On Thurs. Mar 25 ISOC-NY hosted Prof. Jinyang Li in a talk about the use of distributed systems, and particularly the use of the Kaleidoscope Firefox plug-in, in circumventing censorship. This is part of her ongoing research into "exploiting the real world social relationships among users to improve the security and reliability of open distributed systems." The talk explains how traditional censorship workarounds like proxies and P2P can easily be discovered and defeated, but how Kaleidoscope - which passes encrypted data through trusted relays - defies such efforts.