Chinese Censor-Beating Software Resembles Malware, But Isn't

coondoggie writes "Software designed to beat Chinese censorship may behave in ways that seem suspect, but it is all part of the application's strategy to fool the Great Firewall of China, according to one programmer of the software. 'There are many built-in tricks that do all kinds of things to confuse the firewall,' says David Tian, a scientist for NASA who works spare-time on UltraSurf, the free software designed to promote unrestricted Internet access for citizens of China persecuted for being members of Falun Gang, the religious group the Chinese government is trying to suppress."

Comments

Falun Gang

[argux]

I think it's Falun Gong

Re:Falun Gang

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 boring, and spoken like someone who's never even visited China.

To get the attention of the Chinese authorities, you would have to be important. That means someone who's a threat in some way.
Assuming you're a white English speaker, that rules you out. You wouldn't even appear on the radar.

Now the perverse thing was that I found China to be more free, everything being relative.
I don't smoke pot.
I don't steal cars.
I do share thousands of files, some of which are going to attract the growing intellectual property police in the west.
I like to visit a few English sites that are blocked in China, which can easily be prox-ied to, and nobody actually cares.

If the UK does eventually criminalize sharing a few shitty files, then they will make me a criminal. I might have to move back to China and pick up the threads I left there.
In China you are free to do what you want, as long as you are white, or don't break the law.

Re:Falun Gang

[khayman80]

Yes. The great firewall blocks Chinese access more than English access.

Re:NOT Free Software

[BitterOak]

This isn't free software. There is no source available anywhere.

There's a difference between free software and open source software.

Re:Falun Gong

[Wolfier]

It's probably not a cult group, but more resembles a hate group where I see them in Toronto.

They don't seem to practise what they were supposed to believe and preach (which is "Truth, Compassion, Tolerance"). Everyday they set up a booth and spread hate message about the Chinese Communist Party.

Let's put aside our judgement towards CCC itself, which must not be very positive anyway - they way Falun Gong people act just seem to totally contradict "Compassion" and "Tolerance" and it seems more and more like they're preaching "an eye for an eye".

I would not let my children go anywhere near this "religion".

Re:Falun Gong

[macshit]

Everyday they set up a booth and spread hate message about the Chinese Communist Party. Let's put aside our judgement towards CCC itself,....

They don't seem to be preaching violent revolution against the chinese communist party, merely saying that it sucks, and people should not support them. So our opinion of the CCC matters quite a bit in how we judge what they say (and lets face it, for the most part, the CCC does suck)...

they way Falun Gong people act just seem to totally contradict "Compassion" and "Tolerance" and it seems more and more like they're preaching "an eye

I would not let my children go anywhere near this "religion".

for an eye".

the CCC quite happily kills and imprisons all those who resist or complain about its rule, and even those it suspects of resisting, or those who merely defend the rights of others to do so. Falun Gong has certainly been on the receiving end of such persecution. If Falun Gong were guilty of "eye for an eye" thinking, they'd be advocating similar actions against the CCC; but as far as I've seen, they're not, not even close. Though they certainly go to great lengths to demonize the CCC (to the extent they can be kinda annoying), every action I've seen Falun Gong advocate has been non-violent, and non-oppressive (mostly calling for individual chinese to disown the communist party).

So really I don't know what you're talking about....

Re:Perhaps....

[Anonymous Coward]

A) Not everyone complaining about Obama is a conservative.

B) Not everyone complaining about Obama liked Bush.

I hate them both for what they've done to our freedoms.

Re:Confuse it? How?

[girlintraining]

The point of bogus queries is to avoid tracking based on behavior, which is of course a matter of concern in this context. It is assumed that your ip address is already hidden.

First, "tracking based on behavior" -- What exactly constitutes behavior? A string of a thousand randomly generated queries, popular or not, mixed in with several queries on how to build bombs is going to be flagged. It isn't generating any real extra work for them to deduce who you are by traffic analysis, because packet sizes, times sent/received, and other data specific to the request is going to correlate with a specific time and place, which means a specific person (in all likelihood).

As to the IP address being "hidden" -- I'm not even sure where to start. Packet-based switching networks (ie. TCP/IP) require a source and destination IP. The ISP knows your IP address. It's often required by law to log all connections to/from each; at the very least the header data, but with the crashing costs of storage, keeping the content as well is a trivial matter. There's no "hiding" your IP address.

All methods of connecting via encrypted tunnels into a "proxy cloud" that I have seen are still vulnerable to basic traffic analysis: As long as you have packet logs for the end-point and source, traffic analysis is a trivial computational task. Translation: I can have confidence that a given computer sent a given query at a given time; Decryption of the data at any point within the cloud or at the source isn't needed -- as long as I have the server logs and a corresponding packet log of the target computer, you're toast.

Steganographic techniques would make the results of such an analysis difficult or impossible if properly implimented, but depend on the cloud architecture reaching critical mass, sending a constant flow of random data between each node, and then rate-limiting. These constrictions mean that the computational resources used to create said security are much, much higher than the current model. This is why they haven't been adopted -- simply put, nobody wants to wait several seconds to a minute for a single webpage to load, and the owners of said cloud don't want to waste bandwidth to manage what they believe is a low-risk attack vector.

Sadly, it's exactly this kind of thinking that may very well get someone killed over there.