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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?
Now the censors know what they are missing.
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.
First they tried with war. Now they are trying to bring down the government. The oposition is a puppet of USA. The elections were valid. The protests are initiated by CIA and the news coverage is unfair. And, besides, we don't really care what happens to Iran and whether the USA appointed president will finally manage to take over Iran and make it McDonalds country. Really, if we cared we'd visit CNN.com or something.
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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It is hard to fathom how the story of the year (also the tech story of the year) could be tagged "nomoreiranplease". Tech has played a critical role in this event. Who ever thought that twitter could actually be useful? The diaspora of communications technologies has proved very hard to shut down, and it will be interesting to see what new communications tech adds to this in the future.
One issue this brings up is the differences between the fark free-for-all comment system (including images!) versus slashdot's moderation. The contribution of fark to reporting what has been going on in Iran has been really impressive, and fark is essentially a news aggregator just like slashdot. Does the moderation system of slashdot prevent a similar thing from happening here? I had hoped to see a much more vigorous discussion from the slashdot community, but the real action is elsewhere. Part of this is due to the moderation system, I think, which effectively forces an end to conversations when the mods run out.
I'm not trying to be trollish, but think this is an interesting thing to think about. Slashdot used to feel like the center of the tech universe, but has been badly outdone on this topic by fark and others.
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?"
search #iranelection or #neda on twitterfall.com
Kill your TV
This is ridiculous. You can't just conjure up some irrelevant examples and use them as an argument when they have absolutely nothing to do with it. E.g. with the coin flip test, the correct analogy would be to check what the chances are for less than 40 heads/more than 60 tails after 100 coin flips. The chances for this happening are indeed very low. That is why it is so impressive that they had 5% of the times 5 as last digit and 17% a 7. The 1/200 is not the chance to have the 5% and 17% (that would be a lot lower) but the chance of having suspicious results vs. the chance of them being false.
Besides: n/o but I'd rather believe a study made by two PhD students instead of some slashdotter.
Elections aren't random. Vote distributions aren't random. People don't usually vote via coin-flip.
and when they shut down WoW, we will have a true revolution.
Hi, I'm an Iranian and i've been tortured by the internet filtering here for a few years but the filtering after election is really terrible, we can't use the old ssh tunneling methods any more, in fact it seems that all encrypted packages are being dropped so we can't connect to our servers out side of Iran any more so we can't use another method for passing through the filtering, however today i've used a browser based ssh client to connect to my VPS in Germany and installed a proxy using squid but the interesting thing is that we i try to connect to facebook (or any other filtered website) the firewall changes my request to the famous "This site is blocked" page! These things was just examples of methods we tried to pass the filtering, anyway we are using other method to pass the filtering (which i will not mention here for safety!) but we have serious problems connecting to our servers over ssh, i'm going to test the ssh over http method but i know that this will be a temporary method!!!
mod parent up, grandparent has obviously not understud anything about the linked article, the claims are simply false.
the most striking thing about the election manipulations are imho that they have been done very very badly. the government obviously did not give a crap whether anyone would find out, they put some uneducated guys at a table and told them they want at least 60% of the votes and published the results after one hour of work. it would have been very simple to take into considerations many of the criticism that has come up, they should have used actual randomization and thought about which provinces voted for whom. in the end it seems like they simply did not care if anyone found out, it's like they're laughing at the world (or they're just plain naiv).
I don't think the manipulations at hand here are subtleties like "shifting votes". Seems more like "pulling numbers out of their collective ass" is what happened.
Dude, that's completely wrong. First:
That's not remotely similar to their calculation. It's not a question combinatorics but a question of probability distributions. The last digits generated in a random process have one probability distribution function and human invented ones have another PDF. The comparison here is the election results vs the null hypothesis PDF. Your combinatorics example is completely irrelevant.
Really dude, you need to read up on some statistics. What you are ranting about in that section is Bayes' theorem P(A|B) = P(B|A)*P(A)/P(B). It's for conditional probabilities (what is the probability of A given B). It is not applicable in this situation. The prior probability of mr.A cheating has no consequence - we're just looking at the distribution of the numbers. Let me illustrate the folly of your claim: Suppose that the vote count for each and all districts ended with the number 666. Would you say that this was a probable result and that you would have to have mr. A's honesty factored in? We can just looking at the numbers make a probability calculation that tells us how improbable a deviation from the expected PDF is.
