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)"
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.
Once you have installed CENOBox in your system, you can re-open a protected
browser window by navigating to the CENOBox directory and using the CENO.sh
script
cd ~/CENOBox
./CENO.sh
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
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:
- Request websites via the CENO URL bar;
- Browse pre-loaded news feeds via CENO Channels.