Slashdot Mirror
Canadians To Douse Chinese Firewall
FrenchyinOntario writes "Researchers at a University of Toronto lab are getting ready to release a computer program called Psiphon, which will allow Internet users in free countries to help users in more restrictive countries (like China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc.) to access the Internet by getting past the firewalls and getting around "rubber hose cryptoanalysis" which is a drawback of other anti-firewall programs as it reveals a user's tracks if discovered by authorities. Operating through port 443, Psiphon will allow users in monitoring countries the ability to send an encrypted request for certain information, and for users in secure countries to send it back to them. The UofT's Citizen Lab hopes to debut Psiphon at the international congress of the free speech group PEN in May."
How is this better than Tor: http://tor.eff.org/ or just an HTTP Proxy that supports CONNECT for SSL traffic?
It's good to see that human kindness hasn't been completely lost in the internet age.
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
While it makes me feel good to hear about this... won't the censoring nations have something to say about an organized and publicised effort to help their citizens break the law?
Private initiatives like this are cool and all (and have proven very effective in the past), but it would be nice to see our governments taking a much stronger stand regarding free-speech. Free speech is the absolute foundation of democracy and freedom.
1. Block activity on port 443
2. Opress
"While it makes me feel good to hear about this... won't the censoring nations have something to say about an organized and publicised effort to help their citizens break the law?"
That reminds me. How's that DirectTV working for you guys?
Let's see. While the Chinese are unlikely to block port 443, they could monitor sites for which the percentage of 443 vs. port 80 https requests exceeds a reasonable threshhold.
But, it seems that I need to communicate with someone in China first, and offer my computer up to them, and then we both need to install something on our computers, and I give him a userid and password.
Isn't this just too clunky to work?
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
The US keeps making laws I have problems with, like the Patriot Act, but then I see the polls which show that most people support them.
Have you ever considered that it's a bit ethnocentric to try to "save" Chinese from their own conservative culture? Christ, you may as well be invading them! The fact is that most Chinese support censorship.
As a Canadian, although I do sympathize with those in China trying to get around their censorship, I am concerned with one country developing a tool with the explicit stated goal of trying to undermine an internal regulation of another country. In effect, it provides the user with information which is not allowed in their own country.
What would the Canadian government think if people in countries with different drug laws started intentionally mailing their drugs, which they consider legal, into Canada? Better yet, what would Canada think if such an action was sponsored by the government of the offending country (Psiphon is coming out of a publicly funded university in Canada).
As another example, currently a hot topic up here is gun violence. Many of the guns get into Canada from the US, where the gun laws are not as strict. Certainly, and rightfully so, the Canadian government would be offended if the US government funded a program with the goal of getting more guns into Canada.
I agree both drugs and guns *can* be much more harmful than information, but if the consequence of having that information is jail sentence in a Chinese prison, then enabling them to access it is something that should not be taken lightly.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
If it travels over port 443, the ports need to be configurable!
You can be certain the Chinese firewalls will just start to block 443 and ban encrypted http... What have they got to lose!?
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
before we police the world, lets see how americans themselves sometimes ask for censorship - though be it self-censorship - as it is written here.
I see this report as America admitting that sometimes, censorship is a prerequisite to peace. And not all news is acceptable in all places at all times.
In relations to this project however, my worry is how this would affect diplomacy.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
The following anonymous comment currently sits at -1, Troll: "Have you ever considered that it's a bit ethnocentric to try to 'save' Chinese from their own conservative culture? ... The fact is that most Chinese support censorship."
I didn't write the above (though feel free to disbelieve me), but I know I've struggled with the same question. It's quite true that the CCP's efforts to protect China's conservative values, through censorship, enjoy wide support among the population--just as a majority of French and German citizens support their governments' suppression of Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial, and arguably rightly so.
Certainly I personally wouldn't want to live under such a government, but then, apparently a majority of Chinese wouldn't want to live under ours. Who are we to say they're wrong in their desire to be so nannied?
Thoughts?
Operating through port 443 ... Blocking port 443.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
It also happens to be a great way for anonymous pedophiles to surf kiddie porn without having their IP exposed. All they have to do is impersonate web-deprived Chinese surfers.
/. discussion on privacy and/or free speech will degrade to the point where someone will invoke 'The Pedophile Threat' - i.e. 'pedophiles can use this to evade detection' or similar.
This is quickly turning out to be a new twist on Godwin's Law on usenet discussions always degrading into namecalling and nazi references: Any
Come on and face it. Pedophiles are not the greatest threat to mankind. They've always been around and as long as they keep to the net, no children are physically harmed. Stop limiting everybodys freedom on the net in order to make some often rather futile moves against online pedophiles. Use all those misspent efforts to go after the real life pedophiles and those helping them (sleezeball photographers making kiddie porn etc.). This will do much more in preventing harm to children and it will cut off the feed of kiddie porn at the source.
A much bigger threat to mankind are the repressive regimes bent on controlling how people think. Making it possible for free thought and expression to spread and flourish and thus paving the way for those regimes to fall, are far more important than preventing a few pedophiles from sharing their filth.
This is why software like this is nessesary and why the risk of abuse by pedophiles, nazis and other 'undesirables' is an acceptable risk.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
As much as I am a friend of free speech, I don't forget that we live in countries that had a few centuries to adapt to the concept, and it was far from painless. From the french revolution to the american independence war, and a hundred smaller clashes.
We forget so often that the chinese government isn't stupid, and maybe not even evil. They have reasons for why they do what they do. You may disagree with the reasons, of course. But let's not forget that preventing large-scale civil unrest is among them. Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong. But are you ready to gamble a few million lives on that?
The french revolution took maybe 100,000 lives (40k alone went to the guillotine), in a country of about 40 mio. people. Now imagine the body count in a 1200 mio. people country. Add modern firearms and tanks. 3 mio.? 4 mio.? maybe 5 mio. people could die during an all-china civil unrest.
If the chinese leaders are wrong, they are oppressive tyrants who've killed thousands. But if the free speech advocates are wrong, they are rebellion initiators with millions of dead on their consciousness.
China is moving towards more freedom, though at glacial speeds. That is probably too slow. But the demands of the western world for essentially immediate total freedom are very certainly too much, too fast. Change needs time, and a look into our own history books would tell us what the stakes are.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You know what, what about companies that censor themselves so they can still be allowed to the white house press conferences? Or companies that censor themselves to not step on the advertising company's feet? Or maybe companies that are allied to some backward thinking group?
So go ahead call me a troll if you want, but I see many news agencies and papers doing much worst then google and no one talk about it. This kind of auto-censorship is being around almost always and has hidden many truths from you people (not someone who is in china), you're the affected.
Ohhh, but those censorship are OK, since they are not mandated by the government. You want my opinion, bullshit, those are not okay and are much worst then google applying to china's law. We have a saying here that goes like this "in Roma like the Romans", and that is what google is doing.
So I question, what good is free speech if no one has the guts to speak what people need to hear? What good does the law does, when there are other ways to suppress the news, by using either money or political pressures?
It is my opinion that google is doing more good by having a censored Chinese version than if it had no appearance in china at all. They are being clear that there is censorship and making it clear for the people that they are being oppressed by someone, while in the case of free speech in the western side of the world we are indeed being oppressed without anyone noticing.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq