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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?
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.
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
An elegant wrinkle is that the data will enter users' machines through computer port 443. Relied on for the secure transfer of data, this port is the one through whichreams of financial data stream constantly around the world.
"Unless a country wanted to cut off all connections for any financial transactions they wouldn't be able to cut off these transmissions," said Professor Ronald Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab.
rtfa kthnx
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
3. Never surrender.
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.
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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
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.
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There's definitely been some kind of purge since February 5th, when many of these were up.
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.
They are truly defenders of truth, justice, and the Ameri...
Oh, wait. we might have to revise this.
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
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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
...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