Slashdot Mirror
Tearing Down China's Great Firewall
quadsoft writes to tell us The Toronto Star has a look at three University Toronto computer geeks who are working hard to circumvent the internet censorship problems like those found in China. From the article: "But the computer smarts of Ron Deibert, Nart Villeneuve, and Michael Hull, combined with their passion for politics and free expression, have led them to develop a highly anticipated software program that allows Internet users inside China and other countries, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Burma, to get around repressive censorship and not get caught."
Ive got relatives in Iran who i wanted to talk to, but instead of the US censoring my emails (which they do, but its easy to get around), Iran censors more of the emails. They also block my site, but I don't know why.
Anyway, nice find.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
It looks like it is just a write-up of what they intend on developing...
We've never had an unbreakable DRM. Will we really have an undernet that can't be spied on?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I understand the human rights aspect of this situation, but isn't it an administrator's ability to control his/her network and user access that is important to preserve? If outsiders can circumvent the Chinese government's firewall setup and other security measures, aren't all the systems on all the networks in the world potentially vulnerable?
Certified Microsoft Notworking Specialist
Tearing down a firewall is getting rid of it, and letting people access the internet freely. Circumventing a firewall is sneaking past it and hoping you don't get noticed.
To use a Berlin Wall analogy, what TFA is proposing is sneaking across to the West during the 80s and hoping to not be shot in the process. That contrasts quite strongly to tearing down the wall, which would be granting unrestricted access without fear of recrimination, as happened in Berlin in '89.
When will the world learn that Geeks and Nerds are completely different "types" - they are not interchangable... Some may class themselves as both - But most of us 'Geeks' would agree we are definitely NOT 'Nerds'...
The article seems to talk more about the developers, geeks and whatnot than how the actual program works. From what I have gathered, it uses third-party computer to do the work yours can't.
.cn govt blocks all transmissions between this site/domain?
However if China's Great Firewall is so great, how do third-parties come to your rescue if the work they helped you to do still cannot get through?
For example, this search-by-email site seems to bypass google.cn censorship, but what if
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
now that this has been slashdotted its only a matter of time before Chinese officials find a way to circumvent the circumvention (is that even a word?...)
good going tho, im all abouts free speechez n stuff...
Considering what will happen to any individual in these regimes caught using these circumventions, I sometimes wonder if this is really helpful. In the end, regardless of the good intentions of their creators, these circumventions may just be luring some unfortunates into personal misfortune (prison, perhaps torture and death) at the hands of their governments, while accomplishes very little good.
In Three, Two, One...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
One link: http://tor.eff.org/
l and it doesn't describe something that's even as good as a plain old Squid proxy. Tor appears to be far, far, far safer.
I found http://www.third-bit.com/2004-fall/psiphon_ae.htm
(I live in Toronto. I want to go find these guys and slap them.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Myanmar is the name used by the ruling military junta. Burma is the name used for the country by countries that do not recognise the junta as legitimate government. Most people from that country who now live outside it refer to it as Burma. There's a wikipedia article on the subject.
Let me start by saying I applaud these guys' motivation. Circumventing censorship is certainly a worthy goal in the name of individual freedom. However, this is just another step toward that goal, though TFA gives these hackers status approaching messianic. The paragraph I found most interesting:
(emphasis mine)
First of all, to claim a new tool for defeating censorship is "nearly fail-safe" does not give the Chinese and other goverments enough credit. China hass a government heavily invested (financially and emotionally in terms of propaganda) in controlling information sources available to its people. I'm sure they will try very hard to make sure this tool is rendered ineffective. Here's hoping they don't achive this; but you can be sure they will try hard.
Secondly, the technical side is somewhat dubious. It relies on "close friends and family" in friendly countries such as Canada -- but what if all your friends and family are living in China? And even if you make a secure, encrypted connection, how long before the censor get suspicious? Say encryption is declared illegal, and all external access has to go through certain proxies. Where does that leave Psiphon ?
These are just my two cents on the issue. I'd like it to work, but it may just cause the net to tighten (no pun intended).
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Don't want to repeat it all here, check my journal (there's only one entry) to see what I wrote.
Basically, the idea is to mirror banned content during the 2008 Olympics when the authorities should have their hands full with other things.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
This software will require a client installed on each Chinese desktop? The existance of such a client will be against Chinese law and make you liable for fines, prison, beatings, etc. Another simple method for the Chinese Firewall staff is to simply setup their own proxy server, catch any IP address that connects from China and send the police around. If its an individual put them in prison, if its a company close the company, commandeer all the companies equipment and imprison the owners. There is no way this can work on a large scale.
Cryptography is useful for keeping everyone but the parties with keys from seeing a message. A good crypto system ensures that if you have the key, you get the complete and accurate message, if you don't, you get garbage that tells you nothing at all about the message.
Well that means it's excellent for keeping things from being snooped on. SSH is a good example of this. When you connect to an SSH server the computers exchange a private key (encrypted using public key crypto) and then encrypt everything with it. Nobody can listen in, it's all just random bits.
So, why doesn't this work for DRM? Well now you are trying to do something that crypto doesn't work for. You want the person to see the end, decrypted product, but not have access to it. So you give them an encrypted disc, but for them to use it, the decryption key has to be somewhere. It's either on the disc, or in a chip, or whatever. They must have the decryption key or it's of no use.
Well, if they have that key, they can get their hands on it. Might not be easy, but they can do it. Also, since you are decrypting it, they can just intercept the decrypted signal and reroute it. Like on DVD-A players. They only allow full bandwidth/channel output over analogue links. However, what some people do is simple intercept the data right before the DAC, and reroute it to a S/PDIF codec. Digital output, post decryption (legal outside the US too).
So something like an undernet is far more like the SSH scenario than the DRM scenario. You are looking to hid your traffic so that it can't be listened in on, not hide the message from the person who gets it in the end.
The thing is China has taken a reactive approach with it, not a proactive one. That means that they allow access to the net, unless it's something they've decided isn't ok, rather than blocking everything and only permitting what they explicitly approve of. It's easy to see why they did it that way, but it's a weakness. It means that stuff like this will work, espically since the foriegn hosts can shift around.
I'm actually supprised how lax their firewall is in general. For example they allow encrypted traffic out of the country. When my mom went over to China to teach English, she warned everyone not to say anything untoward about the government there. While they'd probably not hassle a foriegner who was there on their invataion for that, you never know. I figured she'd be getting a Chinese e-mail box and thus the worry. Nope, she just used her US one via webmail, which was 256-bit AES encrypted. There is no way they were spying on that, and yet they did nothing to filter it from anywhere.
The reason is, of course, it had never made theri "bad site" list. Why would it? It's a webmail page for a US ISP. I'm sure almost noone visits it. However, she could have been funneling all manner of things through that, had she wanted to, and they never would have been the wiser.
So unless China shuts down crypto out of the country, which they won't do because it would cripple business, they'll be hard pressed to stop those determined to circumvent their firewall.
Those comp sci students better know what they are doing. If someone gets caught using their software to circumvent government censorship, people could die. People have gone to jail for dozens of years for saying the wrong thing.
This is not one world where all people believe the same things. One nation should be allowed to keep its culture, even if another nation disagrees. IF there are stupid laws in china, then it is up to the chinese to have a revolt or change of government. Iraq has taught us that an outside power can't change a people or their culture. No matter what laws the USA or UN or new Iraqi government passes, they will never take precedence over their religious laws.
Imagine if the people of amsterdam decided that drugs should be more available in the USA. Should they help Americans break the law inside the borders of the USA? The government of the USA has assasinated heads of state for not complying with USA drug laws, and imprisioned for life the former head of state Manuel Noriega.
It's to a selected group; not available to anyone (eg police) who's interested.
If the police suspect anybody in your circle of friends, couldn't they do any of the following to break into the circle of trust and monitor your activities:
(1) Sneak into your associates' houses and install hidden monitoring software directly into their HTTPS stacks on their computers.
(2) Coerce your associates into providing them with access to their activities
(3) Use social engineering to convince you to let them into your circle of trust
When you are fighting a government, which has basically unlimited resources, you cannot grant trust as easily as when you are merely dealing with civilian adversaries. For example, I trust https://amazon.com/ enough to put my credit card info into a form there, but I wouldn't trust _ANY_ server or peer-to-peer host with my detailed plans to subvert and/or overthrow the government.
I know that citing Orwell's 1984 is cliche in these discussions, but one of the points of the book is that, when fighting against the government, even your most trustworthy companions and things cannot be trusted. Remember Winston's speck of dust?
In fact, you cannot even really trust yourself when against extremely harsh coercive measures. Look at what Winston did at the end.
Or we can have these anti-censorship people working on informing the masses that critical information reguarding the cure for cancer is blocked because otherwise the medical world would go broke... Some countries have too much censorship. They are ran by them so their citizens won't know enough to take down their government (or won't want too). We use propaganda: the citizens in the U.S. know so much that thoughts of rebellion or even getting into "real politics" (outside of crap like "I voted for _____ for president") or medicine becomes "boring" since that information is given in not only a boring but a needlessly slow pace.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Who ever heard of Sri Lanka tea? (since Burma's already been covered) No New Geography there, just good old fashioned marketing.
Remember RFC 873!
Consider it said: US Censorshop of the Internet is Even Worse and more of a problem!!!
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
They named this vaporware "Freenet 2."
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
(Score:0, Adequate)
what happened with the anti censorship software that the cul of the dead cow said they were going to release several years ago? sounded alot like what these guys are trying to do.
nobody's perfect
"As the administrator, all you can do is play an endless game of cat and mouse, trying to close these connections down; in the end you'll always be one step behind though, unless you have a very selective whitelist of allowed connections, and block everything else."
God I love technology!
All you say is true, but there is one thing that makes it easier for censoring over just hiding. It should be possible to detect encrypted communication. What I mean by that is an analysis of the traffic itself and the information being transfered over it should allow one to determine if someone is communicating with encryption or mearly through plain text. It shouldn't take much to just block all encrypted traffic, or forward the users IPs to some who will come knocking wondering what you are talking about. One would have to hide it, such as with steganography, in addition to encrypting it. Sure, some of this might put a damper on retail sales over the internet, but I don't think some countries care about that as much.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
At this point, they don't ban crypto out of the country, and I don't think they'll start. It would cripple their ability to do business and as much as they like spying on their populace, they seem to like money more. So much online these days mandidates cryptography that it would be hard.
As for how to mask it, not my department, just pointing out why using crypto to keep a third party out is different than trying to use it to keep the recipient out.
It's high time our Republican leaders stood up and said "Mr. Hu Jintao, Tear Down That Wall!" (but kept the NSA spying on us)
Circumventing censorship in China, if needed (it rarely is), is easy, and most people know how to do it (it is spread by peer education in homes and internet cafes). No one is gonna lock you up for doing it either, so I don't know what TFA is talking about.
