Google talk block by BTL???

using and ISP who doesn't have BTL as its backbone. will Gov't tell that ISP to block Skype too? or its only BTL who wanted skype blocked becuase BTL is loose revenue? i'll have to get an ISP who doesn;t use BTL as its backbone so i can use 100% of the internet features. If i'm paying for it, i should damn use it as i please. I gwen get wah satellite.

"Ambition is the last refuge of failure." Oscar Wilde

Iv'e heard the gov told BTL to block skype cause they weren't getting any revenue sharing from it.

Well hmm, skype to skype calls no one gets revenue on, so that's just bogus.

Why do we want external VOIP anyway BTL offers it.

Well unless your out of the country you can't use BTLs VOIP.
BTL doesn't offer video calls, file transfers shared whiteboards etc..

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, pee in it, and serve it to the people that piss you off. And supa-fly koncas has some fries if you want some! (No ideal what he might have done with them though :)

About EFF

From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people's radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.

Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public. Sometimes just defending technologies isn't enough, so EFF also supports the development of freedom-enhancing inventions.

EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight —and win—more cases.

For information on donating to EFF, see
http://www.eff.org/support/

Learn about significant EFF court victories
http://www.eff.org/legal/victories/

Learn more about EFF's founding
http://www.eff.org/about/history.php

Learn more about current hot cases:

» AT&T Class Action
» MoveOn v. Viacom
» E-voting Florida Case
» FOIA Lawsuit on FBI Spying

Learn more about EFF campaigns, projects, and issues:
File Sharing
Bloggers' Rights
Intellectual Property
Tor

Support EFF's efforts through our Action Center:
http://action.eff.org

To stay up to date on EFF issues, subscribe to our EFFector newsletter, or check out our weblogs, Deep Links and miniLinks.http://www.eff.org/

About EFF

From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people's radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.

Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public. Sometimes just defending technologies isn't enough, so EFF also supports the development of freedom-enhancing inventions.

EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight —and win—more cases.

For information on donating to EFF, see
http://www.eff.org/support/

Learn about significant EFF court victories
http://www.eff.org/legal/victories/

Learn more about EFF's founding
http://www.eff.org/about/history.php

Learn more about current hot cases:

» AT&T Class Action
» MoveOn v. Viacom
» E-voting Florida Case
» FOIA Lawsuit on FBI Spying

Learn more about EFF campaigns, projects, and issues:
File Sharing
Bloggers' Rights
Intellectual Property
Tor

Support EFF's efforts through our Action Center:
http://action.eff.org

To stay up to date on EFF issues, subscribe to our EFFector newsletter, or check out our weblogs, Deep Links and miniLinks.http://www.eff.org/

Tor: Overview
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.

Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.

Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are supporting Tor's development as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication. Which locations have employees working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting websites? Which research divisions are communicating with the company's patent lawyers?

A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.

The variety of people who use Tor is actually part of what makes it so secure. Tor hides you among the other users on the network, so the more populous and diverse the user base for Tor is, the more your anonymity will be protected.

Why we need Tor

Using Tor protects you against a common form of Internet surveillance known as "traffic analysis." Traffic analysis can be used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. Knowing the source and destination of your Internet traffic allows others to track your behavior and interests. This can impact your checkbook if, for example, an e-commerce site uses price discrimination based on your country or institution of origin. It can even threaten your job and physical safety by revealing who and where you are. For example, if you're travelling abroad and you connect to your employer's computers to check or send mail, you can inadvertently reveal your national origin and professional affiliation to anyone observing the network, even if the connection is encrypted.

How does traffic analysis work? Internet data packets have two parts: a data payload and a header used for routing. The data payload is whatever is being sent, whether that's an email message, a web page, or an audio file. Even if you encrypt the data payload of your communications, traffic analysis still reveals a great deal about what you're doing and, possibly, what you're saying. That's because it focuses on the header, which discloses source, destination, size, timing, and so on.

A basic problem for the privacy minded is that the recipient of your communications can see that you sent it by looking at headers. So can authorized intermediaries like Internet service providers, and sometimes unauthorized intermediaries as well. A very simple form of traffic analysis might involve sitting somewhere between sender and recipient on the network, looking at headers.

But there are also more powerful kinds of traffic analysis. Some attackers spy on multiple parts of the Internet and use sophisticated statistical techniques to track the communications patterns of many different organizations and individuals. Encryption does not help against these attackers, since it only hides the content of Internet traffic, not the headers.

The solution: a distributed, anonymous network

Tor helps to reduce the risks of both simple and sophisticated traffic analysis by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you—and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going.

To create a private network pathway with Tor, the user's software or client incrementally builds a circuit of encrypted connections through servers on the network. The circuit is extended one hop at a time, and each server along the way knows only which server gave it data and which server it is giving data to. No individual server ever knows the complete path that a data packet has taken. The client negotiates a separate set of encryption keys for each hop along the circuit to ensure that each hop can't trace these connections as they pass through.

Once a circuit has been established, many kinds of data can be exchanged and several different sorts of software applications can be deployed over the Tor network. Because each server sees no more than one hop in the circuit, neither an eavesdropper nor a compromised server can use traffic analysis to link the connection's source and destination. Tor only works for TCP streams and can be used by any application with SOCKS support.

For efficiency, the Tor software uses the same circuit for connections that happen within the same minute or so. Later requests are given a new circuit, to keep people from linking your earlier actions to the new ones.

