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The Technology Keeping Information Flowing in Iran
Death Metal writes "Iranians seeking to share videos and other eyewitness accounts of the demonstrations that have roiled their country since disputed elections two weeks ago are using an Internet encryption program originally developed by and for the US Navy. Designed a decade ago to secure Internet communications between US ships at sea, The Onion Router, or TOR, has become one of the most important proxies in Iran for gaining access to Web sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook." A related story was submitted anonymously about the efforts of hactivists to keep the information flowing inside the data-locked nation.
Sheesh, all this time folks were talking about TOR I thought they were being lazy and shortening Torrent. I learn something new every day!
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Support them by becoming a Tor relay
You almost have to wonder if this scares the crap out of the powers that be. That something they created could, in theory, be something that fuels their eventual downfall, (assuming things ever got really bad....)
Support them by becoming a Tor relay
From nedanet:
If you are a Linux or *BSD or Mac OS/X user, we have a detailed recipe for setting up and registering a Squid proxy for the revolutionaries' use. Update: We are no longer recommending people set up plaintext squid proxies. The Iranian regime appears to be doing deep-packet inspection on all traffic now.
My work here is dung.
I mean, perhaps they don't even care what are you saying, just that you try to hide it... How can you access a Tor network without them knowing? With another Tor network?
Dear
So... people are punching "slashdot.org" in to the google toolbar less often? Maybe they just found out what the address bar is for? Besides, for google trends to have any meaning, it needs to be placed relative to something. http://google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2C+fark%2C+digg%2C+reddit&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
I use Tor regularly and it's really slow. Not unusable, but really slow.
If I understand this correctly (and I'm not at all sure I do, so feel free to correct me), the more people who set up and use Tor the more quickly traffic can propagate. So if the situation in Iran is causing lots of people, both in and outside of Iran, to use Tor, then the whole thing should speed up, right?
So is that why when I visited a few miscellaneous .onion sites last nite, they were far more responsive than usual?
I imagine the Supreme Leader would be pissed if he understood. :-)
TOR doesn't ensure true anonymity. The only thing the Iran regime would need to do in order to sabotage it, would be to setup a lot of TOR nodes and analyze the traffic going through them as there is no encryption for the data. Right now this technology benefits from privacy due to obscurity. If the service becomes popular enough, they'll probably resort to the tactics detailed above.
right...
the reporter of that article is an idiot.
Onion Routing was invented at the Naval Research Lab, but it had nothing to do with ships.
If the reporter would have done a cursory reading of http://www.onion-router.net/, which is the page the creators made, the reporter would not have found any mention of ships on the description or summary of what onion routing is.
I had to read it twice too. To be fair, titles don't have to be full sentences (books, newspapers, etc.)
What is to stop the Iranian government setting up a plethora of TOR nodes and inspecting and tracing everything back to the source? I understand there are alot of different levels to a TOR connection (hence the 'O'nion) - but could the 'bad guys' setting up thousands of TOR nodes around the world help them trace back to the originator?
Wow. Just think about it, a person siting by computer and actually witing this. I am amazed. I can't even imagine a person actually reading all this.
After the Kremlin exited Eastern Europe, the peoples of each nation in Eastern Europe rapidly established a genuine democracy and a free market. Except for Romania (where its people killed their dictator), there was no violence.
In Iran (and many other failed states), no external force is imposing the current brutal government on the Iranians. The folks running the government are Iranian. The president is Iranian. The secret police are Iranian. The thugs who will torture and kill democracy advocates are Iranian.
If the democracy advocates attempt to establish a genuine democracy in Iran, violence will occur. Why? A large percentage of the population supports the brutal government and will kill the democracy advocates.
Let us not merely condemn the Iranian government. We must condemn Iranian culture. Its product is the authoritarian state.
We should not intervene in the current crisis in Iran. If the overwhelming majority of Iranians (like the overwhelming majority of Poles) truly support democracy, human rights, and peace with Israel, then a liberal Western democracy will arise -- without any violence. Right now, the overwhelming majority clearly oppose the creation of a liberal Western democracy. The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.