Now, tearing down the firewall would be the easiest thing in the world. It just requires a collaborate effort between governments in the West, or at least some powerful companies in the West, namely to host servers for distributed protocols a la Tor and similar, distributed and encrypted IM and so on.
But you won't ever see such a collaboration. I leave it as an exercise to figure out why.
For Iran... I recommend we nuke'em. It is the simplest and least painful way.
TFA points out the obvious problem: if the great firewall can identify a relay, it can close it. It can also find out whoever is using it, making it a dangerous proposition. To me, it is fairly obvious that the response has to rely on "strength in numbers": place a great many relaying pages all over the internet. In fact, what about placing at least one such page on every web site? The great firewall would then have to either lock the entire Internet, or give up!
I'm going to have to ask you to retract that comment. Failing that, just don't read it, ok?
How is this effort different than peekabooty?
an ill wind that blows no good
It's true, you know. The tripple-barrel pun on firewalls, China's great wall, and the Berlin wall.
TFA says that this does not require a local client install.
However since they are using encrypted traffic, I suspect their biggest threat would be identification of suspicious or unusual Internet traffic patterns. A Wi-Fi connection to an unsecured router could solve that problem.
The other concern would be government officials checking out the proxy server and determining it's purpose. Since the approach is to send the server information to friends/family, one could set the server to only connect to certain MAC addresses, or add a hidden login feature amidst a misrepresentative website/server. At that point, they have to either catch you running it, or intercept the connection information.
Moreover, I fully expect that the majority of the funding for this Canadian effort will come from Microsoft and Google. I expect that both companies will be (if they are not already) the prime backers of this effort if their management do honestly regret the previous censorship.
I expect nothing of Yahoo. Reporters without Borders declares, "Now we know Yahoo works regularly and efficiently with the Chinese police". If Buddhism has any validity, the managers (including the Yahoo chief, Jerry Yang) at Yahoo will be receiving their just karma in the next life.
The answer is open source. It has already solved software defect, missing functionality, world hunger and other things (watchout though, open source DRM is coming).
Open source undernet will be impenetrable. After all, there are a million eye balls looking over every line of code and piece of logic.
I'm wishing they'd put my IP ranges in the 'great firewall' so I get less spam, fewer ssh attempts (nothing annoys me so greatly as sending an abuse report and get the exact same problem the next day). I'm doing all I can to censor all of china from all my machines.
even the magic 8 ball has an opinion on email clients: Outlook not so good.
Not to put to fine a point on it ... but as strongly as they feel about their cause, I wonder if they realise that what they're doing - if used by poeple inside those countries - could get people killed?
I can't help but wonder how zealous they will be if they have to think about the potential blood on their hands.
Doing what you can to help from your end is one thing. Helping somebody become a martyr is another.
To my mind, it's like giving dynamite to a suicide bomber, without thinking about either the bomber or any of his victems.
First, the very fact of using encryption makes you stand out in the crowd. Do that a bit too often, and someone could very well come knock on your door.
Second, SSL can be defeated. I am pretty sure that all PC in China have a Chinese Government Certification Authority listed in their SSL root file. That is enough for mounting a man-in-the-middle attack against SSL. Now you have dissidents who believe they are safe because of SSL, but in fact the firewall is reading their exchanges. Knock, knock?
The article actually points to a much better solution: just use port 80, but rewrite the page to avoid the keywords that the firewall is looking for. For example, "New York Times" could be rewritten to "New Grok Dime", or whatever. That way, the traffic remains stealthy.
Technicalities aside, its name doesn't combine nursery rhymes with references to the buttocks. Worst. Project name. Ever.
If we provided people in China with satellite internet terminals, like this then the firewall would be completely out of the loop. And since the antennas are directional, it wouldn't be too hard to conceal your RF signals and would be difficult to jam.
How're you enjoying all the free speech and intelligent exchange of ideas?
Yeah, I'm just looking at the boobies too.
For sale: geniune piece of the great firewall of China.
Includes GENUINE certificate of authenticity.
You heard it here first.
barack to the future?
"That is the reason outside nations should not interfear."
Well there goes VOA (Voice of America).*
*Google it. You might learn something.
It was all in the delivery.
(Urban Legend disclaimer: apparently, residents of Berlin don't really call the donuts 'berliners')
It sounds easy to defeat to me. The proxies will have a distinctive profile in traffic analysis:
* Communicates on port 443 (SSL)
* Only a few Chinese computers ever connect to the foreign proxy
* Those that do connect, tend to do so extensively.
So the Chinese see this pattern and block the proxy or worse.
As an alternative countermeasure, would it be feasible for the Great Wall to act as a man-in-the-middle on all SSL connections which cross it?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I don't see the big deal. Most people around here know that you just need to get a secure connection to a proxy server in a non censoring country and then you can access the web without trouble. A guick google search will turn up lots of companies that offer web proxing for a very small charge (avoid all the 'free' proxy lists since many of then are honey pots).
Unless the gov't is specifically spying on you this is more than enough.
Peace, or Not?
You are not alone. Your added insight into women will make them love you long time.
You're exactly correct about SSL.
If the Chinese govt. wants to shut this down, they simply require financial institutions to "register" their subdomains at both ends (a whitelist, in effect), or, even more simply, require financial traffic to be port-shifted.
But you overestimate the effectiveness of trying to circumvent keyword restrictions. Keywords are the least effective of the three primary methods the Great Firewall uses.
Method 1: keywords.
Method 2: whole-site blacklists (wikipedia, bbc, etc. etc.)
Method 3: an army of browsers/searchers proactively looking for "bad" content
So any "keyword shifting" sites would be found in short order, and Method 2 employed.
Yup. That's why you need to hire people you can trust.
My personal feeling, given the work that I do, is that if I can't trust someone to not look at porn from his desk, I certainly can't trust them to make a presentation to a client or handle sensitive information which they could probably sell to a competitor for a not insignificant amount of cash (and, later, lots and lots of court-imposed fines for damages--but I don't expect someone who lacks the foresight to realize that pornography is going to get them fired to realize that leaking trade secrets will land them in court).
I would much rather figure out that I hired/was-assigned the wrong person because I walked up behind him one day and found him looking at porn, than after he did something really publicly embarrassing. Someone who doesn't implicitly get that it's not okay to look at porn while on company time, is not somebody I want to work with; full stop. It shows a lack of separation of one's personal life and business life, or at the minimum a great lack of understanding of the business world, which it is not an employer's job to rectify.
There seem to be a lot of companies that spend an awful lot of resources, from what I've read here on Slashdot, trying to control what their employees do online. It seems to me that those same resources would be better spent figuring out why they're hiring such dolts, and attracting and retaining quality people who don't need baby-sitting. Perhaps that's more expensive, but it makes for a much more pleasant workplace.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You might want to check out point #3 on your website at geocities. It reads, "From a pubic notice..."
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Ron Deibert, Nart Villeneuve, and Michael Hull, does not sound Chinese to me. Does anybody know what is the mood among Chinese in US? I have got plenty of Chinese coworkers (hi tech) at my previous job.
You know how many of them were disseidents, that is expressed even slightest dissatisfaction with Chinese government? None. Including Taiwanese.
For me it is clear indication that the weakness of Chinese opposition is a result of genuine destaste of Chinese to all sort of revolutions in favor of a piecemeal balanced development, not information blackout.
May be westerners should get themselves a break for a change and let Chinese decide what to do with the country?
What is with this Kiplingian (Kiplinguesque) "burden of a white man"? It is XXI century already... Stop revolving other peoples lives!
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
This isn't the first time China has taken this strategy. The last time they built a wall they were nvaded by the Mongol Hordes. There is no way China's firewall is any match for a planet of computer geeks.
Can you give any evidence or substantiation to the claim that the U.S. Government is censoring your emails to or from Iran?
... so I think it's fair to say most people would also be surprised.
I have never heard of the USG actively censoring private email that wasn't to or from a serviceperson or that wasn't directly national security related (e.g., all the email to and from submariners and probably other Navy personnel afloat passes through censors who remove sensitive or geographically revealing information). Even then, they're pretty obvious about it.
If this is actually happening, yours is the first case I've heard of, and while I don't claim to be all-knowning (or even close to it) I consider myself pretty well-read in terms of current events
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Ive lived in china for a year now and all i can say is that its not bad at all. First if you really need to look at pornography or wikipedia you can just use a proxy (most chinese know how to get one easily) or even better is to just use TOR. If you are caught using it that proxy is blocked for about 5 - 15 mins thats all no torture or prison. google.cn is censored google.com is not. Most chinese couldnt care about them blocking foriegn political websites and are more concerned with US corruption and chinese economy than not being alowd to look at anti communist websites. I support the firewall to some extent i just dont like the way they block wikipedia. But if i was chinese who couldnt speak english i wouldnt care at all. Chinese use baidu as a search engine as opposed to google because it is better in china. Anyway I just dont like all this china is evil cause they have google.cn crap cause most chinese dont care.
All they would have to do is post the program on a website and then all the Chinese could download it. . .
I wouldn't worry. This was created by geeks and nerds. No higher endorsment could there be. Plus as "Revenge of the Nerds" demonstrated, geeks and nerds triumph over their adversaries every time. Keep this in mind. Chinese government==jocks. Geeks and nerds...well that's obvious. They don't stand a chance against our mental might. We brought down the RIAA/MPAA/Steam/Textbook publishers/Jaywalkers. We can do the same to them. *High-fiving the room*
This is not one world where all people believe the same things. One nation should be allowed to keep its culture, even if another nation disagrees.
Nations and cultures do not have rights, indnviduals have rights, but the statement above is implying just the opposite. It also implies that individual rights are just some kind of culturial thing, and not inherent. What about HK? their culture strongly respects rights. But China does not want to respect those at all. Funny how Chineese citizens who go to HK seem to adjust in a matter of days.
Hey, "if not us, then who? if not now, then when?" This has nothing to do with US policy, it has to do with us and if we are willing to help people looking for freedom.
They should be very worried about that! This tactic frames owners of the unprotected computers. How many will be investigated or even arrested because somebody used their computer to access forbidden sites? It is one thing to have willing accomplices who accept the risk of the activities. It is another thing altogether to involve an innocent party without their knowledge or consent.
This tactic is likely to backfire, by eroding the very trust that is essential to the system. When people in the censored countries come to believe that the circumvention software is associated with a company that got somebody arrested, they will (rightly or wrongly) fear everything associated with them. Now that these methods are public, the censors will be motivated to get such stories circulating, whether fact or fabrication. In a trust based system, reputation is everything.
