Another successful Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) was held 6-10 March, 2017. The week-long "global unconference" festival takes place every year in Valencia, Spain. It is a great opportunity for those in the Internet Freedom community to meet up, share experiences, learn from one another, and discuss issues affecting the Internet today. Once again, Psiphon team members were in attendance at this year's IFF. This year’s sessions focused on eight different themes: Community; Training & Best Practices; Internet Freedom: Present and Future; Tools & Technology; Policy & Advocacy; Regions & Groups; Communications & Design; and Journalism & Media.

2016 was an eventful year, with plenty of world events to be informed about. While access to the Internet and thus information around the world grew, censorship of all kinds including the blocking of websites also rose. Here at Psiphon we have also seen more users of our software than ever before, and while this comes hand in hand with increasing information controls on the internet, we are happy to be able to help people get round them.

This month Psiphon turns 10 years old! We would like to thank you for your support, as we look forward keeping the Internet open for many more years! Psiphon began at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab as a ‘network of trust’ amongst people who knew each other. The first version of the software allowed a person’s computer in a non-censored country to act as a server for a friend in a censored region, and helped to prove that there was a real need for the open Internet.

Access Now recently reported that there have been over 50 Internet shutdowns around the world in 2016, compared to 15 known shutdowns the previous year. Many of these shutdowns have taken place in Africa - as seen in a recent Psiphon blog piece documenting a shutdown and social media blocking event in Gabon. Last week, another shutdown happened in Gambia. Just after 9pm local time on November 30th 2016, we received a message from our friend Moses Karanja, a researcher at the research fellow at the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT) in Kenya.