Slashdot Mirror
Contrabandwidth
tcd004 writes "Kate Palmer writes in Foreign Policy Magazine that an international black market for Internet access has arisen in many authoritarian countries who keep their populations offline. Savvy black marketers in cybercafes, universities, private homes, and elsewhere are exploiting technological loopholes to circumvent government filters and charge fees for access. According to OpenNet Initiative, a nonprofit that tracks banned sites, visiting a single website in Saudi Arabia can cost anywhere from $26 to $67. And as censorship spreads, the prices are only going up." It's just a few paragraphs, but thought provoking.
First posts will be harder to attain without this service.
In a sad way it really demonstrates how things we take for given are not all that given.
I used to run my high-school's firewall, back in 1994... Students paid me top dollar to gain access to then blacklisted sites... What a sweet deal that was... :) Especially since I maintained the blacklist of sites.. :)
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
How else could someone have a black market for Internet Site access? In our day and age, information should florish, not be stifled by fearful governments.
...we have a black market in any molecules that might cause enjoyment.
Whenever there is a need, a supply will arise, regardless of any other factors. When gas/food/etc was rationed in WWII, black markets rose to fulfill the demand. That can also be applied to the sex industry in SE Asia, but I digress...
Question is, though, is visiting 'banned' websites worth the cash, or is it just for 'thrill' value? I don't think I'd pay $26 just to get to Maddox's site, despite it's inherent awesomeness.
How backward ? Yes, indeed try to travel to Cuba then...
MP3 Search Engine
And suddenly, a Slashdot addiction seems to be a much more costly habit than a smoking addiction...
Exactly. When something is "banned", we have criminal activity,i.e. making money off giving the public whatever was "banned". Good example was alcohol prohibition in the USA.
I can just picture geeks driving around in red 70's Dodge Chargers shouting "Yaaahoooo" and "Yeehaaaaa" as we jump over ravines to bring data to the censored masses.
Table-ized A.I.
I wonder if there is any good way to invest in a black market? I'd gladly run a proxy server to help people in opressed countries access stuff, but then, bandwidth costs and all... A shame there isn't a black market stock exchange, where one can invest in emergent social causes, and get a cut of the profits. One could invest seed money for a marijuana dealership, or a contrabandwidth supplier, etc.
On a side note, since I'm in the US, and running a proxy here is legal, would there be any potential legal implication to my supporting a black market overseas, assuming I never go to saudi arabia? What if I did go do saudi arabia?
There are techniques by which anyone can bypass government control of the Internet. Consider the following. A Tibetan uses a cell phone to call into an internet service provider (ISP) in Australia. Radio Free Asia subsidizes all such accounts so that they are essentially free.
The cell phone then becomes a 56K modem. It is not fast but will do the job. The Tibetan can then freely and daily e-mail reports about Chinese brutality in and around Tibet. Moreoever, the Tibetan can receive factual information about the outside world. After all, both CNN and FoxNews have web sites.
In a market, import duties encourage smuggling, since the artificial State imposes cost makes it possible to provide a given good at a significantly cheaper rate simply by avoiding customs.
Censorship is an attempt by the State to prevent the import of information. In an exact parallel, this encourages the smuggling of information, since there is censorship by no means eliminates demand; it merely restricts supply and so drives up prices.
The article implies that Internet access is expensive in authoritarian countries because of the rates being charged by black access groups.
In fact, it is a testimoney to the power of supply and demand that it is *possible* to obtain access *despite* all attempts by the State to prevent this.
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Toby
In short, we can all look forward to a future where freedom isn't a right.
It's a service that's offered, for a price.
May the Maths Be with you!
Press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, select, start
I knew someone who had a company that set up some sort of technical equipment in Saudi Arabia. The government wouldn't let them operate there all by themselves, so they only allowed a "partnership" that was 51% owned by a Saudi company - the cousin-in-law of some royal, or something like that. Of course, the Saudi company didn't do 51% of the work, so it was like a hefty tax. Anyway, in addition to their regular installation, they had a bustling business in illegal satellite tv dishes. They eventually got busted, but then it was the fact that this was mainly a Saudi-owned company with royal ties that kept them out of trouble. And, they probably copped a deal to uninstall the dishes. The penalty was only monetary - my friend had all his appendages.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
From A website that promotes democracy in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Diplomat Defects to France Saturday, 19 March 2005 Washington DC - A Saudi diplomat defected to France Thursday, according to the diplomat who issued a statement on the first anniversary of the reformers arrest last year. Ahmed Bin Jaza Al-Shaikh, the second secretary at the Saudi Mission to the United Nations in Geneva told the Saudi Institute from Paris he defected to protest the Saudi government oppressive polices against reformers and democratic activists. Al-Shaikh called for a fully elected parliament with real powers in order to curb massive official corruption and to ensure the human rights f the population, and their rights for free expression.