I never met one in China.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
One is that many people in a place like China are not even aware they're being censored, says Geist. Even if they are, he predicts, few will make the attempt to get around it. Qiang notes that even young urban males, the greatest beneficiaries of China's economic boom, are reluctant to rock the boat and risk their wealth.
Beyond that, the vast majority of users in China do not own their own computers - they spend their time in internet cafes... which means they're even less likely to have the proxy program. While its a huge topic outside of China, in China itself its not an issue at all.
The only way to tear down the Great Firewall of China is for the regime to collapse.
May be westerners should get themselves a break for a change and let Chinese decide what to do with the country?
The point is that we'd like the Chinese to have that opportunity. They don't.
Revive the Constitution.
Thank you. And kudos to these guys for helping information to flow freely, even through a serious firewall. Good luck!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I am sure the excellent network engineers at Cisco that built the "Golden wall" for China can add features to their router to track this traffic.
So with the help of the good guys at Cisco, all these criminal elements that look for "freedom", "democracy" and other indecent material, China can put them in jail. Maybe even donate their organs.
"Fix it"
SSH has a SOCKS proxy built in, is on a large number of boxes by default, and everybody has to leave the port open anyhow because the only other option would be to use unencrypted access protocols and administration which would leave computer networks vulnerable.
Perhaps having public ssh accounts on secure VM's with a method of decentralized authentication or standardized access rules would work better. In theory they could even use full fledged x-windows apps over the internet leaving no trace of their activities on the local machines.
"My personal feeling, given the work that I do, is that if I can't trust someone to not look at porn from his desk, I certainly can't trust them to make a presentation to a client or handle sensitive information which they could probably sell to a competitor for a not insignificant amount of cash (and, later, lots and lots of court-imposed fines for damages--but I don't expect someone who lacks the foresight to realize that pornography is going to get them fired to realize that leaking trade secrets will land them in court)."
So how do you feel about a potential employee admitting in the interview that he regularly commits copyright infringement so he can "stick it to the man"?*
*Bonus points if he uses company equipment to do it.
"There seem to be a lot of companies that spend an awful lot of resources, from what I've read here on Slashdot, trying to control what their employees do online."
It could be worse. They could take the privledge away from everyone.
Since Bill Gates is one of the most philantropic person in the world, here is a perfect area where he could place the enormous resources of his personal wealth and Microsoft to make a change in the life of a billion people. He might seek advice from George Soros, who put his money where his mouth is in supporting practical ways to help falling the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Bill Gates, here is your opportunity to create your own great legacy.
But hold on... isn't Mr. Bill Gates who just recently entertained Chinese Communist leaders in his home?
Well... I guess, he will pass on this historic opportunity... Let the 3 guys from Canada do it... they have nothing to lose after all. It's much safer to send free software to Africa.
So far TFA stuff is still just buzz.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It doesn't matter if somone creates a program that is so secure and stealthy(?) it will not be broken a century from now. The fact that the program is on a computer is proof of a person's guilt in a country that controls everything.
wow...I'm proud of being a Chinese and a U of T computer science student :D
"It doesn't matter how many holes you punch, repressive governments use fear to keep the majority in line. Governments can never directly control 100% of the population."
Fear of dying. Fear of prison. Fear of torture. Fear of...stop me when you see something you can relate to.
"It doesn't matter how many holes you punch, repressive governments use fear to keep the majority in line. Governments can never directly control 100% of the population. By making an example out of a minority of people, the majority will fall into line like sheep."
Ah, yes. Wanting to stay alive makes one sheep. Love those martyrs.
"Then the key is isolating those who do not fall in line through public stigma (control of education, patriotism, etc). "
It's called prison. According to slashdot, guys get raped there. Not certain what the women get.
"Look at how many people far for accepting repressive laws in the name of fighting terrorism and ensuring global freedom."
We're talking about China. What country are YOU talking about?
This seems to miss the obvious. Any major change in network traffic pattern is going to alert the chinese authorities. So, to stay off the radar, you want to subvert an accepted application into providing the data.
:(
eg. how many people over there play network games? It would be reasonably easy to subvert the client/server software of the game to replace game UDP packets with web UDP packets. Ensure the server sends the data out to the client in the same pattern as normal, and have the client continue to fake a 'game input' pattern. Since, the user will be unable to receive much game data, have the server take over his session whilst the subterfuge of file transfer is occurring.
Seems like an emminently reasonable solution to implement within a controlled group.
The only possible option seems to be a 'web site agile' rewriting proxy. (ie. like frequency agile radios). You have a proxy that continually jumps from random server to random server within its list of massive servers. Never keep a proxy open for more than a few minutes (so by the time they notice it it will be gone) and the proxy points the browser to the next proxy before it closes down.
Even in this situation, unless every major non-chinese world website agreed to support such a scheme, it would be reasonably easy to detect this network access pattern.
It is a dupe from February.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Why is this ok? Yes censorship is bad, however like it or not its legel in China. What if these Canadians were to write I program that what able to tell people in the U.S. when the NSA or FBI was monitoring your phone or internet connection. You know as well as I do that in less then a week they would be in Jail here in the U.S. awaiting a trail for being Terrorists. People will say well its ok form them to do this because the Chinese goverment is evil... So they are so evil that we have favorite national trading status with them and we do billons of dollars in trade with them every year???
How would you feel if China actively was fighting against law in the US ? For example what if they start "fighting against the great drug firewall of the US" and publish method to avoid law enforcement to smuggle drug ? How would you feel (well I am sure some USian would feel happy but that is not the point you are hinting at).
On the paper I am sure it is a noble goal "freedom of speech" but de facto you are publishing way to go around china law. So how would you fee if China did the same to US law ?
This might sound like a troll, but this is an earnest question : many country are feeling sick of US interventionnism from its governement, or from its citizen... Furthermore , you know the proverb "do not do unto me what you would like to be done by me unto you".
PS: feel free to mod me as flamebait or troll, I always like irony (cue to the discussion theme).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This guy is either trolling, or his e-mails were being censored by Iran and being made to look like the U.S. did it. I know for a fact that the U.S. censors no incoming or outgoing private communications, although they do listen on suspect communcations. One guy's story doesn't make it true, it is false, ask anyone who has ever worked in such scenarios.
Yes, I know you meant something else entirely, but this highlights the key point - unless you're involved in the group who could censor, but doesn't, how would you know this for a fact?
And more importantly did you post this while at work?
Web browsing at work can at times be a grey area. There are resources I find useful directly related to my work, and some other resources that I may seem to waste time on, but help to improve my skill set / domain knowledge.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I strongly suspect China has already blocked *.eff.org?
What I'm hearing is that their program is a basic proxy that you connect to via SSL. And unless their complete morons as some other poster thought they might be, they'll use their own code and not have China's public key anywhere on their trusted provider's list (quite the contrary, I would suspect they'd reject any key signed by them as dangerous by default...).
At least, that's what I'd do. I guess they could be morons for all I know, but I hope not. It's kinda sickening to think that people's lives might depend on one's software...
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
If the US doesn't roll over the place in M1's, the Israeli's are going to nuke it into the stone age.
Just a few quick points to clarify some aspects of the Iranian situation for our American cousins. An invasion there would not be another Iraq. Iraq was a burned out shell of its former self, militarily, after years of sanctions and inspections. Iran is a whole other kettle of fish, and certainly no one is going to roll over with any time soon. Some facts, from all over:
Iran's army includes 350,000 regular soldiers (non-conscript) and 220,000 conscripts, and a 7 million-strong "Basiji" volunteer militia. Iran is sharpening its abilities to wage a guerrilla war. Over the last year, they've developed their tactics of 'asymmetrical' war, which would aim not at resisting a penetration of foreign forces, but to then use them on the ground to all kinds of harmful effect.
Iran designs and produces its brands of fighter and tank, among other things, some of which it exports to other countries. Initial developments in every field of military technology were carried out with the technical support of Russia, China, and North Korea to lay the foundations for future industries. Iranian reliance on these countries has rapidly decreased over the last decade in most sectors where Iran sought to gain total independence; however, in some sectors such as the Aerospace sector Iran is still greatly reliant on external help.
Iran has, at present, developed an uncanny ability to reverse engineer existing foreign hardware, improve it to its own requirements and then manufacture the finished product. They have currently a full spread of main battlefield systems, about 2,000 tanks, 300 combat aircraft, three submarines, hundreds of helicopters and at least a dozen Russian-made Scud missile launchers. Iran also has an undetermined number of Shahab missiles that have a range of more than 1,500 miles. Within minutes of any attack, Iran's air and sea forces could threaten oil shipments in the Persian Gulf as well as the Gulf of Oman. Iran controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which oil tankers must navigate, and could sink ships, mine sea routes or bomb oil platforms.
Although the Bush administration charges that Tehran already has been interfering in Iraq, many Iranians brush off the low-level infiltration as minor compared to the damage it could cause by allowing Iraqi militiamen to take heavy weapons into Iran, by backing the most extreme Islamist groups instead of the moderates it now supports, or by dispatching operatives across the long, porous border between the two countries.
But don't worry, a war would be over by christmas, right? Thats why the American government was openly discussing a nuclear option recently, much to the horror of the rest of the world...
On a related note, I have a lot of friends inside Iran, both male and female, and I have been continually surprised at how open minded, educated and free-thinking they are, especially the women. I expected a downtrodden mentality at the very least, but these women engage me in intelligent debate, pulling no punches. Their culture is unique, with musical instruments I have never heard of anywhere else, and some wonderful music produced by these instruments. Its important also to remember, these are not arabs, these are Persians, they tend to get upset if you call them arabs. The food is remarkable, and the language is thousands of years old. Putting aside fox propaganda, and actually talking to Iranians, getting to know them, is an eye opening experience. Yes, they have many problems with the religious rulership of the country, but those problems are being resolved over time. As for their nuclear program, they simply see it as a response to American aggression. And they are right.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
It seems to me that when we can't stop Chinese hot software from getting in, they can't stop western news either.
There must be thousands of ways. How about encrypting websites into music files (so much of it sounds random anyway) and distributing them via music sharing software? Have a friend in the west mirror a website at another address, substituting some key words? Send CD's by mail - no one can check every file. Use ham radio.
Really?
So you have no problem with the employee cleanly separating company time from personal time?
So you have no problem with the employee not carrying a pager and not being reachable by cellphone during non-business hours?
Oh, you do have a problem with that?
Then make up your fucking mind. Do you want the employee at your beck and call 24 hours a day 7 days a week, or do you want the employee to cleanly separate personal time from company time? You can't have both. Pick one.
