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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."
I think it's Falun Gong
You shouldn't be trying to "confuse it", you should be making sure that the traffic patterns aren't unique and discernable. In other words, using steganography. All this "confusion" stuff I read in the article gives the user a distinct pattern of behavior that can identify the user as actively using said software. If you're trying to get under the radar of the government, don't start by sending up a big digital flare that says "Hey! I'm trying to bypass your crap." It usually ends badly for the would-be revolutionary, who's first job (I might add) is to survive.
Even in so-called "free" countries like the US, the government can imprison people indefinately on the off chance that the encrypted data may be subversive. How do you suppose China would handle it? Encryption doesn't enable free speech -- a gun to the head is a pretty effective way of recovering the key.
Save lives: Use stenography.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Oh yeah that's way nuttier than believing drinking the blood and eating the body of a zombie will get you into heaven.
This isn't free software. There is no source available anywhere.
There's a difference between free software and open source software.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
and no chinese read /. so the secret is safe.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
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".
Or so David Tian would like you to believe, but did any of us think that he may be using his software as a ploy to deploy real Malware and take down the Chinese space program, from the inside!! If you listen you can hear the muah ha ha echo after reading the blip.
Well pretty much any new religious movement is going to be absolutely insane. It makes sense for a communist government to suppress Falun Gong.. the problem is that they do it by treating practitioners as criminals instead of as victims.
The controversy really doesn't have anything to do with the psychological issues though.. it's that they're imprisoning people, torturing people, and harvesting organs.. not cool for any reason
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....
We live, as we dream -- alone....
My own personal explanation for this bizarre behavior is that Westerners actually don't know anything about Falun Gong, and don't care to learn. They are comfortable with the "narrative" that FG=good, China=bad. And as recent events have shown, narratives are more important and cherished than the actual facts on the ground. People get *angry* when their comfortable narratives are revealed to be inaccurate.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Tsk, tsk. This is an important cultural and religious phenomenon that you really should be aware of. Know then that John 6:49 goes something like this. Jesus is getting off the "dividing the loaves and fishes" episode and was evacuating across the lake; the crowd followed him anyway and now they're asking him for a miraculous sign so they can believe in him. They suggest the old manna-in-the-desert trick as an example. Many of them may be operating off of the popular "revolutionary messiah" premise, believing that there will soon be a military overthrow of the existing oppressive world order. They don't quite get what they expected:
Some interpretations dismiss this as a purely symbolic exercise, but the language isn't really the language of symbolism, and furthermore the actual working metaphors for "to eat (someone's) flesh" and "to drink (someone's) blood" mean "to persecute (someone)" and "to oppress (them)". The traditional interpretation for a long time - today, the Catholic and Orthodox stories - integrate this with the subsequent "Last Supper" rite in which blessed bread / wine are said to become his (Jesus's) actual body and blood (though the actual appearance and taste, of course, is unchanged, perhaps recognizing that, in fact, cannibalism is something that people find icky in oractice.)
The whole flesh-as-bread premise probably works a lot better with people who have a diet of mostly-bread, and actually experience handling bread dough, for whatever that's worth.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
While I agree that Falun Gong is a total wacky cult (and I have old friends where sadly involved with it), but maybe you should think with a little objectivity calling the media atheist. I mean the one thing that a US presidential candidate must do is prove their love to Jesus. Don't you think if the media were atheist this sort of thing would be questioned a bit more. The one thing that a major political candidate simply can not be is Atheist, polls have pretty much proven that we will get an islamic president before we get an atheist. Personally I find the rites of all christianity, and bible stories just as nutty as the Xenu crap. Think for a second if you first heard these stories when you were in your 20s.
Because some people, such as myself, are fully in favor of making fun of religions, but object to the 'cracking down' part. As insane as Falun Gong might be, they should be allowed to preach and practice whatever the hell they want as long as they don't resort to actual physical violence, just as the society should be free to do any counter-propaganda - but blanket censorship and putting a lot of practitioners in prison is crossing the line.
Isn't it a requirement of Catholicism? From the light reading I've done, it really seems that according to strict Catholic teachings, you have to have all your nutty rituals strictly in order when you die, or you burn forever.
That's one way in which Protestants have seemed to make more sense to me. It's just an up or down "Accept Jesus y/n" type choice. No chanting, no strange priesthood.
God, sometimes it just boggles my mind that we still have religion. I'll be playing a fantasy game, or reading a novel, with priests and churches and angels and demons, and it hits me that 90% of America fervently believes stuff that seems cheesy in a video game.
Steve Topletz and Jonathan Logan gave a fascinating talk at the BlackHat Briefings this past July, where among other things they discussed how one Chinese tactic in dealing with privacy groups is to set up their own organizations...a darker kind of astroturfing, if you will...that compete against legitimate privacy-focused groups. They also detailed their analysis of UltraSurf, which revealed some fairly horrifying things. For one, it's not just the code itself that historically has been trojan-esque in nature, but the behavior as well. Once they fired it up, it started probing a multitude of networks, all belonging to either Western governments, the financial sector, or the military. Also, it demonstrated that it was listening in within SSL sessions, as demonstrated by its behavior when browsing within SSL would return an error page (even a custom one, that wouldn't be of the normal size expected for a 404 response, for example). So, I'm not too likely to believe a guy just because he works for NASA; NASA is not an organization that was founded to provide bona fides for security researchers, so it really doesn't add any mantle of credibility for this topic.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.