Updates on alkasir: Addressing privacy and security concerns
After the beta launch of alkasir and over 9,000 downloads later, we gathered all feedback we received from people who helped test the software and took many feature requests and citicism into serious consideration. The most vital request thus far is the need for strict privacy so that even in the event of a hack, no one’s IP would be leaked, and people could use alkasir with confidence.
As we noted in the previous post, one of the main goals of alkasir is to gather the data necessary in order to identify the trend in regional censorship and help tackle it in an organized, informed fashion. For this to be possible, we had to seperate users/reporters by country. After much thought we have found a way to do this more securely without revealing anyone’s IP or browsing record, private data that alkasir’s server wouldn’t obtain. We realize that upon launching a controversial software like this, we would also have huge responsibility to ensure the security of its users, and with your help we are constantly finding ways to improve in this regard.
In a matter of days alkasir’s server will be updated with the introduction of these privacy protection methods:
1) Immediate deletion of the IP address of any person reporting the blocked website; the log information will not contain it. The only information retrieved from the reporter will be the ISP and country, which are two essential details for the reporting process to work.
2) Immediate deletion of the IP address of users of the secure tunnel and replacing any information in the log about users with only the ISP and Country. This is also important to keep the tracking process of level of use of the software and to discover any failures of the service linked to a specific ISP in a particular country.
Upon completion of these key updates, we will officially declare that the alkasir server from that point onward does not store any personal information of users or reporters.
In order to keep up with these updates, we encourage you to sign up as a member on alkasir.com, where you will be informed on updated versions, any further instructions to deal with any potential blockage, or to keep yourself alerted on whether or not all ports of the software are still accessible.
Stay tuned for big updates within the next few days!