Aside from this, I'm in complete agreement with you on the problem of quality employees. Just make sure that you're a quality employer in return.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
No, I didn't post that at work. ;)
Where I work, a certain amount of personal browsing is accepted, and a fair number of people even use AIM to talk to their families at home from the office as well, and that's never been a problem that I've heard of. (As far as I know, there aren't any other Slashdotters in my midst; fantasy sports leagues seem to be more my coworkers' fare.) If you do good work, it's been my experience that people don't really care what you do to produce it, or really even how much time you spent on it. Similarly, if you slave for hours but still turn out crap, I suspect you'll go nowhere quickly. (Though I've never had or worked with someone who's been just such a total zero that they washed out completely; problems seem to be more attitudinal than intellectual.)
There are certainly situations where sitting around and doing obviously non-work-related browsing just isn't appropriate: when you're working on a client's site on their dime, for example. Or any other time you might be perceived as representing a greater group of people besides yourself. That just strikes me as being obvious, though -- like "don't browse porn at work," I wouldn't want to have to tell someone that, and it's a bad sign if I do.
If I was the day-to-day manager of someone who was doing good work, but every time I went over to their desk was playing Solitaire, my reaction wouldn't be to fire them, but to try to find more challenging work for them to do. But aside from that, I'm a firm believer that, once people stay within the bounds of propriety, exactly how they budget their time and how they get their work done is their own business.
Especially as work environments become more distributed, with people working from home or at other sites -- so that you as a manager don't have any clue what they're doing while they're working -- judging people based on their output and performance (and thus having good metrics in place to measure output and performance in a realistic way) becomes more important.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Does radio free america or whatever have a call-in show from north korea? No, because you call in and They come and get you. So what's up with all these systems like freenet or this thing where the person you are trying to get info to needs to 'talk back'?
The thing to do is to have somebody in the (so-called) free world have a bunch of information to get into china and then broadcast it. Send random packets with information to each computer in china. Then the only thing they need to do is listen to it, not request it. For example if you have a special apache plug in it sends spoofed packets that only the end-user computer can tell are not the right next packet (based on tcp window or something). So then they get the real next packet plus a bogus packet with banned info in it. And everybody in china gets it by doing nothing so nobody can be held responsible.
Somebody in china should be able to do tcpdump | some small script and just get a continuous stream of info to look at. Without having to send out anything. Sure, they can firewall whatever packets, but then just broadcast on some connections they allow.
In theory that's true. In practice, DRM can be made effective enough by making it too difficult to crack for most users. By designing to reduce the chance of breaks across whole models or classes of device (unique keys, anti-tampering, etc etc) and just generally working hard to make it a royal pain to crack each system, they get most of what they want: the average user stops trying and gives up.
Now, in most cases it only takes one break for some file/show/whatever to be made available for everybody. So long as we assume devices can still play "unprotected" content, that's enough to break the effectiveness of the DRM but still make everybody's lives miserable. Everybody loses! I suspect that's what we're headed towards, and the media outfits will keep on using the isolated breaks as an argument for stronger and stronger "protection" and legislative support, then to lock down "unprotected" content, etc etc.
I'm hoping it'll all come crashing off the rails when someone wakes up and sees some sense, but it's not going to do so in a hurry, and the trip in the mean time won't be fun.
While I do welcome anything that helps opening the internet for more people and keeping it out of reach of governments, I am not sure if the Chinese government would sit and watch.
Currently, the number of people in China circumventing their filters is small. The people doing it first of all need some clue to do it, and it's also usually the people who have a "good reason" to do it (don't get me wrong, nobody needs any justification to want free information!). What I mean is that they are students, journalists, people who try to "move and shake" their society, who wish to change their country, hopefully to the better.
Yes, they are a "problem" for the regime. But the problem is not so big that the gov. can go overboard with it. There are bigger problems, and threatening them with even more serious punishments might actually raise some attention in the public, attention they certainly don't want the issue of the filtered net to get.
Now, what would happen if EVERYONE could access an unfiltered net? Everyone could get any information they want. The "problem" grows. And I'd fear the repercussions could be quite lethal. Literally.
A parallel can be found in filesharing and copyright laws. Think back about 10 or 15 years. Music and software were swapped. Yes, of course it was illegal back then, too. But the focus, of the *AAs and feds, were elsewhere. It was a small circle of people, at best the average person knew someone who knew someone who knew where to get "stuff".
Now everyone is on the 'net, and with the tools available, everyone can (and does) download. And look where our copyright laws are heading. A low profile problem became high profile. And the retribution is quite extreme.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"China will grow Larger..... China will be generous" -CnC Generals
We had dealt with the great china firewall many times because they even simply block our company users in china from even checking their email, we setup proxy servers and after couple of hits they get blocked again, so i am not sure if this idea is going to work because what we had to do ultimatly is to setup servers in china for emails, so unless these folks and planing to make an tar -cfv www.tar.gz http://*.*/ and then put it inside a server in china i doubt it will work, because they have wat too many people watching these traffic in china. They could easily analysize the protocol that is being used and get a fringerprint to match anytime when a call is made to block the connection.
dont get me wrong i am all for freedom of speach but from my networking background you still have the single point of control of bandwidth at the possesion of chinese government, unless someone going to pull some private fiber into china or get on some satetlite based connections, making an replica of the WWW is your best bet.
well thats my 2cents,
http://iesucks.org
It's straightforward to do MIM unless each party has some certificate authenticating the other party. As a result, the certificate in question would have to come with part of the download (unless it were spread by word of mouth).
The download has to come from a web or ftp server, so it would be trivially for the Chinese authorities to tamper with the certificate.
That way the downloaded client would connect to the firewall and see it as legitimate, and in the process incriminate its user.
My mother has one, my sister has one, my cousin has one, ......
Many college students have their own PC. If not, they usually use PCs in public labs.
I even don't know who ever has been to Internet Caffe...
maybe some high school students would go there, before getting their first computer.
And many families have ethernet at home, a thing I am still dreaming of here in USA.
I don't really have any strong feelings one way or the other; it seems like someone's accessibility (whether they carry a cellphone/pager/Crackberry off-hours) is a function of their job role. I give out my personal cellphone number pretty freely, as do most of my co-workers, but I've never gotten a call that I thought was inappropriate or frivolous. I don't check email most weekends unless there's a reason, either.
It seems like there are definitely jobs out there that you shouldn't get involved with, if you don't like getting panicked phone calls in the middle of the night, or work very strange hours. If I was ever in a position to hire or bring onto a team somebody for a job like that, I'd hope to try and give them full disclosure of what they were getting into. Having someone who hates their job is just bad business all around.
But anyway, I agree with your sentiment; if I was going to ask someone to work a nontraditional schedule, or even just work late occasionally or call them at home outside of work hours, I'd expect them to be able to ask for the reverse if they wanted to flex the other way. That just seems fair.
I definitely know people who let their work run the rest of their lives, and run around with two cellphones, a Blackberry, and a pager, 24/7/365, but I don't think that anyone ever told them that was required. It's just how they're attempting to get ahead of everyone else, and to a certain extent it probably works: if you sleep on your cellphone and don't mind answering panicked calls at 2AM, eventually it might get around that you're a good go-to guy. (And that you have no life...) Your name might get remembered for this and maybe, in some way, that will affect your career positively. I don't think there's any way to stop this: if people want to sacrifice their personal lives for careerism, they're going to no matter what barriers we create. But that sort of thing ought to rightly be viewed as the exception and not the rule: it's keeping the overachiever from becoming the standard (keeping the standard from creeping upwards, in other words) that's the problem.
So to make a long answer longer, in general I definitely agree with your point, I'm just not sure that there's a good and simple answer to the problem.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Thanks to this mock simulation, we can pretty much see how my plan will undoubtedly work. Ah ha ha ha ha!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
My fear with this idea has always been that if I provided a proxy for others, say, people in China, then others could also use my proxy for downloading RIAA songs and MPAA movies and kiddie porn and hacking into the state department to not get a photo of a ufo.
I guess this system works on trust, you only give your proxy info to people you trust. But I don't know. I hope they have solved this potential problem, because it's the one thing keeping me from running a public proxy.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
So why is it ok for you to browse around (slashdot etc) or use msn, but not ok for someone to surf porno?
One obvious weakness in Psiphon is the decision taken to not develop it anonymously. The fact that the developers are identified by name and location leaves them open to attack. If one of their loved ones were to be threatened by sinister guys with foreign accents, would they be able to resist the demands for weaknesses to be built into the system? And would the users of the system ever get to know before it is too late?
I think you're blowing up a terminological inexactitude into more than it is. They used "private key" where they meant "shared symmetric secret key".
Also you shouldn't refer to signing and verification as "encryption" and "decryption" because they're semantically very different things. Both RSA encryption and RSA verification use the RSA public-key operation, but to be secure they must also use padding and the padding system for an encryption scheme will be different than that for a signature scheme. It's also bad to use the same key as an encryption and as a signing key.
As a last nitpick, AFAIK there are no PK systems for which brute force is the most effective attack. If such a scheme existed it could use really short keys, like the 128-bit keys used in symmetric cryptosystems. Every PK system I know of uses keys at least twice that length.
Xenu loves you!
I personally don't believe that it's any of our business in this instance.
Sure, if a government is killing it's citizens or repressing them, then there is a strong case for us to intervene. But censorship is a matter for the indigenous people to fight with their own government if they want those censorship laws changed.
The United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, etc.) has censored (proxied) Internet connectivity but we rightfully do not intervene in this instance because there are religious & cultural reasons behind that censorship.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of Chinese citizens living in China actually *care* about Internet censorship.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I just wanted to say the ever since... ...never seen... ...ship before.
How hard would it be to beam wifi from neighboring countries into China, Iran, Burma, etc? Of course, it'd have to be a lot, but it's better than nothing right? Let's say in the case of China, beam from Hong Kong, Jinmen, maybe even Taiwan. Maybe just provide the complement of what's in China, i.e. all the websites that China censors. Any ideas?
Details of this project can be found here
Mass censorship and the imprisonment of dissenters isn't oppression?
And again, "religious and cultural reasons" means that some authority in those countries has decided to force its views on culture on everyone, using violence to tell individuals how to behave. If the culture really opposed the viewing of sites on democracy etc., then people would choose not to view those sites. They wouldn't need to be threatened. Same with dictatorship: do people really choose to submit to a guy who's willing to murder their families?
But yes, it's ultimately up to the people in oppressive countries to fight for their own freedom. These hackers are just giving them the tools.
And for comparison, I feel the same way about the US "war on drugs."
Revive the Constitution.
I think that current approaches to circumvent censorship are wrong.
Proxies try to prevent filters to filter by origin of the info. Crytography tries to prevent the filter to make sense of the info.
I think it would be better to simply reduce the rate of byte per letter/character. Right now it is roughly 1 byte / 1 character. If there was a way of turning any web page into jpegs, and still interact with it using some AJAX trickery, the web page would be nearly impossible to filter automatically. If you force human intervention to filter content, the effort to do it would be so great they would have to give it up or close the internet connection to the rest of the world.
