First Ladder Parodox: It can be hard to download censorship circumvention tools (a.k.a ladders) without already having and using one of them. This is because almost all the website of censorship circumvention tools are censored by censors. In addition, although most of the censorship cicumvention tools developers do provide an unblockable way for download their tools, those unblockable webpages suffer from the following problems:
- Those downloading webpages are usually not shown by the search engine that collaborate with oppresive regimes.
- Those downloading webpages usually have a relatively long or random URL which is really hard to remember.
- Downloading webpages are scattered in different corner of the Internet, causing people hard to find them all.
First-Ladder provides a nevigation page for downloading censorship circumvention tools in an unblockable way. First Ladder excersices Collateral Freedom strategy which means the project can be hosted on whatever webservics sthat are too expensive to be blocked by the censors (right now, it is hosted on Github).
There are two different trust models in First-Ladder, depending on the Provider of the downloading webpage. To be more specific, if the Provider is marked as Official, it means the official developers are the ones provides the unblockable download and First-Ladder cannot and touch the binary you download. If the Provider is marked as First-Ladder, it means the ladder is distributed by First-Ladder so First-Ladder does touch the binary.
For the case where Official is the provider, since First-Ladder cannot touch the binary you download, there is not need to trust the First-Ladder project. For First-Ladder as the distributor, First-Ladder has the ability to add malfunction to the ladder. To solve this trusting problem, First-Ladder does not beg for users' trust, instead, First-Ladder provides user with reliable way to do verification themselves. And one person's found of First-Ladder's mal-behavious means the death to the entire project.
| Download Pages | Comments | Provider/Distributor |
|---|---|---|
| Tor Browser | After downloading and extracting the Tor Browser, use the pluggable transports to circumvent censorship. "meek-amazon" or "meek-azure" will oftern work in heavily censored area, like China. | Official |
| Lantern | Official | |
| Psiphon3 | Official |