Google last week announced a beta service that will offer protection from Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS) to human rights organizations and media, in and effort to slow the amount of censorship that such attacks cause.
The announcement of Project Shield came during a presentation at the Conflict in a Connected World summit in New York. The gathering included security experts, hacktivists, dissidents, and technologists, in order to explore the nature of conflict and how online tools can both be a source of protection and harm when it comes to expression, and information sharing.
Protecting free speech
"As long as people have expressed ideas, others have tried to silence them. Today one out of every three people lives in a society that is severely censored. Online barriers can include everything from filters that block content to targeted attacks designed to take down websites. For many people, these obstacles are more than an inconvenience—they represent full-scale repression," the company explained in a blog post.
Project Shield uses Google's massive infrastructure to absorb DDoS attacks. Enrollment in the service is by invitation only at the moment, but it could be expanded considerable in the future. The service is free, but will follow page speed pricing, should Google open enrollment and charge for it down the line.
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