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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?
This has already been done: Six/Four
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
Except that the CRTC has nothing to do with what I can and can't view on the 'net.
1. Block activity on port 443
2. Opress
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)
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.
Back in my day if we wanted freedom we had to shoot someone in the face. Twice.
Now sometimes we do it for fun. -DC
Cool! Soon I'll be able to access suicide-related content in Australia!
save the GNUs!
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.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Would it be apropos to say, "Up your nose with a rubber hose!" to China now? (Come on you 30-something Slashdotters, surely you remember Welcome Back Kotter? It was a formative experience like JJ Walker's "Dynomite!")
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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.
and its available at http://www.peacefire.org/
I'd just like to say that I would mod samzenpus funny for the best Slashdot department in recent memory, if I were able.
:)
Thanks for the chuckle
My complaint with this scheme, and Tor, is that they are essentially open proxies. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to pooch the acl lines on a Squid and leave it running a bit will know what happens next. One day you notice your bandwidth pegged at max and you scramble to fix it.
Democrat delenda est
I believe the point he is trying to make is that the CRTC still does regulate content, which is of course a form of censorship.
I recall hearing from Canadian relatives that the CRTC at one time failed to renew the license of a particular radio station because of "offensive" behavior of some of the station's jockeys.
I also remember hearing about how they approved Al Jazeera, but requested that instances of "hate speech" had to be edited out by broadcasters.
Between "hate speech" legislation (itself a very anti-democratic and anti-freedom of expression principle) and the CRTC, we see that the Canadian government does partake in the censorship of various media. The censorship is still prevalent, even if the Internet is not yet particularly affected.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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
Peek-a-booty is also aimed at helping those in speech-embattled nations avoid censoring firewalls.
There's definitely been some kind of purge since February 5th, when many of these were up.
I could be wrong, but I would bet that most, if not all industrialized nations partake in some form of censorship.
/.). My attitude of this may change a little when/if I ever have children (where I will have to censor what they input).
c an_duo) . To a minor's benefit, they should not be held completely accountable for their actions, unless proven to require disipline (repeat violent offenders...).
The issue arises is if people on average think that various instances of censorship is a feature rather than a bug. Now, I would prefer individual-induced boycotts against any stations that a person finds offensive. This could coerce regulation by media companies (monitarily-influenced). A customer should also be able to make a station forbidden unless permitted.
That is what I like about the internet, I can choose what I want to see, hear and read (that begs the question of what is wrong with me to visit such sites as
I also think that some technologies do need to be censored more than others. Any child can attain a radio without parental involvement. On the other side of the spectrum, books should not be controlled for content at all, because they are easily regulated.
*I should note that I believe minors are protected citizens, and as such certain rights and freedoms do not apply to them, and cannot be trumped even with parental consent. For more details why please see the extreme side of the spectrum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Blue_(Ameri
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Many people are asking, "How is this any better than somesite.com, a normal anonymizing proxy?"
The difference is that this is a piece of software which runs on an individual person's computer.
This is more like peer-to-peer than it is like 50,000 people using a well know proxy.
The Chinese government can easily go to google and search for well known anonymizing proxies
and block access to them. What the govt can't do, is find out every IP address on the internet
running this software and block it. The downside of this software is that Chinese users must have
a friend on the outside to run the software, but the upside is that it's vastly less likely that the
Chinese government will be capable of blocking access to it.
It's not a government initiative, and it's in Canada, not the US.
They are truly defenders of truth, justice, and the Ameri...
Oh, wait. we might have to revise this.
Pretty much inaudible? When was the last time you listened to 8-bit audio? It's hardly "high-quality". I'd say the extra 8 bits are pretty important. Of course if the algorithm was smarter, it would be possible to hide a fair bit of data in there without affecting the audio.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
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?
Rubber-hose cryptoanalysis in The Jargon Wiki
Help us build a better map!
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.
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
Very well, if that's so, and good luck to them, and I hope they're happy behind their firewall. For those few who don't support censorship, this project exists. It's not as if anybody's forcing them to use it, after all.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
...do we think the Chinese Government are stupid?
/. 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.
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
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...
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
It doesn't have to be 8 bits. It doesn't even have to be every sample.
If you just use the least significant bit of every sample, you've still got about 45MB of data, which is still a lot.
Of course if you can't physically get them into the country anyway, you're scuppered with using that particular route.
But the same basic technique can be applyed to images embedded on otherwise 'uninteresting' sites, or you could even embed (admittedly very low rate) data in plain text, through variations of 'take the first letter of each sentence' type ideas.
The fact is that if there's a stream of data coming in, there are lots of ways of hiding extra information in there, as long as the hidden information data rate is substantially lower than the open information rate, it's easy.
Z.
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
You can use a Tor node as a proxy. I do it all day every day. I didn't install anything on my computer, I just set the proxy.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
In my experience, having attempted to send CDs to China repeatedly, by postal mail, nothing gets in, regardless of content.
Fedex might do better, I don't know, but their service area is limited to a few major metropolitan zones, and cost is imposing.
I think illegal smuggling is probably the most reliable and cost-effective way to ship data into China by sneakernet. Hand off to a friend at the airport, whatever.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I used to live in China, and shipping CDs to and from was impossible as customs agents would confiscate them. I was living in Guangdong province at the time.
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