The tool is designed to help protect activists, human rights groups, and so on

Oct 22, 2013 07:55 GMT  ·  By

Google unveiled several tools designed to fight oppression and censorship around the world. At its Ideas conference in New York, the company revealed proxy service uProxy, designed to bypass censorship, but also a tool to protect sites from DDoS attacks, to protect free speech.

The DDoS protection tool is dubbed Project Shield and is currently invite-only. The tool relies on the company's existing PageSpeed service, which distributes resources throughout the Google infrastructure and among users of the service to improve website performance.

Now, the same concept is being applied to defend sites against DDoS attacks. In essence, all users pool resources together so an attack against any of the sites is met by the entire network and not just one server.

"Project Shield is an initiative to use Google's infrastructure to protect free expression online. The service currently combines Google's DDoS mitigation technologies and Page Speed Service (PSS), which allow websites to serve their content through Google to be better protected from DDoS attacks," Google explained.

The service, quite obviously, is very similar to CloudFlare, which also offers content distribution and DDoS protection for free for most users. Google's service is also free, for now, but it is only available by invite.

If you'd like to try it out, you can use the online form. For now, Google has a strong preference for things like news sites or human rights campaigns, so you'll probably not be accepted if you just want to protect your regular blog.

In time, that might change and Project Shield might evolve into a standard tool available for regular sites for free or for a price for larger organizations.

CloudFlare offers the basic service for free, but it charges for more customization options and more advanced tools. It's unclear whether Google actually wants to improve the service and compete with the former, or is just offering a basic service for those who may need it.