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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."
This sounds like a revolution, but its been in use for a long time. Did they just make software that looks for key phrases?
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.
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.
In fact, if you can and prefer reading and writing English, then you can access to most information that are otherwise blocked. The Chinese government worries about the poor people. If you can and prefer reading English, you are likely well educated with some financial resources -- you are the successful ones in their society and you are not going to try hard to subvert it. The biggest problem in China is still poverty.
Neither they care any fringe way to bypass their censor, because they worry about mass unrest. For example, while you can't go to YouTube, you can go to other sites for video because not many people even know those small sites. Once the site becomes popular, it will be blocked.
Unless this technology can be shown to have a chance to become very popular and it still can't be blocked when it is very popular, it is not a relevant censor-bypassing technology.
And that direction is the opposite of anywhere that would seek to limit the free exchange of information, whether by heavy-handed government fiat or by para-legal "intellectual property" laws.
I hope to see a new arms race, between China, who wants to subvert the West's system of intellectual property and the US, that seeks to subvert China's limitation on open communications. It's the only kind of arms race where the rest of us win.
I'm afraid that the opposite is going to happen though: China will become more compliant to the US' corporate information lockdown and the US will become more tolerant of China's heavy hand. Both governments ultimately want the same thing: a weak and malleable work'n'consume force that will keep the corporations rich and the ownership elite richer, while not expecting too much and not threatening the hegemony of the monied. Good shoppers who will calmly strive for a lifestyle that is just out of reach so they can't make any lifestyle choices that would threaten the system.
At least the people in the Matrix had a nice dream. Our future is more along the lines of Metropolis only with large-screen TVs bought on credit.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And that direction is the opposite of anywhere that would seek to limit the free exchange of information, whether by heavy-handed government fiat or by para-legal "intellectual property" laws.
I hope to see a new arms race, between China, who wants to subvert the West's system of intellectual property and the US, that seeks to subvert China's limitation on open communications. It's the only kind of arms race where the rest of us win.
I'm afraid that the opposite is going to happen though: China will become more compliant to the US' corporate information lockdown and the US will become more tolerant of China's heavy hand. Both governments ultimately want the same thing: a weak and malleable work'n'consume force that will keep the corporations rich and the ownership elite richer, while not expecting too much and not threatening the hegemony of the monied. Good shoppers who will calmly strive for a lifestyle that is just out of reach so they can't make any lifestyle choices that would threaten the system.
At least the people in the Matrix had a nice dream. Our future is more along the lines of Metropolis only with large-screen TVs bought on credit.
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.
"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