Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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