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.
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.
According to this: http://opennet.net/research/profiles/iran
Nokia/siemens sold filtering software to iran, quite the nefarious thing to do, perhaps even bypassing some boycott agreements and US export regulations, if containing any US code. now's the time to make them disclose what sofware they sold, and everything they know about the filtering system. a lot of lives are at stake, now's the time.
if any nokia/siemens employees are reading this, pass this on!
Oil is sold on the open market, and currently, mostly in dollars, meaning that the source isn't as important as the ability to pay for it. Any major disruption in total world supply will have an effect on the ability to pay for it, because the market will bump the price up fast, including the oil from those nations you currently import the most from. They are not going to arbitrarily keep supplying at a much lower price "just because".
If/when (and I think inevitably) oil becomes priced in a lot more currencies than dollars, it will just cost more for US consumers. All these other nations aren't *that* stupid, they realize as the FRN gets inflated daily, it becomes worth less and less. Eventually they just won't think or accept that the dollar is worth what some blowhards in DC and wallstreet claim it is worth. The FRN is a debt instrument that currently is backed by more debt instruments, and not much else. Back when the petrodollar phenomenon took hold, it worked for the US because where we bought oil from turned around and used those petrodollars to buy US manufactured stuff. Plus, the US domestically produced most of the oil it needed anyway, something not true today.
Now let us contemplate the status of world trade and manufacturing from 50 years ago to today...hmm..
Starting to see the longer term ramifications of this? When those foreign nations could get real stuff for the swap, it was acceptable, now they are being told they need to just swap their real stuff-oil or various other commodities- for debt instruments backed by "the full faith and credit" of the biggest liars and conmen out there, who are already in hock to them to the tune of trillions.
They talk about peak oil, I think the larger picture is we have hit "peak trust" with the tangible producing world versus the US economic system, which apparently the main top official focus seems to be just creating paper and electronic "products" and that those, "trickled down" through keeping everyone in the US in perpetual debt via the credit "industry" combined with national government debt, will be enough to sustain everyone, that all these other folks will just keep swapping their real stuff for fancy IOUs in various flavors.
I think that isn't going to work for much longer. YMMV. My bet is on the tangibles and the tangibles producers winning the "what is worth more" global economic wars.
You know where the US gets most of the oil from, right? Hint, it aint Iran or Iraq.
Totally irrelevant. This has bugger all to do with where the USA buys it's oil.
The rest of the world buys US dollars so that they can buy oil. This allows the US to print (borrow) dollars into existence and then spend them on whichever projects they want to without inflation sky rocketing. Military, healthcare, whatever is the pet project of the people in charge.
This is why Iraq and Iran are so important, particularly to the USA. Saudi is even more important in this regard and why they are America's bestest friends, particularly after having seen Iraq invaded and unrest is being incited in Iran.
Does anyone actually believe that the Iranian elections have ever been anything but fixed? Oh, come on... So why all the unrest now? The Iranian Oil Bourse is due to start trading oil in euros, not dollars, real soon now. So now would be a great time to prevent that by say funding opposition to the incumbent leadership.
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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.
This morning I've been watching clips "smuggled out" via posting onto YouTube.
It's axiomatic that if you know about YouTube and can post to YouTube that you can also view YouTube. And if you're viewing YouTube then you seeing a rest of the world that is a whole lot more fun than the hell hole you're stuck in at the moment. Of course the young college students fueling the protests would like their lives to be a bit more free than what they've been forced to live under -- especially the women!
So just how is that Sharia Law working out for you?
Say what you want about the decadent west, but nobody is about to show up at my door and beat me senseless for posting this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Safenet also sells censoring software to the iranian government.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
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.
Not so fast. The Iranian authorities are shutting off as many of these tools as possible, as well as using the good old fashioned technique of simply imprisoning the sources. For example Amir Sadeghi, the brave photojournalist who runs the http://tehranlive.org/ blog, has gone missing. Also, just plain shooting protesters down in the street has evidently not lost its appeal. The net provides new and revolutionary tools of communication, but brutal dictatorships are still able to leverage their tried and true techniques.
The "Islamic Republic" has lasted longer than the Shah, and has clearly shown that religious oligarchies are every bit as corrupt, barbaric, and secretive as secular ones.
I hope the people of Iran are able to free themselves of dictatorship soon.