The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business unless they attempt to develop nuclear weapons. We in the West are morally justified in destroying the nuclear-weapons facilities.
Note that, 40 years ago, Vietnam suffered a worse fate (than the Iranians) at the hands of the Americans. They doused large areas of Vietnam with agent orange, poisoning both the land and the people. Yet, the Vietnamese do not channel their energies into seeking revenge (by, e. g., building a nuclear bomb) against the West. Rather, the Vietnamese are diligently modernizing their society. They will reach 1st-world status long before the Iranians.
Cultures are different. Vietnamese culture and Iranian culture are different. The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran. We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.
Iran, has banned the use of encryption. It's illegal to use gpg and such like. Good luck with TOR. Maybe they get away with it because everybody uses it. I cannot judge on the merits of the Iranian election and wheter it represents the free will of the majority of the people (many seem to imply it doesn't but with little in terms of proof) I don't know that the opposition in that election would be any better for said people. But yes, let information flow. Freely and encryptedly. I hope TOR has no holes.
Why does it need to be a complete sentence? The headline makes perfect sense: The Technology (implied "that is") Keeping Information Flowing in Iran
How come nobody talks what has happened this past week and is still happening in Honduras?
How come the election in Iran provokes such a passionate response from the US (which is not bad) and a call to support them, put proxies, blablabla, but a real military coup in an american country much next to the US doesn't provoke Sh1t? Have you heard of it at least?
Don't follow the imposed agenda people, trust your judgment. And apply it equally for everybody, not just the ones that your leaders want you to hate.
To defeat TOR they would have to make sure at least a certain amount of traffic went through their nodes.
If the Iranians wanted to interfere with TOR, they could. How is left as an exercise to the reader^H^H^H^Hgime.
Quote of the day: TOR, it's not just for porn any more.
After the Kremlin exited Eastern Europe, the peoples of each nation in Eastern Europe rapidly established a genuine democracy and a free market. Except for Romania (where its people killed their dictator), there was no violence.
In Iran (and many other failed states), no external force is imposing the current brutal government on the Iranians. The folks running the government are Iranian. The president is Iranian. The secret police are Iranian. The thugs who will torture and kill democracy advocates are Iranian.
If the democracy advocates attempt to establish a genuine democracy in Iran, violence will occur. Why? A large percentage of the population supports the brutal government and will kill the democracy advocates.
Let us not merely condemn the Iranian government. We must condemn Iranian culture. Its product is the authoritarian state.
We should not intervene in the current crisis in Iran. If the overwhelming majority of Iranians (like the overwhelming majority of Poles) truly support democracy, human rights, and peace with Israel, then a liberal Western democracy will arise -- without any violence. Right now, the overwhelming majority clearly oppose the creation of a liberal Western democracy. The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.
The Iranians created this horrible society. It is none of our business unless they attempt to develop nuclear weapons. We in the West are morally justified in destroying the nuclear-weapons facilities.
Note that, 40 years ago, Vietnam suffered a worse fate (than the Iranians) at the hands of the Americans. They doused large areas of Vietnam with agent orange, poisoning both the land and the people. Yet, the Vietnamese do not channel their energies into seeking revenge (by, e. g., building a nuclear bomb) against the West. Rather, the Vietnamese are diligently modernizing their society. They will reach 1st-world status long before the Iranians.
Cultures are different. Vietnamese culture and Iranian culture are different. The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran. We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.
There seems to be all of this press about how people are getting information out using the internet. But back in the early 90's, before I had access to the internet, my friends and I used to transfer information and files from one place to another using two modems connected via a plain old telephone line, sending files back and forth using Zmodem protocol. Is this technique still being used? I'm picturing someone using an acoustic coupler on a pay phone to send small cellphone videos out of Iran to a friendly party...
http://warriors-attack.blogspot.com/
I used TOR to communicate while 'working' in several repressive M.E., S.W.A. and African countries. While it works, it does not work well (veeerrrrrryyyyyy sloooowwwww...). I found much better success setting up Linksys WRT's with DD-WRT running as OpenVPN POPs in various free (as in speech) countries around the world (make friends on your travels -- give them a free WRT). Run the servers listening on 443 (bypassed 100% of the VPN filtering going on in said repressive/oppressive at the time) and run the client on my machine. If you do this, remember to set for lport and rport, otherwise you're not using pure 443 (and you'll stick out like a sore thumb). Cheers!
