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Internet Censorship Arms Race Gets New Weapon From Georgia Tech
coondoggie writes "Trying to get out in front of what they call a censorship arms race, a team of researchers has come up with technology that lets users exchange messages through heavily censored networks in countries such as China and North Korea in hidden channels via user-generated content sites such as Twitter or Flickr. Researchers with the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science will demo the technology known as Collage for the first time at next month's Usenix security conference and ideally have a working package the public can download by the end of August."
Working on packages at unisex conferences isn't the only way to get a head.
China's censor ship is designed to prevent people from openly sharing content that they don't want shared. Communications between two people who have an existing relationship and a desire to exchange information is always going to be possible through a variety of methods. This doesn't change that.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This sounds like a revolution, but its been in use for a long time. Did they just make software that looks for key phrases?
These terrorists won't be allowed to get away this, trading chlid porn over Twitter and Flickr and what not. Won't someone think of the children?
My blog
As we all know, the definition of "legitimate" varies from totalitarian regime to totalitarian regime, and also depends on what the leaders want the public to see and how badly something like this needs to be blocked.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Am I the only one who read "Usenix security conference" as "Unisex security conference" ?
If it involves steganography it's useless now.
Because now China, North Korea and Australia know to look for it.
They'd have been better off releasing this at a hacker convention than to do it through university channels. Don't you think they (the Chinese) keep track of it?
To win this sort of arms race, you need secret weaponry. You cannot announce it to the global media before it's finished or too soon because whatever vulnerability it exploits will be fixed soon later and then what would the purpose be?
On the other hand it's the right direction at least. Censorship can only be defeated by technology. But as this technology to beat censorship is created it will only make the censorship that much more oppressive because it will train the immune system of the censorship regime. Organized censorship almost always has more money and resources than organized resistance.
Darknets are the best way to beat censorship. This does not mean providing tools to hide the data on known sites. That's not going to be good enough. A darknet means having a secret internet within the internet itself accessed by a covert channel. The channel could be hidden by steganography but the channel is just an access point. This could be the seed nodes to freenet. This could be the seednodes to a series of proxies to bounce the information from point A to point B.
Alice and Bob both want to communicate but they don't want to be discovered by Mallory or by Eve. So they both have a shared secret and that secret is the access point to the darknet. As long as this access point remains secret Mallory and Eve do not know it exists. The access point could be contained via steganography within an image. Inside the image would be IP addresses to the secret proxies or connection points to the darknet which could be Freenet. The traffic would look like browing lolcats or 4chan, just looking at pictures but it wouldn't display pictures on Alice or Bob's sites, it would display something else.
Technically it's not all that difficult in theory. In practice is a different story. First of all Alice has to be able to trust Bob enough to give the access point. The access point is the secret and once smoeone enters the darknet they can stay in it via a web of trust. It's not all that different from PGP where Alice vouches for Bob, so Bob is invited into the darknet. Now Bob can see whats going on and if Bob posts then Bob wins the opportunity to invite someone into the darknet. You could have websites like https://www.slashdot.dark/ instead of .com which can ONLY be accessed by individuals who not only have the right seed nodes but authentication from the web of trust.
The friend to friend model is proven to be the most secure way to do it. And really if you are in China going up against the government it's the only way to do it.
If the access points to the darknet are kept secret, Alice and Bob remain safe from Mallory, Eve, even Gordon if trust is absolute between Alice and Bob it is an unbreakable chain. It's the basis behind PGP's web of trust protocol.
Inside the image would be IP addresses to the secret proxies or connection points to the darknet which could be Freenet. Bob can see whats going on and if Bob posts then Bob wins the opportunity to invite someone into the darknet. free sex videos The channel could be hidden by steganography but the channel is just an access point.
As far as I'm aware, North Korea's internet is not filtered in any way, shape or form. It's simply that only the high-ranking military elite are allowed to access it...
Trying to get out in front of what they call a censorship arms race, a team of researchers has come up with technology that lets users exchange messages through heavily censored networks in countries such as China and North Korea in hidden channels via user-generated content sites such as Twitter or Flickr.
So how long till this gets either banned or heavily frowned upon in the "western" world?
Why is it that we are so happy to help Chinese, Iranian, North Korean and other dissidents get the word out and work against their censorship yet we (as in the government of the US and Europe) embrace censorship of our own networks?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This will not work as Twitter, youtube, facebook, wikipedia(used to) is blocked completely in C***a for example.
As for the censorship on the internet, the bigger problem is the access, in many parts of the world, getting an internet access is a privilege and you must supply your real name, ID, address and reason for access the internet, not to mention you must sign-on and sign-off.
The books, letters and the word of mouth are more powerful weapon as they can already bring huge wealth of information, and can spark a revolutionary thoughts(look at all the human history in the past, how people communicate, spread ideals, etc).
Trust can be expressed by digital currency. An individual with a lot of trust has a lot of digital currency to give to individuals he or she trusts. If one or some of those individuals are found out to work for the government or suspected, then trust is lost.
