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---- posted in verbatim for /. proof ----

Theres been a lot of alarming but rather brief statements in the past few days about Haystack, the anti-censorship software connected with the Iranian Green Movement. Austin Heap, the co-creator of Haystack and co-founder of parent non-profit, the Censorship Research Center, stated that it had halted ongoing testing of Haystack in Iran; EFF made a short announcement urging people to stop using the client software; the Washington Post wrote about unnamed engineers who said that lax security in the Haystack program could hurt users in Iran.

A few smart people asked the obvious, unanswered question here: What exactly happened? With all that light and fury, there is little public info about why the worlds view of Haystack should switch from it being a step forward for activists working in repressive environments that provides completely uncensored access to the internet from Iran while simultaneously protecting the users identity to being something that no-one should consider using.

Obviously, some security flaw in Haystack had become apparent, but why was the flaw not more widely documented? And why now?

As someone who knows a bit of the back story, Ill give as much information as I can. Firstly, let me say I am frustrated that I cannot provide all the details. After all, I believe the problem with Haystack all along has been due to explanations denied, either because its creators avoided them, or because those who publicized it failed to demand one. I hope I can convey why we still have one more incomplete explanation to attach to Haystacks name.

(Those whod like to read the broader context for what follows should look to the discussions on the Liberation Technology mailing list. Its an open and public mailing list, but it with moderated subscriptions and with the archives locked for subscribers only. Im hoping to get permission to publish the core of the Haystack discussion more publicly.)

First, the question that I get asked most often: why make such a fuss, when the word on the street is that a year on from its original announcement, the Haystack service was almost completely nonexistant, restricted to only a few test users, all of whom were in continuous contact with its creators?

One of the things that the external investigators of Haystack, led by Jacob Appelbaum and Evgeny Morozov, learned in the past few days is that there were more users of Haystack software than Haystacks creators knew about. Despite the lack of a public executable for examination, versions of the Haystack binary were being passed around, just like unofficial copies of Windows (or videos of Iranian political violence) get passed around. Copying: its how the Internet works.

We were also told that Haystack had a centralized, server-based model for providing the final leg of the censorship circumvention. We were assured that Haystack had a high granularity of control over usage. Surely those servers could control rogue copies, and ensure that bootleg Haystacks were exc

Set up this preconfigured proxy VM and let Austin Heap know about it. Read his best practices guide to make it as effective as possible. The Iranian government has very nice Nokia Siemens inspection filters on all the terrestrial traffic leaving the country and is jamming many sat freqs. Randomized ports to random proxy hosts and SSH tunnels are about the only way to get through; they've of course blocked all the usual proxy ports.

Set up this preconfigured proxy VM and let Austin Heap know about it. Read his best practices guide to make it as effective as possible. The Iranian government has very nice Nokia Siemens inspection filters on all the terrestrial traffic leaving the country and is jamming many sat freqs. Randomized ports to random proxy hosts and SSH tunnels are about the only way to get through; they've of course blocked all the usual proxy ports.

bah!! Don't put the email address up there, post a link to the instructions for how to set up a proxy There's also good material in this Wired article that auric_dude linked below and got that link from about how to get the proxies to who needs them.

Can you please post what we can do in order to help the Iranians throw over their dictatorship?

If you have the bandwidth (with a verizon fios account for example), run a proxy server that gives unlimited access to IP addresses from within Iran.
Here's How.

Uhm, did they miss something back in 1998 -- six years ago?

I'm honestly not posting this because of my secret addiction to living in the past, but this has been going on much longer than the main-stream music sharing. South Park was a natural canidate for digitization (then using one of Real's codecs) due it's incredibly simplistic style.