Hidden services

Tor also makes it possible for users to hide their locations while offering various kinds of services, such as web publishing or an instant messaging server. Using Tor "rendezvous points," other Tor users can connect to these hidden services, each without knowing the other's network identity. This hidden service functionality could allow Tor users to set up a website where people publish material without worrying about censorship. Nobody would be able to determine who was offering the site, and nobody who offered the site would know who was posting to it.

Staying anonymous

Tor can't solve all anonymity problems. It focuses only on protecting the transport of data. You need to use protocol-specific support software if you don't want the sites you visit to see your identifying information. For example, you can use web proxies such as Privoxy while web browsing to block cookies and withhold information about your browser type.

Also, to protect your anonymity, be smart. Don't provide your name or other revealing information in web forms. Be aware that, like all anonymizing networks that are fast enough for web browsing, Tor does not provide protection against end-to-end timing attacks: If your attacker can watch the traffic coming out of your computer, and also the traffic arriving at your chosen destination, he can use statistical analysis to discover that they are part of the same circuit.

The future of Tor

Providing a usable anonymizing network on the Internet today is an ongoing challenge. We want software that meets users' needs. We also want to keep the network up and running in a way that handles as many users as possible. Security and usability don't have to be at odds: As Tor's usability increases, it will attract more users, which will increase the possible sources and destinations of each communication, thus increasing security for everyone. We're making progress, but we need your help. Please consider running a server or volunteering as a developer.

Ongoing trends in law, policy, and technology threaten anonymity as never before, undermining our ability to speak and read freely online. These trends also undermine national security and critical infrastructure by making communication among individuals, organizations, corporations, and governments more vulnerable to analysis. Each new user and server provides additional diversity, enhancing Tor's ability to put control over your security and privacy back into your hands.

November 27, 2006
Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor

By CHRISTOPHER MASON
TORONTO, Nov. 21 — Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or “hactivists,” have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government censorship of the Web.

The program, called psiphon (pronounced “SY-fon”), will be released on Dec. 1 in response to growing Internet censorship that is pushing citizens in restrictive countries to pursue more elaborate and sophisticated programs to gain access to Western news sites, blogs and other censored material.

“The problem is growing exponentially,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which designed psiphon. “What might have started as censorship of pornography and Western news organizations has expanded to include blogging sites, religious sites, health information sites and many others.”

Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country (psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person’s computer into an access point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain access to censored sites. The program’s designers say there is no evidence on the user’s computer of having viewed censored material once they erase their Internet history after each use. The software is part of a broader effort to live up to the initial hopes human rights activists had that the Internet would provide unprecedented freedom of expression for those living in restrictive countries.

“Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible extent so we’re trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise that the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication,” Dr. Deibert said.

When it opened in 2000, the Citizen Lab, which is one of four institutions in the OpenNet Initiative (opennetinitiative.org), was actively monitoring a handful of countries, mainly China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that censored the Internet. But citing increased filtering by governments, the lab now monitors more than 40 countries.

The program’s designers say existing anticensorship programs are too complicated for everyday computer users, leave evidence on the user’s computer and lack security in part because they have to be advertised publicly, making it easy for censors to detect and block access to them.

“Now you will have potentially thousands, even tens of thousands, of private proxies that are almost impossible for censors to follow one by one,” said Qiang Xiao, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Instead of publicly advertising the required login and password information, psiphon is designed to be shared within trusted social circles of friends, family and co-workers. This feature is meant to keep the program away from censors but is also the largest drawback because it limits efforts to get the program to as many people as possible.

The software is also designed to allow users to post on blogs and other Web sites like Wikipedia, which has been a problem for some other anticensorship programs. By requiring only login information and no installation, psiphon is intended for anyone with basic computer knowledge because psiphon functions much the same as any typical browser.

“So far it’s been tech solutions for tech people,” said Dmitri Vitaliev, a human rights activist in Russia who has been testing psiphon in countries where the Internet is censored. “We have not had very good tools so everyone has been eagerly awaiting psiphon.”..........................................................(sample)..http://psiphon.civisec.org/samples/psiphon_guide.pdf.....................and peep this on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMMzGO_KfhY

I have to say that Google talk is back on BTL's internet service. I have to say that its was blocked for three days. Same like they did Skype before officially blocking. I tired the services on there Cable, DSL and Fiber lines and it was block. However, I use a Satellite connecting and wow, it connected. uhm.... BTl.. what is happening???

*** LEGALIZE FREEDOM ***

Just doing a comparison between VoIP services that BTL has been blocking (up above) and the same services under a WISP company in Corozal....

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Vonage (SIP) - WORKS

IConnectThere (SIP) - HAVENT TRIED

TomatoVine (SIP) - HAVENT TRIED

SpeakEasy (SIP) - WORKS

Yahoo IM Voice (SIP) - WORKS

Gizmo Project (SIP) - HAVENT TRIED

Skype (P2P) - DEFINITELY WORKS

Google Talk (Jabber) - WORKS

Soyo (IAX) - HAVENT TRIED

"the enemy of my enemy is my friend"

is already offering high speed internet to homes WITHOUT the blocked VoIP services and considerably cheaper dan BTL.....just something to think about....kicking BTLs ass left right and center!!!!!!!
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend"

BTL WEBTALK too?????

<

WHAT IS BLOCKED RIGHT NOW?
Updated February, 2007

Vonage (SIP) - BLOCKED

IConnectThere (SIP) - BLOCKED

TomatoVine (SIP) - BLOCKED

SpeakEasy (SIP) - BLOCKED

Yahoo IM Voice (SIP) - BLOCKED

Gizmo Project (SIP) - BLOCKED

Skype (P2P) - BLOCKED

Google Talk (Jabber) - NORMAL

Soyo (IAX) - NORMAL

<

Is this true?