Welcome to the Official Schedule for RightsCon 2019, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age.
Together at RightsCon Tunis, our first summit hosted in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 2500 expert practitioners will come together across over 400 sessions to shape, contribute to, and drive forward the global agenda for the future of our human rights.
Important note: Whether you’re a session organizer, speaker, or participant, you’ll need to login to Sched or create an account in order to get the most out of the program (including creating a profile and building your own customized RightsCon schedule).
Refraction Networking (RN) is a new kind of censorship circumvention tool, which is the culmination of more than eight years of research. Unlike conventional circumvention methods that use proxies located on individual hosts, which can be identified or blocked by censors, RN places proxies, called refraction stations, within the networks of participating Internet Service Providers (ISPs). To use RN, users open connections to innocuous, non-complicit websites, and embed a hidden cryptographic signal in these connections. If the connection passes by a refraction station, the station detects the signal and acts as a proxy on behalf of the user, allowing the user to reach any website. To the censor, it appears the client is only connected to an innocuous (unblocked) website, making it difficult for the censor to block without blocking a large number of potentially useful sites. In this session, we will give a high-level description and brief history of Refraction Networking and its challenges, and describe our ongoing deployment that we have operated over the past 6 months. We will describe our experience operating our deployment in heavily-censored regions for hundreds of thousands of users, and describe our ongoing work to scale-up and add new features.
