A new tool will join the censorship circumvention arsenal this September.

Feed Over E-mail (FOE) sends restricted content, in the form of RSS feeds, via email. The tool can't help a user browse censored sites or obtain large files. But its creator, Sho Ho, says that FOE could be particularly hard to block and could work in concert with other circumvention technologies. Ho, who is a researcher with the federal government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, gave a talk about FOE yesterday at Defcon, a hacker conference that takes place annually in Las Vegas.

There are plenty of other circumvention tools out there, but it can be hard for some people to gain access to them, Ho says. Also, the makers of such tools can get drawn into a game of cat and mouse with governments that block the access points needed to make them work.

To use FOE, a user just needs access to an e-mail service hosted outside of a censoring country, and the FOE client. Information is sent via e-mail, which can come from servers all over the Web, making it hard for censors to spot a consistent source of censored information. Governments also usually don't block access to foreign mail services (there are some exceptions, such as North Korea).

FOE is different from the average feed reader in that it's able to fetch content from censored sites without requiring the user to visit those sites to set up the feed. Once FOE fetches the content, it encrypts it and sends it via e-mail much like an attached file. The user's client gets decrypts the feed once it's arrived and displays it on the local machine. Ho adds that FOE should be easy for activists to set up and maintain because it uses existing infrastructure.

The version that will be released in September works on machines running Windows, Ho says, but she hopes that volunteers will help add support for other platforms, including mobile devices.

The stimulus plan passed by the US Congress earlier this year provided $21 billion for scientific R&D to be allocated through the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and other agencies. (The full text of the bill is available in this large pdf file.) The debate still rages amongst politicians and economists about just how many jobs the $787 billion bill has created. In the meantime, the government has launched an interesting website detailing where that scientific R&D money went.

Call it propaganda--the site is called ScienceWorksForUS--but it's interesting to browse through the detailed list and see which research projects were funded and for how much. You can browse by state from the homepage, and a full report is here in a large pdf file. A lion's share of the funds was allocated through the National Institutes of Health, and a browse through of projects funded in my home state of California reflects this. However, there was also an emphasis on renewable energy research. For analysis on stimulus funding of renewable energy technologies, check out Technology Review editor David Rotman's two-part feature on the subject here and here.

Aneesh Chopra, President Obama's appointee for national chief technology officer, is not giving interviews until after he's confirmed. But as Virginia's technology secretary, he was known for finding creative ways to bring broadband to remote rural areas of that state. He's also a booster of electronic medical records and understands that ubiquitous broadband is needed to enable their fullest impact: Chopra was quoted in this story last year saying: "People are literally dying because they can't get the broadband they need to run the [medical] software."

With any luck the appointment of Chopra will translate into the wise expenditure of $7.2 billion set aside in the stimulus bill to promote broadband expansion. Chopra will be the national technology policy counterpart to Obama's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, who will oversee an overhaul of the federal government's computer infrastructure. Kundra was previously CTO for Washington, DC.

Tech industry bigwigs have fallen over themselves to praise the Chopra appointment--but what else would they do? Cynicism aside, some more neutral observers share the optimism, and predict that technology is an area where Obama has the highest chance of making his mark on the nation, given that war, an economic crisis, and gridlock in Congress may hamstring him on other fronts.

In announcing the appointment in his radio and video address last Saturday, Obama said Chopra will promote technological innovation "to help achieve our most urgent priorities, from creating jobs and reducing health care costs, to keeping our nation secure."

Chopra and Kundra "will be recognized in several years as the biggest agents of 'change' Obama promised and delivered," Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference, told me. "Technology in an Obama administration will be more than just a slice of the pie. It will be the pan that supports change in all the issue areas he will address as president."