Digital currency could be used to buy access to locked darknets within the darknet. This would create infinite layers to the darknet so that the most trusted are also at the deepest layers. This means Alice trusts Bob so Alice bets points on Bob. If Bob is Mallory or Gordon, Alive loses 500 trust points and cannot get into the layers of the darknet which require X amount of trust points. The darknet could be self segregating and color coded by level of trust. The colors will go from white all the way to black. Also the points can be expressed as titles. This would create a darknet nobility which would be extremely difficult to crack as it would take months or years to gain nobility and nobility could be lost in one bad bet.
I dislike the term "arms race" because it carries the historic sense of increasing risk of conflict with the increasing rise of armament. In this case, the war's already on. What we have here is a symbiotic relationship. [cue Sam & Max]
this only works if Mallory and Eve are not the government run ISP.
in the case of China, the people you want to hide from, "Mallory and Eve" have access to all traffic coming from you, and see your IP connecting to the 'secret' ip.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
USA, not China/NK.
For the worst, and most importantly, trend-setting shit happens in USA.
Trend-setting for China and like.
But more importantly, also us western people (I am european).
So, pirate party.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
I would love to see an absolutely secure messaging system capable of easy use and transfer of any size file in common use. Although I feel that anyone and everyone has the right to snoop I also feel that people should have the right to communicate without any possibility of censorship even when national security is involved. The instant that corporations or governments are allowed access for any reason all hopes of free communication vanish.
...there isn't any way for regimes to block access to specific websites.
And um... North Korea? I'm sure there's a 386 or two floating around there (not including the ones that power their nuke facilities) but how many North Korean dissidents do you suppose have access to the internet? They'll need to focus more on cell phone and sneaker net communications (smuggled across the Chinese border) if they want to reach them.
"Yeah but what they want and what they'll get are two different things. I'm sure the money elites didn't want the economy to melt down but it has. Now all their plans are ruined. It's simply impossible to continue with business as usual, something will change or we will sink into a global depression and we wont get out of that until something changes."
I don't see many of them out on the street. From where I'm standing, the wealthy elite are doing just fine right now, even with the crap economy. Of course, from where I'm standing, the reason our crap economy is crap is that the wealthy elite drained the rest of us dry... we gave them everything they asked for, on the premise that it would all "trickle down", only to find that money ignores gravity.
There wont be rich elites out on the streets. Thats not what is going to happen. What is going to happen is they'll try to build lots of prisons to put poor people in there rather than extend unemployment benefits or pay for welfare. This will end up costing them more than if they just gave them the benefits. Then they'll have to deal with the growth of organized crime, terrorism, and others who will target them and their turf. As the middle class shrinks and ceases to exist, civil unrest will grow until the USA as a country is as corrupt as Mexico.
I suppose if someone is rich and elite and does not care about America at all, they obviously wont care about the current situation. But if you have to live in this country and you care about the next 50 years, then something has to be done. None of the solutions are easy, none of the solutions will be cheap.
The source of the problem is that we have more people than we have jobs. We have too many people on planet earth and not enough jobs for them all. And as computers, machines and robots become more sophisticated then we need less and less people. There is no reason to maintain a high birthrate in the USA. There is no reason to maintain the inflated dollar as this just guarantees a high cost of living which increases the likelihood of crime and punishment.
What I expect the rich elite to do is build lots of prisons, create lots of laws, and put poor people in there. That is the simple yet stupid solution I expect them to choose. It's not a long term solution because theres 6 billion people on the earth and the people in the USA whom they put in prison may have offspring who now will be more likely to commit crime and they will have to be put in prison in a lot of instances too. So you create a prison cycle which is not all that different from the welfare cycle.
Why is prison and welfare necessary? The cost of living is artificially kept high. The job growth is artificially kept low. This means you have millions of unemployed people, and their numbers increase every year as the cost of living continues to rise and people continue to be born. This is going to lead to not just a national crisis but a global crisis.
It's actually so bad now that the rich elite don't even want to hire enough cops to protect them.And it's also so bad because when they do hire cops they don't want to pay them very well, and lets be honest, very few people are willing to risk their lives for less than middle class pay. So even if they build more prisons and hire more cops it's going to cost a lot of money and it wont be taken from the middle class because soon there will be no middle class.
I expect the middle class to still exist but it's going to shrink. It's going to consist of professionals, of law enforcement, of lawyers, of doctors, of the career military men. I expect that the military will be the primary path to reaching the middle class. I expect a college degree to decrease in worth and importance unless it's in law enforcement, lawyer, doctor, MBA. This means that college will still be important but only if you plan to stay in college for 6 to 8 years and spend an obscene amount of money.
The jobs will still exist for individuals willing to risk their life, f
the ORIGINAL story says to use steganography techniques on normal common use websites such as facebook and flickr as connecting to those sites will not draw undue attention.
Your post- the one I was replying to, says --NO NO NO-- they must have a secret IP address to unknown proxies..
I dispute that, originally and again, because to connect to those UNKNOWN proxies, they have to type in an unusual IP address.. that kind of activity can easily by tracked by governments with access..
and your rebuttal to me says- what exactly? connecting to a series of websites makes it OK? if I control the ISP- If I am the opressor with complete system access I can pull every packet you send and receive and reassemble them.... I'll ignore connections to facebook or flickr, but I sure as hell won't ignore connections that you and 11 other people I'm keeping an eye on connect to- that no one else does...
only connections to systems that everyone commonly connects to are likely to be hideable..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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