Google will begin to shield news organizations and human rights groups from cyberattacks as part of a new package of services designed to support "free expression" on the Web, the internet giant said Monday. The company also unveiled a new technology called uProxy that allows citizens under some regimes to bypass government censorship or surveillance software to surf the Web. The software will be available for Google's Chrome browser and Firefox but not for Internet Explorer, at least initially.

Google's Project Shield is an initiative that enables people to use Google?s technology to better protect websites that might otherwise have been taken offline by "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attacks. Google is inviting webmasters serving independent news, human rights, and elections-related content to apply to join our next round of trusted testers.

The Digital Attack Map is a live data visualization, built through a collaboration between Arbor Networks and Google Ideas, that maps DDoS attacks designed to take down websites - and their content - around the globe. This tool shows real-time anonymous traffic data related to these attacks on free speech, and also lets people explore historic trends and see related news reports of outages happening on a given day.

uProxy is a new browser extension under development that lets friends provide each other with a trusted pathway to the web, helping protect an Internet connection from filtering, surveillance or misdirection. The University of Washington and Brave New Software developed the tool, which was seeded by Google Ideas.