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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."
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.
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?
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.
"Censorship can only be defeated by technology."
Revolution worked far better before we even had the technology we do. In fact, technology made people lazy and unwilling to fight censorship.
Great Intellect...
If it involves steganography it's useless now. Because now China, North Korea and Australia know to look for it.
I wonder if the Aussie people and the Aussie government realize just what a condemnation of what they have become this is... to be legitimately and accurately grouped with the likes of China, North Korea, Iran, and Myanmar over a basic human rights and civil liberties issue.
The government for what it does to its citizens.
The people for tolerating it.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.