Monkeys and typewriters man, monkeys and typewriters.
www.isoHunt.com
Eric & Emad: Iranian Hackers & Cyber-Buddies
We didn't have Zmodem. All we had was Kermit. We didn't have modems either. We wrote our bits on the back of his little froggy-back 7 bits at a time and waited for him to go and come back with the reply bits. If we were lucky he managed to cross the highway without getting run over.
Anyone know the packet loss of frogs hopping across a desert?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This guy doesn't count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
His initial reaction was that the two candidates were virtually indistinguishable, anyway, and that given the US' recent history in Iran we should stay out of it. This actually was the correct response, but when it became clear that he was grossly out of step with popular world sentiment he chose to backpedal rather than lose some of his likability and cult of personality status. Remember when you were little and your mother told you that the popular decision wasn't always the right one? Well, you people should have listened to her, and Obama should have, too. It takes far more courage to stand up for your convictions than I guess Obama possesses. I guess in a world where the absolute worst thing you can do to someone is to make them feel bad about themselves, Obama calculated the risks and decided that he'd rather not have to tell people how it is and therefore become slightly less popular. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people here on /. who are advocating for private citizens to meddle in the internal affairs of another country were against the Iraq war. Tell me, why is it illegal for one government to overthrow another, but not illegal when you try to do it on your own? Because you say so? Because your subjective sense of morality dictates it? Here's a novel idea: how about we stop meddling with other countries and try to solve some of the huge problems facing us here at home? How about we build some friggin' nuclear power plants and upgrade our electrical infrastructure to harden it against EMI pulse attacks, cascading failures, overload, etc., then tell the Arab world to grow up or just kill each other off finally, but either way to leave us the fuck alone?
You will see the same waffling play out in the healthcare debate and the energy debate. Instead of being a leader for change as he promised, he's become a cheerleader for change, cheering on the horrible abortion of a bill that no one even read before voting on that was Waxman-Markey. The House saw support for Global Warming taxation decreasing under the assault of a bad economy and mounting scientific evidence that current Global Warming dogma is bullshit, so they crammed through a vote before the July 4th recess and hung many middle-America democrats out to dry. Waxman-Markey: more corporate welfare. Be they green companies or auto companies or giant banks, it's still corporate welfare and robbing future Americans blind.
Nancy Pelosi: that blow-dried bimbo is setting the cause of women in leadership roles back decades. Why has Obama decided to become her Cabana Boy instead of telling her to get in line? He IS the friggin' President, for crying out loud. Oh right, the whole "no balls" thing.
I think it's just you, the title seems pretty easy to understand to me.
Read it as: "The technology that is being used to keep information flowing in Iran".
Because what happened in Honduras was legitimate by their constitution (the president was committing TREASON according to article 4 of their constitution, therefore it was legal for the Honduran Supreme Court to vote to remove him and for the military to execute that). It is not exactly a military coup, because once the president was removed, the next in line was legally put in his place to serve out the remainder of the term until elections next year.
So, in Iran, you have a corrupt government trying to steal the election from the people and implement their own de facto dictatorship. The people are standing up against that. In Honduras, you have a president defying the law and committing treason by trying to set up a way for himself to become a dictator, and then being legally removed from power by the government he was trying to betray. Very different situations.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I gave up reading it about 1/4 way through. I wonder if it got any less supremely lame toward the end?
sorry, just had to get that in
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The Guardian Council's propaganda must be insane if Iranians are relying on The Onion to get news of the outside.
when reading the post. I thought, "What does a satire news site have to do with routing?" The Onion
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
Then, after the Kremlin exited Eastern Europe in 1989, the peoples of each nation in Eastern Europe rapidly established a genuine democracy and a free market. Except for Romania (where its people killed their dictator), there was no violence.