If you ever went to Arabia, they wouldn't need a legal reason to arrest / torture you. You'd just vanish or get beat to death by "holy" men. That's kinda the point.
However, if you are serious about helping, what I would suggest grabbing a copy of FreeNet and running a node. You don't even have to actively surf on it, IIRC, to allow it to make active copies of nodes, thus allowing "banned" content to get out.
IIRC, they had also included last time I ran it a built in proxy server/anonymizer, so you'd be helping in that way, too.
If you are concerned about Bandwidth, you can use Netlimiter to throttle it. I don't know of any Linux equivilants to Netlimiter, but I'm sure there's something (probably built in).
There is always place for black market in every country. Whenever something is illegal, it will be on the black market.
Examples:
-Prostitution - most of the world (well, exept for Amsterdam, and p0rn)
-Drugs - most of the world (well, exept for Amsterdam)
-[Insert illegal things here (exept Amsterdam)]
So... in conclusion. Go to Amsterdam.
No sig for now.
It's funny how we're supposedly bringing freedom to the middle east, when one of our biggest "allies" is a nation so opressive that they lock girls in a burning school to prevent them from being seen without a burqa. The saudi government is much worse in many ways than Saddam Hussein's, yet we are not starting any wars for a "regime change" there? Saudi Arabia is openly hostile to our allies, treats their citizens worse than Kim Jong Il or Fidel Castro, and publically criticizes both democracy and the US government and people. Not only do we not detest them, but the Bush family is friends with the oppressive house of Saud.
I fail to see how anyone can believe that this administration's goals are anything but getting Bush's friends richer.
... wanna buy a byte? Brand new....
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
I remember one of my classes on the middle east- the professor asked for a show of hand as to how many people would be willing to trade civil liberites for cash. More then half the class seemed willing to make the bargin. He then pointed out that this was the trade-off that Saudi-Arabia represented. He also noted that students from other middle eastern countries usually tried to stay in the US, but that the students from Saudi Arabia tended to go back.
I suspect a large number, if not a majority of US citizens would be willing to make a similarly lucrative trade off in exchange for allowing an absolute monoarchy, in a way the house of saud is the ultimate example of free market goverment, they have bought their power.
I for one don't waste any effort hating this goverment, nor do I feel espically sorry for its citizens. I suspect that most could leave if it really bothered them.
When I was working in Riyadh the compound where I Lived had two internet access routes. The first was available to all residents regardless of nationality and went via the government censored route. So, the only sites reachable were those which had been passed by the Saudi censor.
The other route was only available to non Muslims was via satellite and was totally uncensored. It was very illegal but we made sure that it was kept quiet and for the 18 months I was there the service was splendid.
From my experience you have to actually live in the place to understand the paranoia of the Censor. In the branch of Safeway that I regulrarly visited there were plenty of womens magazines that carried no censorship whereas any picture of a women in a magazine or paper that was aimed at men was heavily censored with the black felt tip pen.
just my 0.02riyals worth
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
FreeNet nodes can - and often do - contain generally unacceptable content such as images of child pornography. It's not an acceptable solution for most people.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I lived in the Middle East for a very long time before moving out west. I recall that back in 1996 when the Internet started to get a hold of more pro-Western nations (Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar) that there was an outcry from the conservative, fundamentalist population. After 20 years of censoring Israeli and Jewish pictures from encyclopedias in local bookstores and pixelating television broadcasts containing PG kisses, they were appalled that the Internet gave access to such decadent material.
Since the only ISPs were the government-run telcos (Batelco, Etisalat, Qatar Telecom) censorship was rather easy to push. Websites that promoted blasphemy, Israel, anarchy, porn, warez, etc. were banned; sometimes hastily. The ignorant admins at these ISPs used a list of keywords to censor URLs due to the exponential increase in pornography. In fact, because of its very name, Hotmail.com was banned in 3 of those countrie for almost 2 months until they realized its innocence. Similarly, sites such as Whitehouse.com were made available for diplomatic content (for some time) but access was denied to Hotbot.com because it was too lewd.
