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.

Comments

Possession == crime

[grub]

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.

Re:Possession == crime

[Anonymous Coward]

True but irrelevant.
China doesn't chase up every little breach of censorship. They couldn't, and they don't need to. Censorship is so evil and insidious because it manipulates the masses world view, at only a tiny level of effectiveness.

Also, why does TFA lump "countries such as China and North Korea" together? They are so dissimilar, might as well be "countries such as China, Australia and N. America".

North Korea has total control over all networked computers, and therefore has perfect censorship. This, or any other technical circumvention won't work.

Re:Possession == crime

[John Hasler]

Possession of a Title 17 1201(a)(2) "circumvention device" is not illegal in the USA. DMCA .

Re:Possession == crime

[WhitetailKitten]

Pardon me for being the pedant and only addressing your last sentence, not your overall point that NK has little to do with China's censorship situation, but I need to say: Well, theoretical perfect censorship. If I can see user-generated text of any kind, I can sneak encypted data out of it past anything North Korea can throw at me (assuming that the text was seeded with data encrypted by a pre-agreed cipher). Even if I'm being directly supervised by some grunt with a semi-automatic breathing over my shoulder, if I've agreed that a certain piece of otherwise-arbitrary and innocuous text has a certain meaning, observing whether the text is in the appropriate place of the plaintext will convey information. If I'm only allowed to read it and not take any permanent form of notes, the amount of info that can be conveyed might be limited, but you can train yourself to store a reasonably good bit of info over short periods of time.

Alternatively, imagine a one-time pad for use with a ciphertext that's slow-mosey'd into form by being all of the numbers, in order, in an otherwise-innocent business or weather article, or a span of them? Admittedly, this assumes the ability to insert arbitrary numbers into what's normally the realm of journalism or meteorology and to have the pages be available on an uncensored host, and have the appearances of these articles be agreed upon and prepared long enough in advance (potentially years), but it's not impossible if your reasons for sending a message is important enough.

This does all hinge on the ability to see the ciphertext in the first place. Alternatively, you could just end up shipped to a famine zone for $[THOUGHTCRIME] to sort everything out.

This will just get sites like Flickr banned

[Anonymous Coward]

This will just get sites like Flickr banned in places like China, Iran, or Australia; and nothing else will change

Re:This will just get sites like Flickr banned

[perplexify]

It's funny (in a sad, ironic kind of way) because Australia (one of the most 'free' countries in the world) is getting lumped in with China and Iran (two of the least 'free') due to a moron senator by the name of conroy who wants to censor our internet. I doubt they'd get away with banning Flikr in Australia so it would actually be a geniune circumvention here which makes the whole filtering thing completely pointless. Of course conroy would has an almost superhuman ability to ignore the facts. Hurray for democracy.

Re:This will just get sites like Flickr banned

[MichaelSmith]

How about my forthcoming blog "heroes of the chinese revolution". It has lots of pictures and many of them have beautiful textures. Sky, water, so forth. All available in lossless formats.

Re:This will just get sites like Flickr banned

[MichaelSmith]

Cheer up. Only five days to go.

bottleneck?

[johnhp]

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.

Re:bottleneck?

[idiot900]

A system like this could presumably work through any site that hosts user-generated content. A repressive government would have to ban every service that doesn't allow them to tie each message to a real person. So they would have to block all of the Internet originating in the western world. Even for a place like China that would be pretty untenable.

Re:bottleneck?

[betterunixthanunix]

Or, a repressive government could ban the tool itself, and imprison anyone who possesses it. Why would a repressive government have a problem making possession a crime?

Why is this being blurted out?

[donscarletti]

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.

Re:Why is this being blurted out?

[sadboyzz]

flickr is already blocked in China.

After this many years of trying, I've found that all publicly known methods of circumventing censorship do not last, no matter how promising the technique may seem at first. There are (were) online forums where people would share SOCKS and HTTP proxies they find or own, but nowadays these gets blocked faster than you can post it. The only reliable solution I've found is to buy your own commercial VPN service and keep it to yourself. I rent a VM host in California and run OpenVPN which I share with some of my friends. We get pretty decent connection speeds here in China, and it's actually pretty cheap even by us third-world standards, especially if you share the cost among a few people.

The only long term fix to this problem is, of course, to replace the communist (more like fascist nowadays) regime with a democratic government, which is an endeavor that may take a few more decades. In the meantime, I suggest buying a VPN service as a temporary workaround.

Re:Why is this being blurted out?

[internettoughguy]

flickr is already blocked in China.

After this many years of trying, I've found that all publicly known methods of circumventing censorship do not last, no matter how promising the technique may seem at first. There are (were) online forums where people would share SOCKS and HTTP proxies they find or own, but nowadays these gets blocked faster than you can post it. The only reliable solution I've found is to buy your own commercial VPN service and keep it to yourself. I rent a VM host in California and run OpenVPN which I share with some of my friends. We get pretty decent connection speeds here in China, and it's actually pretty cheap even by us third-world standards, especially if you share the cost among a few people.

The only long term fix to this problem is, of course, to replace the communist (more like fascist nowadays) regime with a democratic government, which is an endeavor that may take a few more decades. In the meantime, I suggest buying a VPN service as a temporary workaround.

A third option is for already democratic countries to reduce immigration restrictions, and have China's best and brightest vote with their feet.

Re:Why is this being blurted out?

[donscarletti]

As of 2010-08-16 15:00 Beijing time, flickr is not blocked. Sounds like you were being fed a line by a lazy customer service rep. Apathetic handling of refunds transcends nationality, race, colour or creed.

Re:Why is this being blurted out?

[Anonymous Coward]

China is not currently blocking Flickr - I am in south east China and have Flickr open in a another tab - it is blocked occasionally but the delays involved in connecting to accounts are not that significant - evidence of this is the large number of Chinese Flickr users and the availability of Chinese Flickr streams. Facebook is blocked - but any number of proxies can assist there.

Re:Pirating tastes like Child Porn

[schon]

Pirating != Stealing

And for those who continue to confuse the two, I find this handy guide to be beneficial.

(and it's on Flickr to boot! :)

Specialist software?

[John Pfeiffer]

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.

Great for publishers who want nobody to read

[xiando]

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.

Re:Steganography is not all that invisible

[Sovetskysoyuz]

For really high bitrates, sneak some data into your collection of memorable TV static.