That is how people act when they want freedom and free markets.
In 1979, after the Iranian people overthrow the despot whom the Americans supported, the Iranians immediately established a brutal, authoritarian theocracy.
That is how people act when they reject both freedom and free markets.
Cultures are different. Eastern-European culture and Iranian culture are different. The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran. We should condemn Iranian culture and its people.
Call it naivety on my part, but am I the only one worried about National governments studying the Iranian uprising, in search of countermeasures to YouTube and Twitter? Judging from various crowd control measures being implemented (such as 50,000 volt riot shields, I'm sure there is an interest in figuring out a way around everything people are doing in Iran. I can easily see the physical destruction of a website's servers to be on the top of a government contingency plan. Cut power to Twitter's servers? Done. I hate conspiracy theories, and am looking for anyone to tear me apart on this one.
What? I can't assume Occam's Razor was a slick fold-up scooter?
There is no way Iran has the resources to perform correlation attacks on Tor traffic.
/16 subnets. /16 subnets
Facts: -There are about 1800 Tor nodes running right now, and about 900 of those are exit nodes. (http://torstatus.kgprog.com/)
-Any entity performing cross-correlation attacks on Tor isn't going to have a very good chance of compromising a given circuit unless they control a very significant portion (say, a third or more) of the Tor network.
-There are tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of clients using Tor, and Iran only accounts for about 3000 of them. (https://blog.torproject.org/blog/measuring-tor-and-iran)
-By default, Tor will not construct circuits with two nodes that share
-Iran's assigned IP address blocks include 75 or so distinct
So to even have a chance of being effective, Iran needs to come up with at least 600 geographically distinct Tor nodes. Any nodes inside Iran are going to be almost entirely ineffective, because deep packet inspection means that all traffic into and out of Iran is slowed to a crawl. Iran also needs to write the code to do cross-correlation attacks. Iran then needs to deal with a ton of data they don't care about from users not in Iran (and there are a lot more people using Tor who aren't in Iran than people who are). It would take a lot of smart people distributed around the world to pull this off, and for very little gain.
Compromising Tor? That's pretty difficult. Blocking it, when all internet connections are being routed through a single place? Not so difficult.
Being interested in "helping the cause", I used to run a TOR relay on my primary system with a fair share of bandwidth. My exit policy was to allow only http/https/irc traffic out. Within 3 days, I found myself unable to browse several websites/forums that I normally frequent. Apparently, a lot of websites use proxies to filter connections from spam and abuse and some of these proxies identify, track and mark IPs running TOR exit relays as abuse relays. I have talked to a maintainer of one such "blacklist" and this is apparently a feature, not a bug as he considers complete anonymity on the internet to cause more harm than good. So, I cannot change the opinion of a blacklist maintainer and I cannot make the websites I visit stop using such blacklists. Essentially I was being blackmailed in a "either you stop running a TOR exit node or you can't browse this and this and this website" fashion. Eventually I had to cave in and had to stop running TOR on my system before the maintainers of these lists agreed to take me off them.
Obviously I want to support the cause of having anonymity on the internet, but I am not really sure that this price of not being able to use internet properly myself is a price I am willing to pay. What can be done about this?
The second problem comes from another point of view. What can I do, as a TOR relay operator, to protect myself from potentially getting harassed by law enforcement non-stop?
Cowboy Porn?
This is true in the general trivial sense that many of the ideal principles in social studies (whether political science, sociology, or economics) are true, but (as is often the case with such ideal statements) often false in practice. Like many such generalities, in really is only true in situations of universal perfect information: preferences which are general throughout the population but are not known to be general throughout the population are far less likely to be realized. It also is true in the long term; even widely recognized strong general preferences may not be immediately realized.
This is false in many respects; many Eastern European countries began making this transition before the Red Army started packing up and leaving (and certainly before the Soviet Union and later Russia stopped trying to influence the region, which in many cases they haven't stopped doing), and not all countries in Eastern Europe have established "genuine democracy and a free market", though most of them are closer on both respects than they were during the Cold War.
