CensorTracker: Bypass Censorship

CensorTracker is an extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox which helps to bypass censorship and to detect websites blocked through the DPI filters.

Features

CensorTracker provides a lot of useful features, here are the most important:

Configurable proxy
Country-specific proxying
Detects DPI-filtration
Bypass censorship and restrictions
Warns about sites that transfer data to third parties

How does DPI-filters detection work?

What about this "Report DPI-filter" thing?

We are collecting anonymized data to check the availability issues of the websites for users from different parts of the country. Such data helps us to extend the list of blocked websites for proxying them and fastly react to new acts of censorship.

Our backend is open source, so you can check how it works: censortracker_backend

This is an experimental feature and can be removed in future releases if it turns out that it is an ineffective way to detect censorship.

Development

Prerequisites

Make sure you have required versions of node and npm, which are:

node v15.4.0 or higher
npm 7.6.3 or higher

Optionally, you may like:

docker
nvm

The build was tested only on the following operating systems:

Ubuntu 19.10
macOS Catalina v10.15.7

We don't guarantee that CensorTracker will work on outdated versions of browsers, so make sure you're using the latest ones.

We've tested CensorTracker on the following versions:

Mozilla Firefox 80 or higher
Google Chrome 80 or higher

Docker

You can use docker to avoid installation of all the requirements globally:

~ docker-compose build
~ docker-compose run ct npm run build:{BROWSER}

Installation

Firstly, you will need to install dependencies:

~ npm install

Now you can build an extension for Chrome like this:

~ npm run build:chrome
~ cd dist/chrome

and for Firefox, like this:

~ npm run build:firefox
~ cd dist/firefox

Troubleshooting: If you're getting error on building an extension using npm, please make sure that your shell supports per-command environment variables (i.e something like this NODE_ENV=production npm run build:firefox:prod)

Going to production

You can build a production version of the extension for Chrome like this:

~ npm run build:chrome:prod
~ npm run release:chrome
~ cd release/chrome

and for Firefox like this:

~ npm run build:firefox:prod
~ npm run release:firefox
~ cd release/firefox

Attention: Webpack automatically increments a key version in the manifest.json file on every build. To prevent such behavior you need to add BUILDUP=0 before the npm run command, just like that:

~ BUILDUP=0 npm run build:firefox:prod

Testing

To run all the kind of tests just run following command:

~ npm run test

to run just unit tests:

~ npm run test:unit

and to run end-to-end tests you need too add chromedriver to your $PATH and then run this command:

~ npm run test:e2e

Attention: e2e tests works only on unix systems and requires OpenSSL for generating chrome extension id.

License

Censor Tracker is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

vitlav/censortracker