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."

Comments

neat tech, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

There will always be ways for dedicated and savy people to get through firewalls for purposes such as this. However, on the large scale, it does little to affect the access to censored information by the public in general.

Serious Responsibility

[Comatose51]

A drawback to Psiphon is that the person behind the firewall has to be given a user name and password by the person offering up the computer. With this kind of setup, Mr. Villeneuve said, activists may end up working with specific dissidents and people in repressive countries may rely on relatives abroad to help them get connected. Canadians, with ties to every country in the world, are in a particularly good position to use such a system.

So what happens if the person who you gave access to does something illegal (child porn for example)? Does the host become responsible, legally and/or morally? Unlike a general, open, free for all access, this individual approach appears to shift more of the responsibility onto the host, who may not be in a good position to make such a judgment. The program apparently has some facilities for doing forensics on the traffic, which then shift even more of the responsibility onto the host. I guess when you're trying to fight a repressive regime, you should be prepared to take on some heavy responsibilities. Kudos to those who are willing to do so.

Re:A HTTP Proxy with SSL?

[Phleg]

I could be wrong, but in a case like this, the Tor system might actually be worse; normal Tor operation says that you only have to trust that most of the nodes are legit onion routers. However, in the case of China, I believe that you need to trust that the first node is legit. Why? Because if that first node is the Chinese embassy or another node owned by China, and your IP is coming from a Chinese netblock, then your secrecy is blown.

At least with this system, you're encouraged to form a relationship of trust with the node you're communicating with.

China spammer crackdown

[Animats]

Unclear if this is related, but some of the biggest "bulletproof hosting" services just dropped off the net. "blackboxhosting.com", the high profiile spammer hosting service located in China, just disappeared. A few other notorious names are gone, too. "specialham.com" and "spamforum.biz", discussion boards for spammers, are gone. "cheapbulletproof.com", also in China, is gone. You can find all of these sites in Google's cache, but they're all offline today.

There's definitely been some kind of purge since February 5th, when many of these were up.

I have to ask myself the question...

[PinkyDead]

...do we think the Chinese Government are stupid?

Over the past number of years we have seen a liberalisation of trade and a continuing move towards a free market economy - China style.

We have seen with the fall of the Soviet Union, democracy and free market economics overnight is extremely painful and possible dangerous - at times it was touch and go there (maybe still is).

China is a really big place with lots of people, a similar shift would probably be catastrophic for China and for the world at large. It takes a long time to turn a big ship.

Same must be true for the application of democratic principles.

Tiananmen Square etc was a wake-up call for the Chinese government. Yes, it was 15 years ago, but that's a blink of an eye in geopolitics.

The writing is sort of on the wall - 'democracy' is really inevitable. And slowly the ship will turn. It will probably turn to its own course, and Chinese style democracy will be the very interesting outcome (if you think the democracy you live in is the only kind then you are well wrong).

To the /. folks: You and I know that systems can be hacked, and you can be sure that there are fair few Chinese doing that right now - breaking through the censorship and reading what the rest of the world is at; and you can be damn sure that the Chinese Government is fully aware of this - they're not stupid.

This kind of access might only be available to a small few - but it will be available. It's like a dam with a small leak - a huge crack would be disasterous, and the dam would crumble. But a small leak - that works.

Watch this space...