You could call the technique "captching", as any web page would be readable only to humans, not to machines (whithout intensive carachter recognition software)
Methinks
He is probably from america where everybody is expected to pretend that they are completely asexual except in certian specific allowed contexts. The problem with embracing sexuality is it inexpensively raises people's standard of living, lowering their productivity. Many drugs have a similar effect which is why they are illegal/taxed.
DId you read what I wrote about Chinese living in the West?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Those chinese I have met (mostly 20-25 year old exchange students, or people that have moved here permanently) are like the grandparent says; they are not negative about their government. In my experience its rather the opposite; they are very proud over china, what china has become and their government. While many can agree that free speech is important, it seemes it is not an important issue in every day life there. Getting food on the table, a nice house, car and a secure life seemes a lot more important for ordinary citizens than legal rights for free speech.
(IMO we dont have good free speech/press in the west either; I cannot spread whatever information I want (for example a movie) - afaik no contry in the world has the ultimate free speech / press laws where one man can spread whatever information he wants..).
Also, what many seemes to tend to forget is that china is not a dictatorship per se; where one person rules everything or have final say (like in cuba, NK, former iraq). No they have a complicated system where thousands of elected party members do descisions in many instances. It is certainly possible for an ordinary citizen to become a member in this party and work their way up in the hierarchy to a position where they have some power, while it might not be easy, it certainly isnt impossible. How easy would it be to get into a power position in the USA politics? What is the difference, really? Well, they dont have public elections for president/senate, instead you must be a member of the party. In the west oth the elections seem just to be about media-hype, populism and looking good, not politics, anyways.
I would like to see a system where citizens have more direct democracy; where every citizen could vote on matters of intrest to them through a system on internet, or something like that. A system where blank votes are not frown upon; but a sign of health where people that does not have an opinion choses to not interfere. The society should be more dynamic and more like wikipedia - where everyone easily can be a direct participant in both policy making and execution of descisions.
When I was in China for a month, I spent a lot of time in internet cafes writing to friends. At first, I didn't even try to use SSH presuming that it would be blocked; I was surprised to find it wasn't.
So I was tempted to just bypass the firewall by routing through my machine in America.
But then I noticed the guy wearing a Red Army outfit watching over the internet cafe.
Methinks they need to revise their presumptions. Software can do a lot of things, but it can't hide the fact you're reading a banned website from a physical eye-over-your-shoulder in an internet cafe (most common way the Chinese people I met there used the internet).
GG
Private key crypto is so called not because the key is only in the hands of one person, but because the key is only in the hands of trusted parties. Anyone with the key can decrypt the messages (or encrypt them). However it's very much used for 2-party crypto. It's how all your bank details get from the ATM to the bank and back. IBM crypto cards with the keys stored in them.
As a practical matter, all public key crypto I've ever encountered uses private key crypto too because it's much less computationally intensive. In the case of SSH it works by one computer saying "here's my public key, send me a private key with it." The other computer then generates a random private key, encrypts it and sends it back. That's then used for the actual data transfer. Notice when you choose an alogirthm, you are choosing only symmetric (private) key alogrithims like AES.
Even PGP works like this, or at least did last I checked. When you write a message to someone PGP generates a random key using the encryption you select (CAST by default I think), it then encrypts the message with that key. That key is then encrypted with the public key specified, and appended to the message.
Asymmetric (public) key crypto is just too intense to do for large things. Even if you have the power, it's not worth it. You don't lose any security by using a symmetric crypto algorithm for the actual data exchange.
Remember though that, unlike Iraq, an opposition exists to the current government. An Iranian friend told me at the begining of the Iraq war : "good news! we're the next!". Iran's army is a real army, true. But it may take sides with the population if it rebels. In 2004 it could have work. In 2 years of catastrophic US foreign politics they might have tighten their grip on the army and population, but as the parent poster pointed, it is a developped country, with educated and rich people. Forget the desert-and-tent archetype, the residential suburbs of Teheran are not unlike those of San Jose.
Keep also in mind that in order to win the last elections, islamist conservatives had to arrest many opposants.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Why would they publicly work against a government with which they're trying to cooperate?
And why would they care what you expect? I don't think that 'reporter (666905)' is very powerful or influential.
Tor makes me feel safe when overseas using banking sites and my own email accounts. You simply don't have to sweat so much about man-in-the-middle attacks or packet sniffing in less than completely trustworthy environments.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
What you're trying to imply is the same thing that Iraq tried to imply in the early 90's, that it is powerful, it can't be beaten, it is strong, it has weapons which are powerful.
Look. Dude.
I don't think that we should invade Iran; politically, it's not right. However, Iran is not scary. The armies of the middle east are a joke. The middle eastern soldier has no heart. Never has. Never will. Get over it. All these powerful weapons you claim for Iran? Please. You make me roll my eyes and laugh.
As for the Iranians falling all over themselves to be a guerilla force, I think that's silly, but also missing the point. Nobody is going to invade Iran, but it is highly likely economic sanctions will be placed on Iran that *will* make it the equivalent of Iraq over the next 3 years.
Just admit it, the only decent government those poor Persians have had over the past 50 years has been the Shah, and so I think if we're smart (and we're probably not with the idiot Bush in charge), we'll shape things so we'll force the middle class to take over and perhaps they'll line all these Iranian religious wack-jobs against to wall along with the politicians who feed off them.
And perhaps they'll change the name back to Persia and get back to being a modern state like they were under the Shah.
Their stories are tailored to a certain head-space. They don't present news so much as they filter ideas and pre-digest them for a bunch of working parents raising kids. The Star is basically just a really fat daily edition of, "For Better or For Worse." (--Or, "How to accept slavery and severely limited possibilities in life while pretending you are happy and that there is nothing more.")
Poor Lynn Johnston. She's a shill and doesn't know it. That's the best way to subvert a populace; get genuine and honest creators to believe in the lie and then repeat it with charisma and talent. There's a reason why, "For Better or For Worse" is the MOST popular comic strip in North America. It's morphine for the wounded.
The problem is that The Star, (and papers like it), are direct arms of the corporate paradigm, which are linked to all kinds of nastiness. Whenever a paper uses emotionally charged terminology when sharing facts, you automatically know that biases are involved. The fact that it's so bald-faced is an indicator of just how far the people have been subverted.
For example. . .
"But the computer smarts of Ron Deibert, Nart Villeneuve, and Michael Hull, combined with their passion for politics and free expression, have led them to develop a highly anticipated software program that allows Internet users inside China and other countries, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Burma, to get around repressive censorship and not get caught."
The average person if they were to read the same phrase usage in a Chinese newspaper, would gag and cry, "Propaganda!" but when it's displayed right in their hometown paper, it's suddenly invisible while retaining all of its subversive power.
So is there an Agenda? Hell, yes! I wonder how exactly the Toronto Star is going to spin Bush's military strikes against Iran?
That's right! Iraq all over again. Baseless lies about war ambitions spun into a such a fear frenzy that the cozy suburban family provider will shudder at the very thought and willingly go along with corporate fascism. Same old story.
Our 'Liberal Media' is designed to make us stupid.
-FL
I think the last thing I would want is to piss off an oppressive communists country and then have my full name announced on news sites like slashdot. I think China just updated their "people to kill" list.
or else!
The article does not say much about *how* this will work, but it will probably not help a lot. The simple reason is that in a country where it is illegal to access some site it is easy to also make it a criminal offence to possess any program or use any means to circumvent that restriction. A similar thing is going on in the west with regard to copyrighted material: in many countries it is not only illegal to copy but also to distribute or even possess any program or technical means to circumvent this restriction.
:)
I wonder how these countries would react if some Chinese hackers would find ways around that
Nyce idea, but it still would be possible to locate/disconnect starting with a traceroute. That is if it provided connectivity to the rest of the Chinese network.
Moreover, anyone found associated with it would probably be charged with spying.
"Sure, after nearly all the open problems in mathematics are solved. If you know of someone who's done this, there's several million dollars (and immortality) waiting for them."
Of course this post makes the same mistake as many others. Crypto-security more times than not, is broken due to a weakness in implimentation. Looks unbreakable on paper, but someone made a mistake in implimentation, or they made some poor choices elsewere. That's why technofaith (in this case) is soo dangerous.
A use for EBCDIC!!
If Buddhism has any validity, *everyone* will be receiving their just karma in the next life. Just a thought.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Occam's razor."
WTF? What does that have to do with this? Oh, right it doesn't.
"In this particular instance, we don't even need evidence..."
Ok, I get it now, you're an idiot troll. What a stupid thing to post.
And so, slashdot.org was censored by the graete china firewall
Omry.
And pretty soon, they are going to have thermonuclear weapons, and theres not a lot anyone can do about it.
Sounds like ol' Dubya thinks he's got something he can do about it.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
"And pretty soon, they are going to have thermonuclear weapons, and theres not a lot anyone can do about it"
I wouldn't call "a thorough and complete nuking by Israel" nothing.
That is the reality, and the contingency we should be planning for.
If the Chinese were like, say, Iranians who by and large just want to left alone by foreign bullies, or even like North Koreans who are run by a (Chinese-backed) brutal regime killing their own people, I might agree to a degree. Perhaps regimes do have the right to try and destroy their own nation and people, and it is the responsibility of those people to do something about their own regimes. I wouldn't leave such people standing alone, but I can understand how some people in the "free world" wouldn't care what genocides take place within despotic nations.
But here we were specifically referring to China, a militaristic dictatorship which is not only holding its neighbours (Tibet, turkic Uighur people's East Turkestan and Southern Mongolia which the Chinese euphemistically call "Inner Mongolia") under Gestapo-style occupation but which is actively committing genocide against the occupied neighbours.
And you're saying that the "free world" shouldn't even assist the Chinese population (and here we must include the occupied "Chinese nationals") in being able to gain access to outside information or the freedom to communicate?
If the Soviet Russians under Stalin or the Germans under Hitler had had freedom to communicate and access to outside information, don't you think a great many people in those countries would have questioned the sanity of their leaders, perhaps even refused to help the war (preparation) efforts or helped the victims of the genocides or helped create domestic resistance etc.? But the people didn't know the facts and nor did they have any opportunity to communicate freely. They just went along with the madness.
Today we have China behaving like a genuine Nazional Socialist dictatorship (albeit with cutesy business ties to other major military powers), its people indoctrinated to believe that it is their patriotic right and duty to subjugate their "barbarian" non-Chinese neighbours!
Stalin began his eradication of tens of millions human beings already in the 1920s but the world didn't care (and we didn't exactly have the tools to help the Soviets of that era to learn about the reality). Hitler established his network of extermination camps in the 1940s but the West only learned to extent of his crimes when the WWII was in the closing stages.
Yet today we know what the Chinese regime is doing to its neighbours so shouldn't anyone with even slightest interest in upholding the UN's Human Rights Declaration or the rights of people to self-determination be supporting efforts at stopping their crimes? Or do these UN ideals only apply to Caucasian christians and not when the victims are Tibetan buddhists, Turkic Uighur muslims or Mongolians?
Enabling communications within the areas under the Chinese regime's control would IMO be of urgent and primary importance. As long as the Chinese population is unaware of the crimes being committed in their name they have no reason to try and stop it from taking place.
PS. One group of people I have no respect for is those Chinese residing outside China who have access to information but who choose to follow and actively support their regime's jingoistic Great China propaganda nevertheless. They are akin to those active Nazi supporters who actually knew that the Holocaust was taking place and yet loudly and blindly supported it.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Your cause is worthy, but why bring Buddhism into your argument? Is Jerry Yang a Buddhist (or are you assuming he is because he is Asian?)
Cleary, you're not Buddhist, based on your superficial grasp of Buddhism. Here is a 10 minute primer. I suggest checking it out before you throw around terms like karma when discussing Buddhism.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Do you reckon it is okay for people to simply ignore genocides committed by their regime? Would you care to ask for your Chinese acquintances opinions on this issue? How do they feel about the Japanese imperial occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s compared to China brutal occupation of Tibet from 1950 onwards? Do they absolutely hate what the Japanese did in parts of China while hailing China's ongoing crimes against the completely occupied and terrorized Tibet as something benevolent and enlightened?
Earlier you said: "May be westerners should get themselves a break for a change and let Chinese decide what to do with the country?"
And let them continue doing with absolute impunity what Stalin and Hitler did before them? Is it really okay to just wipe your neighbours off the map?
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
...is an interesting read on the topic of a potential war in Iran. Not so because it's a great book or particularly well written, but because it comes from one of the policy folks that helped influence the Bush administration to invade Iraq (which he now admits was a mistake).
The crux of the book: Iran is a completely different ballgame. All of the stuff that he thought would work in Iraq doesn't have a chance in Iran. In comparison with Iraq, Iran has a much more legitimate government, at least an outline of democracy, they're much richer, more organized, populous, stronger militarily and have stronger anti-American sentiments (there's a national paranoia, on semi-reasonable grounds, about American interventionalism). Iran is not another Iraq and the US has botched the Iraq situation terribly. Not to mention that if they moved into Iran they would still need a significant amount of their forces in Iraq.
Also, the Shah was great for the rich and cultured, but the society was much more split along class lines as is typical in third world countries under the Shah. He didn't enjoy widespread popularity.
Do you think dissidents would really be given visas to work in the US? On the contrary, it's quite possible your coworkers were collecting information for the Chinese government.
And I expect that you'll be funding every cause that you favor with your own money. "Yahoo will be receiving their just karma in the next life." Yeah, mod company -1 Evil
Here is a 10 minute primer
You must read a LOT faster than I do.
... is it possible? Could we use the same P2P technology to basically run a "virtual internet" with it's own transfer protocols and DNS system? Everybody would share bandwidth and storage space, no centralization needed. I thought I heard of some project called "freenet" or something like that a few years back, I wonder if that's how it worked, or if that project is still alive.
Just like being able to circumvent these things, one day those governments will be able to track down the circumventing. People here on slashdot always start shouting that an encryption technique / DRM scheme will be broken one day... Well.. big surprise : so will this. My question : Will these students feel any guilt when the users of their software hear a life-sentence or death penalty ruled against them? Even though their disclaimer will probably contain a couple of phrases that they are not responsible for the consequences, because ofcourse, the users of the software are.
I hate talking about these things but being a laowai here in beijing I feel like I have to.....
;)
I am currently residing in the good old PR of C and its just so much more complicated than all these "activists" make it out to be. Yes, being technically inclined I figured out ways to see things that get blocked here and there - and I have been passed sites and progs that can also do the trick by locals ive met. But like someone said earlier "becuase i am a foreginer I probably wouldnt get into any trouble - especially if i just wanted to fact check on a certain website (wiki) that has been blocked." But what if im not.
What if I am actually using these proxies to view things that the government explicitly doesnt want me to see?
What if I am a citizen and not to keen about possibly going to jail?
What if I am reading these things so that I can _change_ things, tell people about all this new knowledge, plant the seeds of a better way in China?
Puleez. Yeah I get these proxy progs and if they arent given out by the government then the government is the one running the hosts. If the government is catching these dissidents by going through unsent webmail drafts I think they might have some pros on the job. And none of this even touches on the fucking societal implications. Try walking in another mans shoes before you decide "He needs to be freed! Its the American way!" Ever since I got here all ive heard is about how the NSA and the pres finally turned out great idea for a country into 1984 - meanwhile in China all I have to do is not start a fucking democ movement and no one bothers me - ever.
Im sorry that im rambling and not replying to the parent but I feel like people need to take a second look at the situation. China will change, it is changing, and everyone (including the bosses) know it - but even the _people_ will tell you that running the show for 1.5 BILLION PEOPLE requires some checks and balances.
But seriously , you see me dance around words in this reply here and there - there are things I will not mention, im not selling out, im just getting by. The kids over here know whats going on, they dont need a program, and they dont need someone from the other side fo the planet (and safely out of the Politburo's loving arms) to tell them to break the law and revolt.
This will all be moot in twenty years when they are the superpower and the US is relegated to a failed experiment and police state
(im kidding im kidding)
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
At what point could China consider this an act of war?
Suppose China uses its wide snooping infrastructure to log who's circumventing, who's funding them, and (aside from the citizens of China who want knowledge for information and not for overthrow purposes) who's benefitting from this (namely, the US government), then suddenly and capriciously says: "You, you, and you... you're the assholes behind this; effective IMMEDIATELY, your permit to conduct business here is revoked. You have one WEEK to pack up and get OUT. Not just you, but the FIRST FIVE levels of any subsidiaries and first THREE extensions of business partners. If you can't get your hardware out, then auction it off. Oh, and leave the buildings intact. You can't leave until we've inspected them for bombs, sabotage, or similar Saddam-shoots-the-horse-rather-than-returning-it-a live tactic..."
Personally, I am disappointed that coarse, harsh, and such penetrative domestic means are used against the population. But, you've GOT to see it China's way: They've been FUCKED WITH by the west (US and Europeans) as far back as 580 years: Opium, colonialization, subjugation, exploitation and more. I dare say that had not Commodore Peary showed up with some politicians' writ: "You will do business with us OR ELSE", Japan might not have had yet another reason to sprawl all over and do what it did to much of Asia. (However, how many people know that Korea actually invaded Japan, not once, but at least TWICE, in 1281 and 1284? Memories of a nation can span hundreds of years, and paranoid countries can be wary and vengeful, even if it takes 641 years to effect vengeance...).
But, I also feel that forcibly punching through and digging under a countries virtual customs borders to be tantamount to waging a stateless if not de facto war against various organs of a government.
Now, don't get me wrong: I do realize that China has a effective (how effective I don't know...) apparatus which is aiming computer resources at various governments around the world. It in itself is not a nice act, but unless and until anyone PROVES that China is actively knocking off US power grids or using proxies to do so, then PLEASE don't pull punches and equate military-military/government-to-government probes and studies to commercial/private venture proxy wars in the name of "democracy". (OTOH, how many have heard that the US CIA pressure on Vietnam to root out Communists was so intense that the VN actually rounded up and murdered some 1,800 innocent (and maybe a few dozen bona fide anti-US types) people PER MONTH for a few years? Talk about BAD KARMA. Obviouisly, that pressure is immensely worse than funding a business-to-government action like rending firewalls, but it's an historical wound many prefer to leave salved over...)
Whatever you think of China, Communism, oppression, and other things, look at your own back yards, too. Virtually EVERY country has bones in the closet and enough bad karma to warrant an occasional kick in the gut, smack in the face, or public humiliation, and the US is CERTAINLY not immune, not matter HOW MUCH "contribution" it makes internationally. NO country makes contributions without first scheming and then codifying a "hook-in-your-ass-to-control-you" tactic. IOW, NOTHING IS DONE FOR FREE.
I DON'T like censorship (unless it is to prevent a DIRE, GENUINE release of REAL/EXISTING national secrets, not some trumped up bullshit charges or to prevent embarassment...) or oppression (unless it's being carried out by publicly-routed corrupt politicians or power mongers), but I don't condone rambunctious or strategized abuse of the values of a country. The Chinese deal with their cultural, their local issues their OWN way. It may take another 25 years, but at SOME point, China's government of today will be somewhat if not a great degree different from what it is today. The US and its friends just need to quit being control freaks and have to accept that it IS NOT RIGHT for a junior land of some 325M to dictate or monk
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Great, these nerds are going to lead to the arrest and possible capital punishment of thousands of citizens of foreign countries. They think they are so smart no one will detect it, guess what, they aren't. There will always be something that they will forget. Why won't people realize that the USA is here in the USA, not the rest of the world. Freedom of speech is great in the US, but sometimes people need to shut the hell up and keep their noses out of other government's business.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
I agree with the project's intent, but how does this differ from, say, writing a virus that forces remote computers to run Windows Update in order to protect them from the vulnerability that made the virus possible? In both cases you're co-opting a computer without permission... the intended ends don't quite justify the means.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
It'd be far easier to doctor the download so that it either disabled certificate chaining or inserted the bogus root certificate. The problem has to be one of making sure that you get the right file.
Most likely you'd have to get this download covertly from a mirror site or bit torrent (since the real site will surely be blocked) and there would be little way to know it was authentic. Sure you could download and audit the source code, but very few people will have the skills to identify if they have an original or doctored version.
It's so typical of western society to believe that their values are the ones that should be universally held.
I sincerely hope that the software is immediately used by employees to get around corporate content firewalls, allowing them to surf child porn and hate literature undetected.
Not as impressive as the development of the Zulfiqar main battle tank or the Raad-2 self propelled artillery.
The goal of US military action in Iran is the destruction nuclear facilities and of large ground based military hardware, no matter how good it is. Iran has no answer to stealth, and precision munitions. They know this.
Iraq had little to no anti aircraft weaponary, unlike Iran.
To use anti-aircraft weaponry it must be revealed with radar. Turning on radar during a US attack has been shown to be suicidal.
So you have figured out how to bomb mines then? Good work, I'd patent that and retire if I was you. Meantime, I'd take a look at one example [newsmax.com] of many. FTFA:
The US has been minesweeping the gulf for decades. A more potent threat is shore based missile batteries.
"I think it would be problematic for any navy to face a combination of mines, small boats, anti-ship cruise missiles, torpedoes, coastal artillery, and Silkworms," said retired Navy Commander Joseph Tenaglia, CEO of Tactical Defense Concepts, a maritime security company. "This is a credible threat."
This is a fair accessment. Any navy commander worth spit would not underestimate his enemy. The US Navy 5th Fleet is stationed nearby in the UAE. I like our chances.
So the US isn't interfering with Iraq in any significant fashion...
No, we are nation building there. Iraqis will decide their own fate. They can either unite and be a prosperous country or slouch toward radical islam. Their choice.
It certainly is. That would be called "war".
Is that worse than being tormented by a bunch of fanatics for the next 25 years? Iran with a bomb is intolerable. I say lets have it done!
an ill wind that blows no good
After seeing the Chinese Prime Minister visit Bill Gates first and not the President George W. (Total Failure) Bush, i was rather amazed. Whilest i was wondering how this could be, i saw a BBC Newsnight program where a former CIA director and the British Secret Service director were invited to discuss things. Suddenly the quarter dropped for me! The whole thing was treated by the Anglo-Saxon secret community like a hot potatoe! Somehow the Chinese PM was not to be learned about the real dirty details of matters involved. So...
I place my bets that this so-called Chinese Firewall is nothing else as an extension to Echelon to prevent Chinese People _AND_ Chinese Government to find out certain details about whats really going on.
Just check your web-sites access-logs for visitors from the chinese government. You will find that there aren't any...
Robert
"Not as impressive as the development of the Zulfiqar main battle tank or the Raad-2 self propelled artillery."
Wow, I mean, developing a tank that is two generations behind current designs, and an anti-tank missile that is 45 years old in design, just wow. Amazing.
Why does that impress you? Because they successfully copied designs they had acces to?
The fact that those "accompplishments" impress you says more about your ignorance of weapons technology than it does about Iranian military advancement.
"It basically means that we can't do anything they don't like, or they can fuck our economy, or at the very least turn off the money, and we won't find another country to borrow money from."
What a dumb, wrong statement. The Chinese economy can't "fuck" our economy without "fucking" their own. What do you think all that debt is the result of, econogenius? Chinese benevolence?
We buy their stuff. If they try to fuck us, we don't buy it anymore. If you think there won't be a line to take the place of the Chinese in supplying the US, you're a fool.
Don't allow yourself to remain as ignorant as you are. Read about the subject.
Actually, there are many ways to circumvent the Chinese censorship that work very well: Chinese (those who are interested in circumventing censorship, and they are few and far between) often use things like Garden Networks and related software, developed by overseas Chinese. Tor is also popular - strange thing is that its website isn't blocked, and one can download it freely. Foreigners in China mainly use simple webproxies like anonymouse.org, which don't have any encryption, but are enough to access the blocked sites (however, not enough to get access to sites that contain forbidden words - but since these are Chinese words, most foreigners don't even know how to look for them).
They are literly playing with fire. We think its ok to help those people and we think we are doing something great for them.
But in reality, we are playing with there lives. Once they do get busted, they suffer very strong punishments that we don't have to face.
Just because its "undetectible", does not make it safe. If we think the laws are wrong, we should change the laws. Not make them criminals in there own country.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
I'm not sure what the US has to do with any of this, or why you brought it up other than to troll.
This is about C-A-N-A-D-I-A-N-S. Canada, despite many people's misconceptions, is not part of the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada
Ignorance is not bliss, so do yourself a favor and read the link. Hopefully you won't make the mistake again.
What if the Chinese gov't falsely accuses one of the hackers' victims of breaking the firewall, and imprisons or executes their victim?
It is really scary that the U. of Toronto sanctions what would be a crime if committed against PCs in Canada. Their callous disregard for the consequences of their actions is chilling.
Parent is noted troll Gulo Gulo, well known for his abusive approach to anything. I'm not trying to suggest anything here, but I feel it would be best if he was run out of his current account in the same manner as he was run out of his last account. This would have the ancillary benefit of temporarily stopping him stalking me as well. Much appreciated.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
AnonymOS! http://kaos.to/cms/content/view/14/32/
This could be a very powerful tool in anyones' kit that needed internet privacy.
It includes advanced cryptography, and also, maybe even more importantly in the case of China, a pre-configured ready-to-go, on-by-default TOR http://tor.eff.org/ anonymous encrypted onion-routed proxy system.
Plus, being an OpenBSD 3.8-based LiveCD, it can be used from an internet cafe or whatever net-connected PC one might have or get access to, even if only temporarily.
Of course, Chinese censors could blackhole the TOR gateway servers, but these change randomly as I understand it. I am not that knowledgeable regarding the TOR network details. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can chime in on this.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
"Tibet, turkic Uighur people's East Turkestan and Southern Mongolia"
Can you point out D.C. on the USA map? I doubt about it.
Why shouldn't USA return its land back to native indian? Things aren't that simple. We have seen the changes of ownership of lands for thousands of years. It's part of our history. It is also sad that the winer takes all and the loser had nothing left. But, the winner has its reason to be winner, and the loser has his own blaim for loosing.
I feel guilty every day when I eat food, because I know by doing so I am killing some forms of lives. But I can't stop that, could you?
Related to Chinese censorship, now they have students policing eachother.
Internation Herald Tribune - Students put China's spin on Web
Just thought it was related, interesting read.
Lighten up. Its only a post.
Why would they publicly work against a government
/>
The OP said nothing equivalent to "publicly". You added that.
I don't think
To paraphrase you - why would the OP care what you think?
When you react to a common rhetorical flourish as if it's meant literally, it makes your responses seem no more incisive than "yah, but so are you."
<grrr
Rather than address my point, you use an ad hominem. How many troll mods do I currently have, chief? Right, zero.
So, any more ad hominems to toss about, or are you through?
"I'm not trying to suggest anything here,"
Really, then what's the next statement you make?
"but I feel it would be best if he was run out of his current account in the same manner as he was run out of his last account."
So you are trying to suggest something. Why preface your statement with a lie?
"This would have the ancillary benefit of temporarily stopping him stalking me as well."
Do I know you? Who the fuck are you? I am, amazingly, not ever concerned with the poster, because I deal with the comments.
So, who are you again? Have you and I even had a discussion before? How would I know you? Where would I remember you from? Why do you think anything you've said or done would be important enough for me to waste my time following you around? Right...
So, now that we're done with that bit, address my points. It was funny how you tried to divert attention like that, epsecially the "stalking" bit, but please address my points.
Or not. It's pretty clear you can't, so you resorted to the ad hominem.
You can expect all you want, feeling bad about something does not mean someone has to go out of their way to change it. I feel bad that people have cancer, that doesn't mean I have to donate to the cancer society.
I think your expectations are a bit unrealistic, and by the tone of your message a bit unfair.
While they may regret doing what China wanted them to do, that does not mean they wouldnt do it again. My friend worked for a company that worked with another company who was going to outsource (his company provided the technology to do it). He said he felt "unpure" during all of those meetings, and thinks it sucks that outsourcing happens...he also said he didn't object because he wants to keep his job. This is not unrealistic nor an unreasonable sentiment. -Avi
(Btw I do donate to cancer society, aids research and diabetes research....which I am thankful i can say i have none of the three).
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Because it's widely perceived as offensive and inappropriate for a business environment.
People working from home can browse whatever porn they want to, it's not the porn that's a problem per se, but that it would offend others who might see it, and generally make the office a less pleasant place to work. I think this sort of generally extends to more than just pornography: I'd say that deathpics, and probably extremist political propaganda that would offend other people would also be on the short list of things that would get you a conversation with your manager.
No one (that I know of) is offended by Slashdot/MLB.com/Google News, so there's not really a problem.
It's a 'community standards' thing; you don't look at things when you're surrounded by other people who can see what you're doing and are going to be made uncomfortable or offended by it. That's just common courtesy, which as far as I'm concerned is a pretty critical skill.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But, you've GOT to see it China's way
I really don't have to see it the way of mass-murdering tyrants, who do not represent "China".
But, I also feel that forcibly punching through and digging under a countries virtual customs borders to be tantamount to waging a stateless if not de facto war against various organs of a government.
And fundamentalist Islamic nutjobs may consider it an act of war that the Western world broadcasts TV shows featuring women exposing their arms and driving cars. There is no moral reason to respect the desires of oppressive governments. (There may be practical reasons, as Google and Yahoo have shown).
I don't condone rambunctious or strategized abuse of the values of a country.
Again, you're equating the country with the gang of criminals currently in charge. The Chinese student trying to access uncensored news may have a rather different set of values than the thugs trying to detect and imprison him.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Every semi-educated person knows that colonianism, and particularly the British Empire, spawned crimes against humanity across the globe. Were you aware that the current civil war in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) also stems from the colonial policies of the British?
However China's *ongoing* genocidal aggression against its historical non-Chinese neighbours is taking place *now*, while the CCP's Propandaga Ministry is trying to convince the world that the Chinese dictatorship is somehow a civilized nation.
So instead of the past guilt diversion trick, how about explaining how Imperial Japan's past brutality against its neighbours was a crime never to be forgotten while Chinese communists' ongoing imperial genocide against its historical neighbours is perfectly acceptable. Surely as an AC you can present some wonderful reasoning to defend Mao Zedong's crimes that the current regime continues to glorify.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
First, I think what these guys are doing is great. I have to say however, that I suspect that they are over thinking the problem (as nerds tend to do)
Here is just one of my Low(er) tech solution:
Just Mail (Yes Snail) DVDs Disguised as AOL CD's full of 9GB chunks of content that the target country is known to block to random (and strategic) addresses inside the borders of the country.
Once Blue Ray is widely available, those can be 50GB chunks.
Wait 1 week.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Their Tech will still be usefull for realtime, but weekly/monthly
installments are probably adequate for most searches.
To effectively circumvent the Chinese blacklists, we need:
(1) circumvention tools that can be easily installed on any computer, and
(2) a grass-roots movement to install those tools on many computers.
This could be jump-started quite dramatically if P2P applications would start including censorship-circumvention tools automatically with their P2P software.
I, for one, would be willing to donate a bit of my P2P bandwidth to help put some more cracks in the firewall.
Talking "routers" and "SSL" isn't impressive at all, and there are many ways (discussed in other posts) for chinese gov to make such a trivial approach(known sinse long time cf FireWall piercing howto) ineffective and dangerous(read: detectable).
.ssh/config, it's a great piece of challange actually.
The main weakness of this solution would be it's popularity as if the connection is encrypted, some specific regularity will probabely appear in it's behavour on the network (detectable by the firewall) and on the computer, detectable by desktop integrity tools eg. antivirii. no doubt, the gov would force the deployment of such a tool on every toaster and cut the inet access without it (and yes, i know, it's like DRM, no way to make such verification bullet-prouf, yet it would lead to a very unpleast situation).
