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Researchers Find Gaps In Iranian Filtering
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "With all the turmoil and internet censorship in Iran making it difficult to get an accurate picture of what's going, security researchers have found a way to locate gaps in Iran's filtering by analyzing traffic exiting Iran. The short version is that SSH, torrents and Flash are high priorities for blocking, while game protocols like WoW and Xbox traffic are being ignored, even though they also allow communication. Hopefully, this data will help people think of new ways to bypass filtering and speak freely, even though average Iranians have worse things to worry about than internet censorship, now that the reformists have been declared anti-Islamic by the Supreme Leader. Given the circumstances, that declaration has been called 'basically a death sentence' for those who continue protesting."
Reader CaroKann sends in a related story at the Washington Post about an analysis of the vote totals in the Iranian election (similar to, but different from the one we discussed earlier) in which the authors say the election results have a one in two-hundred chance of being legitimate.
The Internet is The Internet.
Information will get from anywhere to anywhere unless Iran completely disconnects itself from the rest of the 'net. There are as many ways to hide "communications" as there are protocols and servers out there, and no one can do a bloody thing about it. Even a "whitelist" style system would have holes in.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
... and publicly announcing this will help these gaps to stay unfiltered?
We pretty much know what Iran is all about. It is rather overt and obvious to most everyone. Any illusion about a democratically elected government can pretty much be put to rest. And now that they are invoking religious law (not that they haven't been all along) it is clear exactly where the source of power is. (Save the comments about the U.S. putting the Ayatolla into power, I already know.)
But I keep asking myself, why should we care at all? Will we care and demonstrate as much as the Iranians when the next freedom eroding thing happens in the US? Will we take to the streets in protest of ACTA? Will we collectively burn our required government healthcare cards? I seriously doubt it. The government controllers in the U.S. long ago learned the secret that other governments have yet to figure out. Keep the slaves comfortable, busy and distracted, and they won't put up a fight.
Petrodollars. Iran is threatening to sell oil in Euros. If people didn't have to buy dollars in order to pay for oil, the US government couldn't create as many as it wanted, which means that the military spending would have to stop.
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I dont know about anyone else, but reading the tag of "NOMOREIRANPLEASE" Even if you have mixed feelings about Iran and their relationship with the US / World, there is no reason to flag a topic with such a tag line.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
Do you really, honestly believe the CIA is competent enough to organize a nation-wide rebellion?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Elections aren't random. Vote distributions aren't random. People don't usually vote via coin-flip.
Here, let me set that straw man on fire for you:
No and no. Both of those situations involve someone gaining access to computer systems, where the owners of those systems don't want that someone to have access.
With the Iran situation, there are people trying to gain access to computer systems, where a third party doesn't want them to have access. To the contrary, the owners of Twitter, YouTube, and other services have been extremely supportive of the efforts of Iranians to spread the word of how the government has imported plainclothes thugs from other countries to come in and brutalize innocent people in the streets.
You know what? This should be a tag on every story if we really mean it.
Responding to "The prior probability of mr.A cheating has no consequence - we're just looking at the distribution of the numbers."
The claim of the article was that the probability of Mr. A not cheating was 1 in 200. That was the claim I was disputing, not the fact that the ballot numbers were wonky. I thought my point was clear, given the subject I chose for my comment.
When claiming some quantifiable likelihood that there was fraud, the prior on fraud is most definitely relevant. At the same time, the prior is most definitely impossible to know. These two things together make any posterior estimate completely meaningless. *THAT* was my point.
We do need more coverage of Iran, especially from a technical standpoint. First of all, it will help us know how to best help those putting their lives on the line for liberty against a totalitarian force. Secondly, it will give those of use interested in the tech side ("news for Nerds", remember?) insight into how these can best be used to avoid censorship and repression, no matter what the source. Its a good enough rationale to provide extensive coverage here daily -- after all, how many times do you get to see a live, full scale example of censors versus leakers?
/. used to be very "techno-libertarian" in slant, way back when. It is not such a place anymore.
As for why the tag nomoreiran Its pretty simple.
Rob ("Taco") and cronies (e.g. kdawson, whom I view as being irredeemably as slanted as Rush Limbaugh, just in opposite directions) have become more collectivist and pointedly anti-conservative at the expense of libertarianism (mainly by being unthinkingly knee-jerk anti-Bush, instead of well reasoned critics). Thus any political action that does not actively help their flavor of collectivism/statism or something that casts a negative light on their political favorites (i.e. Obama, liberals, socialists, etc) will receive less attention, editorially speaking. Its their own personal bias, as reflected in editorial choices of what to cover and what to try to ignore. I cannot blame them much -- the slashdot userbase has become filled with unreasoning collectivist (non-technical) poseurs, so Taco and company are just following their audience (and the money). Sadly, this means that the epithet SlashKosisn't all that far from the mark anymore.
Its not a troll or flamebait to say so (take a moment to read the actual definitions before you politically mod this post). Its just my observation. One needs a heavy set of "bogus-ness/BS" filters to get any real data out of most articles here anymore, and in general I tend to avoid most "YRO" category articles because they are simply editorials with no pretense of actually presenting any logic examination (and a proper debunking) of opposing views. I do value the book reviews and some of the limited Tech news that manages to make it past the slant here. And some of the humor here is still pretty good.
Still, it would be nice to see more information/articles on Slashdot about how tech is being used to fight what is probably one of the most evil regimes on the planet - and the religious and state mechanisms it uses to maintain its tyranny. Those "resistance" methods might come in hand in other places as well, like China, Britain and the USA, sooner than we think.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
If your statement is true then Bayesian statistics is always completely meaningless without informative priors, yet most of Bayesian analysis is done without informative priors and works quite well thank you very much.
The obvious, but unstated, assumption in the article is that they are using an uninformative prior which gives equal weight to fraud and no fraud. You are free to quibble over their use of this prior. For example if you thought (before seeing their data) there was only one chance in 10,000 chance that there would be fraud then even given their data, you would think that fraud was still not likely. But quibbling over a prior is very different from claiming nothing meaningful can come out of their analysis.
In fact, I think the penultimate sentence from the article is spot on:
But I would agree with you that some of the wording in the article seems very stilted. I think this has more to do with "dumbing down" the article for popular consumption and less to do with crimes against Bayesian statistics (or whatever it is you're claiming).
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I might not approve of a riot, but then again I wouldn't exactly be a fan of big government suppressing the protests with deadly force.
If I knew the elections were fair and square, or indeed even if I didn't give a shit either way, I'd have to be pretty damned arrogant to be so ruthless.
I have nothing but sympathy for the victims in both cases, and I highly disapprove of violent repression that is COMMON to both.
Since state-run TV is now reporting that votes counted exceeded registered voters in "only 50" Iranian Cities, and that indicates sufficient credibility to not change the outcome, I'm going to agree with you here.
Help stamp out iliturcy.