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OpenTechFund / bypass-censorship-extension

A browser extension for automatically suggesting mirrors of websites that may be censored.
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
16 stars 3 forks source link

readme

Bypass Censorship Extension

Cross-browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that suggests available reverse-proxy urls and/or mirrors for sites that may be censored. This extension and its list of mirrors is curated by BypassCensorship.org.

This was originally a fork of the RSF Censorship Detector extension developped by Brendan Abolivier and Clément Salaün during the Collateral Freedom hackaton organised by Reporters Without Borders and An Daol Vras but has since been completely rewritten. To learn more about RSF's Collateral Freedom initiative, visit their site here.

Install

Click one of the buttons below to install this extension for Chrome or Firefox. Afterwards, you can choose to pin the extension to your toolbar.

Chrome Web Store

Mozilla Add-on

Usage

The extension will add an icon next to your address bar. Most of the time, this icon will stay unchanged, and clicking it will show a message saying that no replication of the current tab's website has been set up by BypassCensorship.org.

Screenshot 1

When connecting (or trying to connect) to a website for which a replicated version has been set up by BypassCensorship.org, the extension's icon will turn red. Clicking it will open a pop-up page with a button.

Screenshot 2

If you click the button 'Take me to a mirror', it will bring you to the replicated website. (Alternatively, it also gives you the option to use Tor).

Screenshot 3

The green icon means that you are currently on a mirror.

Short Links

If you are a user that has been given an API key, you can use it to generate a special short link for any mirror URL and copy it to the clipboard. To enable that:

  1. Right-click the extension button and click Manage extension
  2. Scroll down the resulting page and click on Extension options
  3. Paste the API key in the resulting popup.

Screenshot 4

Now going back, when you click on the extension button and a mirror is available, after a moment the button will display a checkmark and a short link directly to the mirrored page will be ready to paste from your clipboard.

Screenshot 5

Contribute

If you want to contribute, please feel free to do so. The first thing to do may be to check the repo's issues. When you've found something to contribute on, just fork this repository, make your changes, and send a pull-request.

Build

To build a development version of the extension from source, first run npm install to install the dependencies, then run the command below to create a development build and load it in Firefox:

npm run build:dev
npm run start:firefox

To build a zip bundle for publication extension, run the command below to create a production build in the dist/prod directory:

npm run build

And then run the following command to automatically bundle it in the dist/xpi directory:

npm run build:xpi

License

AGPLv3

The Bypass Censorship Extension is a free software project licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPLv3) by the Open Technology Fund.