CENO

Censorship, no thank you!

CENO is innovative censorship circumvention technology based on a p2p distributed caching network.

Users do not need to know a friendly proxy server in the uncensored zone to bypass local filtering. CENO maintains strong privacy and anonymity features as well as offering users plausible deniability in an emergency situation. CENO is built in advance of aggressive Internet filtering and the establishment of national intranets to fence off citizens from the wicked Web. Read more about the project here.

Disclaimer

CENO is a work in progress and currently in alpha release. Bugs and imperfections exist. It may be possible for a malicious third party to exploit a weakness to deanonymise your IP address. In most Internet environments, using Tor is recommended for anonymous Internet browsing and publishing. CENO should only be used when all other mature and proven circumvention tools fail.

Also note that CENO is a great tool for reading the news and accessing information that is censored in your area, but since you can only retrieve static content (i.e. text and images) with CENO, it is not a good idea to use it on sites that require login or are heavily dependent on dynamic content.

More information on how to use CENO securely can be found here.

Installing CENO

New users are advised to use the CENOBox, an all-in-one bundle that includes a preconfigured version of all the client-side components. You can download the latest release for your operating system from here.

We recommend to run the Firefox browser, but CENOBox will also work with Chrome/Chromium. You will also need a Java Runtime Environment (in Debian/Ubuntu we recommend the default-jre package, or you can find an appropriate version for your operating system from Oracle.

If you want to build CENOBox manually, read these instructions.

CENOBox in Linux and Mac OS X

Change directory to the path you would like to install CENOBox at (we recommend your /home directory) and execute the following command:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/equalitie/ceno/master/ceno-box/installCENO.sh)"

Once you have installed CENOBox in your system, you can open a protected browser window by navigating to the CENOBox directory and using the CENO.sh script:

cd ~/CENOBox
./CENO.sh

CENOBox will open a new Firefox or Chrome window with a customized profile. Remember that you are protected by CENO only when you are using that browser window to visit websites, and only when CENO Router plugin status is active, which it is by default.

CENO will identify your system's language and show you messages in it, given that a translation exists. In order to explicitly set a language, you can set the CENOLANG environment variable. For example, if you want to use CENO in French, this is the way to execute the CENO.sh script:

CENOLANG=fr-fr ./CENO.sh

CENOBox in Windows

Please note: For CENO to run correctly, Java Runtime Environment and Firefox need to be installed in your computer.

Download the CENOBox installer here and launch it to install CENOBox.

When the installation is complete, CENOBox will open a new Firefox or Chrome window with a customized profile. Remember that you are protected by CENO only when you are using that browser window to visit websites, and only when CENO Router plugin status is active, which it is by default.

To reopen the protected browser, click

Running CENO

The first time you launch CENO, there are several things you need to know:

CENO uses the Freenet censorship resistant platform for communications and storage. The Freenet package is bundled with CENOBox. When you launch CENOBox from your computer, three things happen:

The CENO client software starts;
A window with a customized profile complete with CENO plugin of your Firefox or Chrome browser opens on the CENO portal page (http://localhost:3090/portal);
Freenet starts in your computer.

When you launch it, Freenet needs to discover other peers and learn about the network before it connects properly. This will take a few minutes, which means you need to wait a bit before you get results from CENO. As it learns, its gets faster. The CENO 'Status Indicator' will display CONNECTED when Freenet has discovered enough peers. This will happen every time you start the software.
Both CENO and Freenet use a local proxy client to connect with your browser. CENO is accessible via (http://localhost:3090/portal) and Freenet via (http://localhost:8888).
There are two ways to receive content via CENO: