Sri Lanka surfers turn to anonymizers amidst allegations of net censorship

June 20, 2007 (LBO) – Sri Lankan surfers turned to proxy servers to access a pro-guerilla news website amidst claims that the government has started to practise net censorship in the country. The website, Tamilnet.com alleged that authorities have asked internet service providers to block access to the site in Sri Lanka.

To access the site, Sri Lanka surfers have turned to annonymizers or proxy servers that originally came up to counter net censorship practiced in authoritarian regimes such as North Korea and China.

The first of such sites, www.anonymouse.org was created by a German computer science student Alexander Pircher in 1997.

Since then thousands of such sites have come up, frustrating the efforts of authoritarian governments to block websites and blogs run by 'cyber dissidents'.

We're bringing people the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Pircher has said of his invention.

Article 19 of the United Nations declaration has a clause which guarantees freedom of information as a fundamental right.

Proxy-servers now labeled anonymizers are hunted down and blocked in countries like China, but new ones come up just as quickly. Users have to access an

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