Censorship, no thank you!
CENO is an innovative censorship circumvention technology based on a p2p distributed caching network.
The goal of CENO is to make access to restricted content in areas facing censorship easy and more reliable. CENO exfiltrates document requests out of a censored area using an anonymous transport layer. It then uses networks such as Freenet to store encrypted documents in such a way that they can be easily retrieved securely by individuals in the censored area.
CENO relies on a number of components to carry out different tasks with the goal of making content blocked by censors readily available to individuals facing censorship. Each of these components is explained in greater detail in the Technical Overview section.
The CENO Client acts as a gateway between your web browser and the CENO network. It makes sure that the requests your browser makes are sent securely through CENO instead of directly to the Internet. When you make a request for a web page, a lookup is done to see if CENO has already stored a version of that website that it can return to you immediately. When CENO needs to acquire the contents of the requested site for you, the client makes use of a secure transport to anonymously contact a bridge node. The bridge node then fetches the site on your behalf and stores it in a distributed network. Later, the client will be able to retrieve the contents of the site, making it available to all CENO users.
CENO is not designed to be used for a lot of common internet activity. You would not want to use it on sites that require login, or sites that are heavily dependent on dynamic content. CENO is designed for any individual that desires access to content, such as news, that is censored in their area.
CENO is a free (as in freedom) and open source project. This means that anyone is welcomed to read the source code and all design and reference material, to submit code implementing new features or fixes, to create new content and documentation, and to distribute the software (with or without your changes) under the GPL v3 license.
The project is hosted on Github where contributions in the form of pull requests and issue reports/discussion are more than welcome!
CENO also has a public IRC (Internet Relay Chat) room available for you to
discuss the project with the developers and other eQualit.ie members. The
channel is #CENO on the freenode network. A web-based IRC
client is also available.
CENO is designed to handle errors and misconfiguration issues as gracefully as possible, but from time to time, something will happen that could not be perfectly anticipated and recovered from. In such cases you will be presented with an error page upon requesting a document from the web. Before reporting your error to the developers, you should try to troubleshoot the problem by following the advice the error page will offer. In the case that an error in CENO's implementation is encountered, you will be presented with a message instructing you that it may be worthwhile to contact the developers. If this is the case, or there is an issue you have encountered and cannot find a solution for, you can report issues on Github's public issue tracker. This will require that you possess and use a Github account, however it will give your problem more visibility and open up a space for other users and developers to discuss the issue and collaborate to find a solution. Please try to be as clear and specific about your issue as possible. Some useful information to include in your report:
- The website/page you were attempting to visit
- Your browser's proxy configuration
- Your client configuration
Alternatively, you can email reports of your issue to ceno-info (at) equalit(dot)ie, replacing (at) with @ and (dot) with ..