson: In an age of internet communication, anonymity is surely the best tool for those in the business of getting rid of oppression.

A project known as TOR, a military system developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, was taken over by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is now being used to shield internet users from repressive regimes around the world.

When the first internet protocols were formed there was little thought of the future that lay before the internet. There are strong calls for a revision in the basic IP principles to identify users individually. While this might make life easier for e-commerce, it would be a death knell for internet users' freedoms.

Anonymity is what makes the internet so much more subversive than Caxton's press ever was. In a minute's post online, millions more readers can obtain information than was ever possible under dead tree publishing.

But how people obtain that information has to be safe, and TOR is a valuable tool in being able to do that. Information on its own is not enough, it has to be accessed freely.

Shaun Nichols: Again, it's a fallacy for any user to believe that they are completely anonymous online. When your computer connects to another system, it's invariably going to leave a trail.

As any hacker worth their salt will tell you, the key is to make that trail as hard to follow as possible. Going through protected connections and servers is one way to do so, bouncing your connection through numerous proxy systems, and making the tracking process tedious and difficult.

The Onion Router, or TOR, uses both of these. The general idea is that a user's connection goes through a server which then processes the encrypted connection through a series of proxy servers. The result is a virtual dead-end for anyone trying to analyse the path a user took.

The ramifications of this are obvious: users can surf the web without being tracked back to their home systems. Unfortunately, there is also an easy way for oppressive regimes to prevent this: simply use a filter tool at the ISP level to block users from accessing the TOR service.