Government researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have created a TOR like tool called Slitheen that is intended to allow access to countries who block websites to try to censor their citizens from accessing certain sites on the internet, similar to a VPN, or changing your DNS, or a proxy, or as mentioned, the US Navy's original project, now run by a community driven open source project, TOR.
There's not a lot of information about Slitheen yet, and if you search for it, you'll find it's a creature from the Doctor Who universe, a show which nerds love, and you have to assume some nerd Doctor Who watcher decided to name the project after that creature because it has some similar abilities or whatever, who knows. Anyway, you can read more about it here:
* New Anti-Censorship Technology Called Slitheen to Defeat Website Blocks - ISPreview.co.uk: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/04/new-anti-censorship-technology-called-slitheen-defeat-website-blocks.html
* France 24 video "A mad scientist's dream" May 12th 2017 (cued to when they're talking about it): https://youtu.be/9v9QjGFo1rM?t=4m
* A Trick That Hides Censored Websites Inside Cat Videos - The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/a-system-that-hides-censored-websites-inside-cat-videos/524247/
* Slitheen: Perfectly imitated decoy routing through traffic replacement - University of Waterloo, Faculty of Mathematics: https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/slitheen/
Right now the project exists only as code on a Github repository that you have to compile yourself on a Virtual Machine and run along side three other open source projects OpenSSL, Qt Base, PhantomJS that the U of Waterloo has modified to work alongside Slitheen. It sounds very promising as an anti-censorship tool and time will tell if people pick it up and start modifying it and creating more easy to use tools so end users can run it, like TOR which now has a simple Windows Installer that anyone can download, launch and run. Visit the website above to learn more about it if you're interested in running it, or modifying it and they include a paper about it as a PDF that explains how it works & how traffic is routed through it.