IMHO, the good way to act under such repressive censorchip is, in first place to look innocent, here we could learn a good lesson from botnet overlords. If the the FW drilling prog has a form of a bot-net worm, you could at least claim you were unaware of ot, if it establishes a subliminal channel in a cleartext protocol, it's harder to track it.
The most hard to detect would be an exchange encoded in the timing, like a chat conversation where bits are transmitted by the time elapsed wetween sentences (generating random conversations with data encoded in it would a good start, but don't forget that chinese are very advanced in natural language analysis). Yes, its's slow, but at least you have a chance to not die un jail, AFAIK(and i don't recall where and who told me) in military security specifications they talk about maximum reate of information leak, this is probably because it's almost impossible to stop it completely, but it flows soooo slooooowly.
So i really hope these people are preparing something smarter than "ProxyCommand socat STDIO PROXY:some_proxy:%h:%p" in your
Now how about disclosing it's source? Sure it would be ethical, but would also ease defeating it.
Well, I'm not the OP, but I personally think that anyone who's willing to carry a pager or otherwise make themselves available out of hours without charging a significant sum of money for the privilege is a fool.
I've reread his comment, and to be honest, I can't see where you get the impression that he thinks any differently. I appreciate that a lot of employers seek to tip the balance of the relationship in their favour, but that doesn't mean that they all do.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
A few possible reasons:
a) some people are genuinely offended by porn; few are so moved by slashdot
b) it's unprofessional (most people consider porn to be a personal, private thing)
c) it's in direct contravention of my company's policies
d) it's a damn sight more embarrassing if a client happens to catch sight of it
e) some women genuinely feel threatened by it
f) in some areas it's legally grey or even outright illegal
Basically, because society publicly takes a somewhat dim view of porn (no matter what people individually may think of it privately).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"Honestly I sometimes just browse through your posting history for chuckles"
Honestly, I've never heard anything more pathetic. How could your life be so empty that you'd waste time getting chuckles from a "stalker"?
One other thing, your link, that's not my comment. Pretty funny that you can't even get that right...
And you're still afraid to address my points.
C'mon MAN/WOMAN!
Purportedly, in THIS country, I can write the following and SUPPOSEDLY not fear being rounded up by officials...
(All this rant is (in some way/to some degree, but not 100% directly or precisely) in response to your excerpting a few of my previous statements. I'll expound/expand upon some things.. not that I am trying to "seriously underestimate the attention span of the average Slashdot reader", someone posted in another thread to another poster who had a pages-long comment....)
Please, please PLEASE, Wake UP. What the HELL have we 'merkuns got? A cadge/cabal bunch of imperios who want to impress upon the world THEIR VIEW of WORLD ORDER. A prez who invokes or exhorts "God" being his co-pilot/advisor. (As far as **III*** say, until/unless "God" shows up, we have NO proof one way or another; we need to LIVE as if we are good and right, but SOME things MUST be left to "God", IFFF God exists. SOME things that don't involve nation-nation war must be between "the person and the God of their choice"- say, abortion, self-mutilation, weird worships, licensed, CONTROLLED, medically-monitored ADULT-LEVEL prostitution without fear of PERSECUTION or PROSECUTION-- as long as they don't excessively burden-- I'm SURE we all know a bunch of people who lack the luck or social skills to arrive at enjoyable, consensual, fruitful sexual release with another human, but unfortunately there are the abusers and there are the churches that impose their political wills on local government )...) A nation run by a rootin tootin murderin' (seems so at a distance) former governer who GLEEFULLY, zestfully put his chop (signature) on the execution orders for people, a man whose state had police evidence locker with roofs such poor condition that rain-damaged/destroyed evidence condemned people to death or unnecessary jail/prison terms. A man whose FAMILY is so knee-deep with despots and wealthy types around the world the he can steal elections, kick ass, and snap his finger and people such as myself (doing an expected duty to speak up) could fucking vanish or look like we committed suicide, or be slapped with false charges just to be made examples of.
Native Americans lost this nation-- It was THEIRS. Yet, tho we don't rever columbus so much, there STILL is the legacy of drugged/alcoholic Natives, corrupt reservations and gambling casinos that can only get back SOMEthing only because some pieces of US law allow or tolerate a quasi-Native American State -- maybe out of some strand of guilt. This nation dropped not ONE but TWO nukes on land when they could have called up the Emperor and said, "Get near the coast for a demonstration; respect it or we'll bring out more." (And, yeh, for those who claim the US only HAD 2 or 3 with not backup nukes, this would be ONE helluva poker bluff to pull, but it WOULD have saved some what? 80,000 lives?) And, this country went to civil war NOT to free slaves, but to prevent the damned place from tearing itself apart in the first place. But, half a country FOUGHT to subjugate a flesh and blood people, enslave them (yep, I'm aware that my ancestors SOLD Africans into slavery, the enslaved being the conquered tribal enemies or the undesired...), and dare to fly a repressive flag EVEN TO THIS DAY.
PH got bombed to snub the US' nose. Unfortunately for the "master planners" in Tokyo, it didn't work out. They didn't hit the right targets, didn't do a LOT. That's fortunate, since the world would be worse off had it fallen to tyranny and martial philosophy that was egged ON by snobby cooing elitist in the US who ENCOURAGED Japan to do what it did. THAT is criminal, praising a nation's leaders (Mind you, I am NOT talking about the CIVILIAN POPULACE population-- I'm debasing "LEADERS of NUMEROUS countries".. I've been to Japan, and other parts of Asian and I WANT THEM TO live peacefully as well as WREST BACK "their region" -- And, believe it or not, so does the US, at least in politispeak-- until it runs out of enemies and places to sell weapons to...). The US got lucky throug
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
But will you be able to find the software if you google for it or will it be censored out of public knowledge. As it would be contray to share holders returns because of the threat to google censorwords or censorsence the new pay to play google tools for the preservation autocracies.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
By time you are management in a big company, who actually registers on congress's radar enough to be called before a committee, the parts of your brain involved in feeling emotions other than greed are so atrophied as to be useless. Seriously, these aren't just people who lie through their teeth, they are people who are incapable of even recognizing when they're lying anymore - they probably went straight to the Chinese embassy after the congressional committee to 'regret free speech' and report some more thought criminals.
Sometimes the lab performs tests remotely, taking control of unprotected computers inside the censoring country without permission. This poses an ethical controversy, but Deibert says it's for the greater good: "We don't worry about that too much."
I'm sure they don't, but I do! The moment I hear "greater good", I become very suspicious. China is censoring the internet for the greater good...of China. We always hear the belligerents in a conflict claim "self defense". "Greater Good" is a no-good term to define the force to make people do something against their will for the benefit of others(who might not be so good). I don't care how great your "good" is. Leave me and mine alone. The choice of what is good or bad is mine to make, and nobody else's. Good comes from within, not some outside authority. You have a right to advise, not dictate.
What?
While a friend a mine spent about 18 months in China, we were speaking on the phone and I asked about the real impact of censorship on him during his stay; he explained how things were perceived there, what topics best to politely avoid, and mentionned the Internet being filtered. One thing that struck me was the he said the people there had a clue that not everything was perfect in their land, but were an extremely proud people, which I figured probably helped (the goverment) in keeping things old-school.
In any case, I felt like testing this filtering, and he was willing to give it a try, so once I guided him through the browser's settings pages, we had him configured to use my personal workstation (here in North America) as a proxy, and he was staring at playboy.com within moments. We removed the proxy config, and he was no longer able to access that site.
Clearly, the next step would've been to check and see if free anonymous proxies were black-listed or not, but we weren't looking for him to get noticed, so we stopped there. My perception was that motivated individuals could easily get through, especially if they had help from the outside. But might simply mean they'd play a constant game of cat and mouse, with possible unfortunate consequences IRL whenever caught.
However, this took place some 3 to 5 years ago, and I understand that they've upped the "blocking ante" in recent years.
The us sucks! I hope China and Iran Destroy it. I hope Europe helps. A world with America would be very peaceful. Its us policys on free speach etc suck ass too. Im fed up with all this crap that china and iran sensor the internet. Consider beijing is the safest city I've ever been in such censorship obviosly works. Chinese consider whats best for the majority over the rights of the few. This works. The US consider what keeps the individual happy (such as no anti gun laws, drugs, rapes, murder, racism, anti-social behaviour etc) but are not in the interest of a safe and cooperative society. I went to new york and it sucked. People are rude and all stuck up there own asses. The city is dangerous and old peopel probably wouldnt dare to go outside at night.(not with out the gun they bought in there local newsagent anyway). In beijing old people go out dancing play mahjong in the streets and welcome foriegners to join them. If executing drug dealers and censoring internet content helps to achieve this type of magic society then i surport it. Damn all americans who think the us is the only way or the best way. The us murders its own people to start wars to gain more money to start more wars. China have never stationed a single soldier on foriegn soil. Iran should build as many nukes as it can as if it had none then it would be destroyed like iraq(oh yeah all that clever us intelligence(*cough*lies) about weapons of mass destruction). Sometime soon (possibly august dunno) the world will realise america is just the new hitler secretly taking over the world untill its too late to stop. I hope alqeuda(dont worry i spelled it wrong it doesnt exist either yep 911 was most likely an inside job according to actual evidence) blows a crator in america and raises the flag of peace so everyone in the free world (the one that is free not just america probaganda of what is free and what is not) can rejoice in happiness.
OOOPPSS!!! Korea herself didn't invade Japan in 1281 and 1284. It was the Mongols who enlisted/conscripted the Koreans, and it was in 1274 and 1281.
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If you are in IT, management, or just plain interested in Asian Affairs with emphasis on China, Japan, and Korea, you *might* find these 3 very compelling, haunting, and more. For those interested, check out these:
-Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History, by Bruce Cumings, cpyrt 2005 and 1997
-North Korea The Struggle Against American Power, by Tim Beal, cpryt 2005
- China * Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World, by Ted C. Fishman, 2005 & 2006
And, if you're an Asian expat (or not) to the US, you might want to check out Daughter of the Yellow River: An Inspirational Journey from Deprived Child During China's Cultural Revolution to Successful Global Entrepreneur, by Diana Lu, 2006
(China * Inc mentioned my own former employer of years ago, specifically talking about how cheap VCD players put downward pricing and upward quality pressures the US DVD industry. And, in that chapter, he tells how China averted the "expense" of the DVD licensing.)
There are more, but these 4 I selected recently and they are HARD to set down.
Here is a small quote from the section/chapter:
"Players that hit American stores for $30 left China for $20. With chip sets costing between $7 and $10, and license fees, when they were paid, costing roughly the smae, not much room was left for profit. How aggressive have the Chinese been at slashing prices? On average, the profit on a DVD player exported out of Guangdong, where seventeen of twenty Chinese machines are made, has sunk to a single dollar."
He goes on to talk about in 2003 that China supported the EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disk)...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"