Iran is not a failed state. Somalia is a failed state. Afghanistan has been a failed state, and arguably still is. Iran is just a state where the West (and, for that matter, many of its own people) just don't like the regime. There is a big difference.
True so far as it goes.
This, OTOH, is less true. While certainly, Iranian culture (like many others) includes a tradition of respect for religious authority which aided the rise to power and the maintenance of the current regime, the principal reason the current regime rose to power was anger at the repression of the previous regime (which was externally imposed, by, principally, the US and the UK.) Like many revolutionary movements against repressive regimes, it included both more authoritarian and more moderate factions, and, as is almost invariably the case in successful revolutionary movements -- generally due to the public's fear of immediate threats faced by the nation from either defenders of the old regime or its external supporters, and the case of Iran was no exception -- the more authoritarian faction was ininitially dominant. The high degree of external threat the Iranian regime has managed to convince its public it faced since its inception (factually supported, even if the threat was exaggerated -- Iraq launched a war against it very shortly after it came to power backed by the wealthy Arab states, the US joined that war, the US remained directly threatening to Iran even after the US split with Iraq) helped suppress internal splits.
However, even given that, Iran has faced a strong reform movement largely centered around the same ideas (and, in part, the same people) that were the more moderate faction in the revolutionary movement for many years, which has only been suppressed by the regime carefullly assuring that positions of power and influence are given to loyalists, and doing everything possible to strike a balance between providing an appearance of responsiveness to keep the pressure for reform working within the system while systematically -- by controlling who can run for elections, controlling the media, and, where necessary, more direct action against dissidents -- suppressing the appearance of dissent so that those who di
As last weeks story pointed out, the Iranians have created a single choke point for traffic. TOR traffic can be recognized by flows and even easier by an application aware firewall/IDS. The points where the TOR traffic comes into the country, each of those nodes risks physical detection. It is not known how much monitoring of internal traffic goes on, so perhaps it is safe for this but not for traffic outside the country.
The worst thing about this is that if internal traffic is well monitored they can map networks of TOR operators. The government creates an event worth mass twittering and watches the traffic going to the egress TOR routers, that helps them identify 1 layer away from the border. They then repeat that with each new host found until they have an accurate map of the TORosphere.
'your girlfriend's face' .
You must be new here.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Hillary wants to know why the Honduran military won't let the leftists throw out the Honduran constitution. A victory for North American despots. A glimpse of things to come.
I started running a TOR relay in response to the situation in Iran. Apparently Time-Warner Cable is not TOR friendly. I've noticed that about twice a day, my internet connection goes dead (and stays that way). I can power-cycle the cable modem and it's good for another 10-12 hours. Resetting my cable modem twice a day is a very small price to pay to help folks risking their lives for freedom. Nevertheless, it is annoying.
[Insert pithy quote here]
OP keeps posting (read pasting) that bullshit, on and on every time we discuss Iran, no wonder posting as AC. By his "logic" North Koreans enjoy starvations and really really love dear leader.
I'm not holding my breath for an M14 or M16.
AR-15s are relatively easy to convert to automatic. Of course I'd prefer an M14 or M1. Heck I'd prefer an AK47 over an M16. When I was in the Army we used to joke that if we found an AK47 on the ground we'd drop our M16 and pick up the '47. They aren't as accurate as M16s but like Timex watches they can take a licking and keep on ticking. M16s jamb too easily.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Free Speech or Stone Age.
Note that you can compromise Tor a lot more easily if you can also block it.
Yes it's easy to block Tor, just cut off the net in Iran. If the net is not cut off they can't do much to compromise Tor. That's because anybody, with the skills, computer, and net access can set up Tor. Because of what's going on in Iran someone posted how to setup Tor in Ubuntu.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
How come nobody talks what has happened this past week and is still happening in Honduras?
And what about the coup in Madagascar?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.
Yes military units had to be brought in, because local army units refused to fire on the protesters. Deng Xiaoping even "went as far as ordering the 12th Army, with which he had a close relationship, be moved to Beijing soon after 4 June to guard against a military coup".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?