2007 Circumvention Landscape Report: Methods, Uses, and Tools

As the Internet has exploded over the past fifteen years, recently reaching over a billion users, dozens of national governments from China to Saudi Arabia have tried to control the network by filtering out content objectionable to the countries for any of a number of reasons. A large variety of different projects have developed tools that can be used to circumvent this filtering, allowing people in filtered countries access to otherwise filtered content. In this report, we describe the mechanisms of filtering and circumvention and evaluate ten projects that develop tools that can be used to circumvent filtering: Anonymizer, Ultrareach, DynaWeb Freegate, Circumventor/CGIProxy, Psiphon, Tor, JAP, Coral, and Hamachi. We evaluated these tools in 2007 -- using both tests from within filtered countries and tests within a lab environment -- for their utility, usability, security, promotion, sustainability, and openness. We find that all of the tools use the same basic mechanisms of proxying and encryption but that they differ in their models of hosting proxies. Some tools use proxies that are centrally hosted, others use proxies that are peer hosted, and others use re-routing methods that use a combination of the two. We find that, in general, the tools work in the sense that they allow users to access pages that are otherwise blocked by filtering countries but that performance of the tools is generally poor and that many tools have significant, unreported security vulnerabilities. The report was completed in 2007 and released to a group of private sponsors. Many of the findings of the report are now out of date, but we present them now, as is, because we think that the broad conclusions of the report about these tools remain valid and because we hope that other researchers will benefit from access to the methods used to test the tools. Responses from developers of the tools in question are included in the report

Development of results-based financing framework for sanitation delivery

Access to sanitation in Ghana is one of the lowest in the West Africa sub-region with coverage of about 15%. Several projects to increase access to sanitation have achieved little success. Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) was introduced in Ghana and it was expected to bring about a big change. Coverage however remains off track, and a major change is required if the country is to achieve the MDG target of 56% for sanitation by 2015. The Results-Based Financing (RBF) refers to public funds being used to pay for services ONLY when pre-specified results are achieved. A stakeholders meeting was held to discuss the merits and strategies for implementing RBF for CLTS in Ghana. The framework developed in Ghana has five stages and payments will be made only when the pre-defined outputs/outcomes are completed and verified by a third party. It is expected that with effective facilitation and monitoring of the process, there will be a rapid increase in access to sanitation in Ghana

Yes, You Can Control Crabgrass!

A combination of cultural and chemical control practices works best in getting rid of this pest. Two new chemicals, in particular, show promise in preventing crabgrass seed germination and seedling establishment

Facilities management plan: tool for effective operation and maintenance of school WASH facilities

A School Health Education Programme (SHEP) Policy and Strategy Framework was developed for Ghana in 2010 and launched in 2014. Safe water and sanitation are key components of the policy. A National Strategy for WASH in Schools has been developed under this component. To ensure the sustainability of school WASH facilities a comprehensive Facilities and Management Plan (FMP) was developed. The inability of existing schools to properly operate and manage their WASH facilities was found to be one of the main challenges leading to the breakdown of facilities provided. The FMP focuses on the necessary actions, and the people responsible to make sure the actions are taken to ensure the sustainability of what is provided. It also provides a costing framework which will enable school authorities and the managers of schools to provide the appropriate resource when required for the well-being of school children in Ghana

Stop Lawn Pests!

Your first line of defense against weeds, diseases and other pests is a good dense turf. No lawn is immune to these pests, but they needn\u27t spoil the uniformity and appearance of your turf. Here\u27s what to do

Evaluation of commercial buttermilk and pre-acidified cultured buttermilk by organoleptic and gas chromatographic analyses

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1968 R62Master of Scienc

The representation of protein complexes in the Protein Ontology

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/