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Getting Around Web Censors With Flickr
An anonymous reader writes "Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr." For visual learners: this earlier story at GigaOM explains the system with a diagram.
Leading to image to text conversion sites being used with Lynx.
Countries which censor the Internet will have no problem labelling this as a "subversion tool" (or something similar) and make possession of it a crime.
sad but true.
Trolling is a art,
This will just get sites like Flickr banned in places like China, Iran, or Australia; and nothing else will change
How does pushing content through a few major sites help spread it in censored areas? It seems like an authoritarian government could ban a few major websites more easily than hundreds of smaller ones.
Maybe a torrent-like web server would be best for sharing censored information, where trusted web servers in free countries are the only uploaders on the network.
But why all the fanfare? Unless it's still under testing, release it now...
Aren't there all sorts of plots and conspiracies hidden in the classifieds?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
"... including software pirates, child-porn distributors and other unsavory characters ..."
Pirating != Stealing
Pirating == Raping Children
Idiots
Right now, youtube, facebook, twitter and other "web 2.0" type user generated content sites are precisely the sites that are being blocked, for exactly this reason. Compared to Youtube and Facebook, blocking flickr will cause absolutely no backlash at all. If you want flickr to be blocked in China, then you're going about it the right way by publishing this story.
Also, covert channels through tunnelling is already working quite well, there are many, many technologies to do this, of which steganography is only one. This achieves nothing but causing suspicion towards the remaining user generated content sites that are not blocked. Steganography is security through obscurity by definition, this only works if you keep it a secret. It it astounding how many well meaning idiots love freedom so much that they decide to utilise their freedom of speech by blurting out something stupid and causing trouble for a lot of other, innocent people without those freedoms.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
The diagram was essential for my understanding of the story. But, much better than that, you taught me a fantastic euphemism for my Internet inflicted AADD.
It's great that no-one in China reads /. or reads English, or would ever think to find out what's going on at the Usenix security conference.
/. and other news sites.
No doubt this will completely fly under their radar and will be an huge success...
Oh wait...
Seriously, what -- exactly -- is the point of this software? It seems to be ridiculously easy to get around, especially as it's being fully advertised here on
Summary: fetches page, renders to image, posts to Flickr or similar, and user views that
So, expect Flickr and similar to be blocked shortly.
I live in Tunisia, one of internet's black holes.... And I have always wondered why they blocked Flickr a couple of monthes ago...
People keep talking about steganography as if it didn't alter the look of the image so that it seemed to have been produced by a raster from the 80s: The least significant digit shows up visibly in gradients and fades. Sure, you have to know to look for it, it's a subtle effect to the untrained eye, but still.
You can't take the sky from me...
I had a nice chuckle when I read in TFA that this 'normally requires specialist software', when I've embedded .zip files in .jpg images using the DOS copy command. This should not be rocket surgery, even for non-savvy folks. It's really like 1+1=2, really.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
yah... don't block flickr, its not like they are one of the BIGGEST porn sites in the world or anything!
Most of the time people who are in censored countries has no problem getting information out, the main problem is identifying what is censored and receiving them.
Proxy is still the best way for such purpose, unless someone is willing to publish news and information through this medium. Else it would be just another form of old school steganography.
oops, sorry, I meant 'deal extreme'.
its still referred to as DX and most people know it by that.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Cause, the TRA (telecoms regulatory authority) blocks flickr itself. So much for uncontroversial. Best thing is to pay for a proper vpn service and use it for all internet connectivity. It's what I do.
If Alice creates the anti-government document and wants Bob to read it then she is probably fine with embedding the picture in a picture which is then uploaded to any of the thousands of sites who allow people to read it if she already has some pre-arranged agreement with Bob regarding where the picture will be uploaded. However..
If Alice wants to publish the anti-government document document and she wants thousands+ to read it then just how would she go about getting the masses to read this using the hide-in-image option? eh?
There are already so many ways Alice can give a secret message to Bob and most of them do not involve computer technology.
This just seems dumb if Alice wants to publish something and she wants the masses to read it. China and Norway do not torture people for reading the wrong thing on the Internet, they torture people who publish something they don't like (such as information about NATOs false-flag terror operations).
Tor (torproject.org) still works in China as long as you use bridges and Tor works just fine with or without bridges in Norway. Publishers who want readership beyond their four hundred close friends are likely better off publishing their text using the Tor technology and those who have censored Internet access are also likely better off using Tor.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I recently visited Dubai and Flickr was already blocked there. I assume the rule is countrywide in the whole of the United Arab Emirates, nut just Dubai alone.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
a copy editor anymore?
From TFA:
Ironically, the software uses a data-encryption method called “steganography” to hide text inside images and other files, which is the same process that the Russian spy ring recently broken by U.S. authorities used to pass secret messages and files to each other while they were disguised as American citizens.
That is not irony. In fact it is completely opposite irony.
Rocket surgery?