FlossManuals.net: Circumvention Tools. How to Bypass Internet Censorship (2009/2011)

A book describes circumvention tools and explains why you might want to use them, and honestly describes the risks you must consider before circumventing blockers or monitors. Blockers and monitors restrict access to areas of the Internet, and this book describes simple techniques for bypassing those restrictions.

The growth of the Internet has been paralleled by attempts to control how people use it, motivated by a desire to protect children, businesses, personal information, the capacity of networks, or moral interests, for example. Some of these concerns involve allowing people to control their own experience of the Internet (for instance, letting people use spam-filtering tools to prevent spam from being delivered to their own e-mail accounts), but others involve restricting how other people can use the Internet and what those other people can and can’t access. The latter case causes significant conflicts and disagreements when the people whose access is restricted don’t agree that the blocking is appropriate or in their interest. Problems also arise when blocking mechanisms and filters reduce access to useful business, health, educational, and other information.

Because of concerns about the effect of internet blocking mechanisms, and the implications of censorship, many individuals and groups are working hard to ensure that the Internet, and the information on it, are freely available to everyone who wants it. There is a vast amount of energy, from commercial, non-profit and volunteer groups, devoted to creating tools and techniques to bypass Internet censorship. Some techniques require no special software, just a knowledge of where to look for the same information. Programmers have developed a variety of more capable tools, which address different types of filtering and blocking. These tools, often called “circumvention tools” help Internet users access information that they might not otherwise be able to see. This book documents simple circumvention techniques such as a cached file or web proxy, and also describes more complex methods using Tor, which stands for The Onion Router, involving a sophisticated network of proxy servers.

This manual has content that was largely written at a Book Sprint. The Book Sprint was held in the beautiful hills of Upper New York State in the US. Eight people worked together over an intensive five-day period to produce the book. It is a living document of course and is available online for free, where you can also edit it and improve it.

Published FlossManuals.net, 2011-03-10
240 pages
GNU General Public License version 2

project website (added on 28-5-2011)
FlossManuals page (updated on 28-5-2011)

PDF (updated on 28-5-2011)
PDF (lightweight Quickstart PDF, 8 pages; added on 28-5-2011)

Ben Fry: Visualizing Data (2008)

How you can take advantage of data that you might otherwise never use? With the help of the free software programming environment called Processing, this book helps you represent data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. You’ll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets.

Enormous quantities of data go unused or underused today, simply because people can’t visualize the quantities and relationships in it. Using a downloadable programming environment developed by the author, Visualizing Data demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more.

How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters of the human genome compare to those of a chimp or a mouse? What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look like? With Visualizing Data, you learn how to answer complex questions like these with thoroughly interactive displays. We’re not talking about cookie-cutter charts and graphs. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called “Processing”.

Used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner, the Processing beta is available free. With this tool and Visualizing Data as a guide, you’ll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. This book teaches you:

* The seven stages of visualizing data — acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact
* How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details
* Several example projects with the code to make them work
* Positive and negative points of each representation discussed. The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want to convey about your data set

The book does not provide ready-made “visualizations” that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you’ll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents — why the data was collected, what’s interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.

Publisher O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2008
ISBN 0596514557, 9780596514556
Length 366 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Ira Greenberg: Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art (2007)

“This book is written especially for artists, designers, and other creative professionals and students exploring code art, graphics programming, and computational aesthetics. The book provides a solid and comprehensive foundation in programming, including object-oriented principles, and introduces you to the easy-to-grasp Processing language, so no previous coding experience is necessary. The book then goes through using Processing to code lines, curves, shapes, and motion, continuing to the point where you’ll have mastered Processing and can really start to unleash your creativity with realistic physics, interactivity, and 3D! In the final chapter, you’ll even learn how to extend your Processing skills by working directly with the powerful Java programming language, the language Processing itself is built with.”

Foreword by Keith Peters
Publisher Springer, 2007
ISBN 159059617X, 9781590596173
810 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-1-20)