The Intention of alkasir, and why it is different

Some people have questioned what the need for alkasir is, how it’s beneficial to users in the Middle East and why we are building further anti-censorship technology when several already exist.

We’d like to take this opportunity to declare that our intention is not to replace any other circumvention software out there, such as Tor. Our intention is to create an extra tool that has a regional focus but can still be used globally. Our main motives behind that are summarized in the following points.

1- We wanted a software marketable to an audience in cultures that do no endorse solutions to bypassing censorship for porn or gambling activities. From first hand experience, we have come to see that it is much harder to convince people in certain societies to use services like Tor which provides access to absolutely anything including culturally prohibited content, access which many people fear would be abused by youth, and hence prevent the usage of.

To go much further than this, we do not have the resources necessary to provide blanket tunneling for all websites, but nor is that a specific interest of ours. Our primary goal is to expose the trend in blocking websites: Which ones are blocked for political, social, and religious reasons? How many of those are blocked? How many people are attempting to access such sites in the different countries, and since when have they been reported as blocked? If applicable, when was the ban lifted? What is the average readership of each of those sites despite the block? We turn these into quantitative data in the form of statistics and graphs and try to find ways we can locate the source of the censorship in Middle Eastern countries. These are answers we are exploring, and this is what we are primarily using alkasir for, hence why it operates in the specific way it does.

2- alkasir doesn’t allow users to simply bypass the ISP for any website people wish to access. alkasir applies targeted tunneling by only forwarding the user through a tunnel for websites known and confirmed to be blocked. In other words, it does not interfere with your connection to the majority of websites on the Internet, which aren’t blocked. It takes you to a tunnel only if you try to access one of the websites known to be blocked, making browsing the majority of websites more convenient.

3- Trust is an issue. You know we are all being monitored. Regional governments are investing millions annually in censorship technology. Each year, web censorship is more aggressive, and our privacy becomes more at risk. For this reason, and for this reason alone, we cannot openly provide the source code of alkasir with anyone else except for voluntary developers who can support the software with their skills and services. This software requires hard work to maintain, and we cannot take any visible risks that would allow ISPs to render it ineffective.

4- No circumvention tool or software is perfect. There are cases of circumvention tools that allow you to browse blocked websites, fills your system with ads, banners, and uses your personal information for marketing purposes, which they state quite openly in their Terms. However, we do not feel that channeling everything on the web is strictly relevant to everyone in the Middle East, who wish to access actual information that is political, social or religious in nature. People do not need to be ridden with ads or have their requests be delayed or poorly processed due to servers that channel everything and act as anonimyity tools. Our purpose is to allow people to access only blocked websites and that means we don’t need massive bandwidth that some commercial products or heavily funded projects require, and that allows us to operate with much smaller resources, without bombarding you with ads or providing you with a service that is intolerably slow.

5- alkasir can help fight censorship much more reliably than other services because it actually validates a block on the ground and updates everything regularly, creating a complete picture of what is blocked and what is available in the public domain. Our intention is to expose governments, help reformists, and through organized circumvention, enable users to access information, which is a basic human rights.

6- No one is benefiting from this financially. We are doing this voluntarily, with it being a self-funded project, and thus working with a limited amount of resources, but providing a tool that is already being used daily by hundreds of people in the region, without a single ad or inexplicable URL in the way.

7- We do not claim our service is flawless, rather this post is an explanation of why it exists, the intention behind its existence and why we’re different than anonymizers or blanket tunneling softwares. In terms of the technology itself, we are still in BETA version and are expecting to significantly improve with each new launch.

8- We are committed to maintaining confidentiality of sensitive information of users and are open to all sorts of suggestions, ideas, and criticism that would help us refine and make the project benefitial to the MidEast region and the world.

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