The fines for visiting offensive material and / or finding ways around the filters ranged from about US$10 to ~$200. Of course, in '96 the ISPs charged about US$1.50 for each hour spent online. With that kind of sticker price and the reasonable likelihood of surfing onto banned websites accidentally, some kids started making international calls to ISPs in India and Egypt to get around the limitations. The ones who couldn't dish out the bucks stuck with private BBSs. It would have been possible to make quite a bit of money by meeting the demands of the people, but the risks (especially under Sharia law) are not to be taken lightly.
To bypass censorship and get around a restrictive firewall blocking you from browsing certain web sites all you need is a shell account that is accessable via ssh on a machine that has a free and open connection. This could be another machine that you own, a friend's machine or even an account rented from an ISP. An example ISP offering shell accounts would be Panix. I'll use them for the rest of this example as I have a shell account with them and hence can easily test the example setup.
All you need to do is make use of dynamic port forwarding to simulate a SOCKS proxy. Here is how you would do it.
- Make a ssh connection to the remote machine using dynamic port forwarding. (If the standard ssh port [22] is blocked then some accounts, such as Panix, will allow a ssh connection on another port, such as 80 or 443). For example, on a Windows machine I could connect to Panix by entering the following on the command line:
- In a browser that supports SOCKS proxies, go into the proxy configuration page and specify localhost and the port you dynamically port forwarded (in this example 4096). All traffic is now routed through Panix.
Once you have this setup you can also configure any other internet application that supports SOCKS proxies to route their traffic through your secure link (e.g. instant messaging with GAIM).putty -ssh -D 4096 -P 80 shell.panix.com
In case you are not familiar with Putty* and its command line options I will break that down for you:
-ssh Use the ssh protocol -D 4096 Use dynamic port forwarding with 4096 as that port. (You could use any port number you like that is not already in use on your machine). -P 80 Connect to the server on port 80 (this part may not be needed or your remote machine may not support it) shell.panix.com The server you are connecting to. In this example the panix shell server.Note 1: You can also use the Putty graphical user interface. You do not need to use the command line! Once you have started Putty you can get to the port forwarding section via Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels. Then type 4096 (or any other suitable port number) in the Source Port box, click the Dynamic radio box and click the Add button.
Note 2: If you are using Linux or MacOS/X you could use OpenSSH as follows: ssh -D 4096 -p 80 shell.panix.com
For example, in Firefox you can access the proxy settings here: Tools -> Options -> General -> Connections Settings. Then select the radio button for Manual proxy configuration. In SOCKS Host enter: localhost and in Port enter: 4096
*Putty is a free/open source telnet/ssh client for Windows. Here is the home page. All of the above can also be configured by the Putty GUI and saved as a 'session' if you prefer.
Conclusion: communes work well when they are small enough. Rule of thumb based on extended visits: communes where every member has personal contact with the current leader, and where the leader is replaceable, work well. The further removed the least prominent members are from the leaders - the more dicatorial and cult-like the commune becomes. Cuba is way past my "works well" limit. Counter-example: small cults with very charismatic leaders (e.g. Jim Jones, Heaven's gate) (although they also fail the "replaceable" test).
One Christian group in Vermont that I spent 2 weeks with had a leader who declared himself (while I was there!) an "Apostle" whose authority cannot be questioned of removed. Fortunately, the group was under oversight by an international board with members from every subscribing commune. The "Apostle" was removed.
Interestingly, while every group I visited was a "commune" in the sense that all property was legally owned by the corporate entity, a huge part of what made them tick was "ownership" of a different sort. The head chemist at the Vermont group (in charge of making soap and perfumes) was so excited about his products and workmanship that he "owned" his unique position in the commune. One of the things the "Apostle" talked about doing was switching around jobs so that everyone would learn "humility". Kind of reminded me of the part in the Communist Manefesto were everone is supposed to be able to do anyone elses job.
This is where I began to see that there is a big difference between "commune" and "Communism". Classic Communism as a political philosophy is bunk. However you handle production and distribution of goods, every person is unique, and brings unique gifts and talents to an organisation. A political philosophy that tries to make everyone interchangeable is just another means of oppression. Capitalism becomes oppressive in the same way when it tries to make every employee an interchangeable cog in the machine.