Ethiopia Criminalizes VoIP Services

An anonymous reader writes "The Ethiopian government has passed legislation criminalizing the use of VoIP services like Skype and Google Talk. Anyone using these services within the country now faces up to 15 years in prison. 'Ethiopian authorities argue that they imposed these bans because of "national security concerns" and to protect the state's telecommunications monopoly. The country only has one ISP, the state-owned Ethio Telecom, and has been filtering its citizen's Internet access for quite some time now to suppress opposition blogs and other news outlets. ... Reporters Without Borders also reports that Ethio Telecom installed a system to block access to the Tor network, which allows users to surf the Web anonymously. The organization notes that the ISP must be using relatively sophisticated Deep Packet Inspection to filter out this traffic.'"

Comments

Re:Devolution

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing devolution, only evolution in a direction you don't like.

Re:Now who will complain about evil carriers in US

[dcollins]

Wikipedia > Internet censorship by country > Pervasive censorship (the highest level) in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and of course, Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country

No, and...

[betterunixthanunix]

Not only is this not the first case, but it is a problem that the Tor developers have been addressing for some time. There are two techniques that are known to be used to block Tor:

1. Blocking all entry nodes; China, for example, does this. Bridge nodes mitigate this problem, but a determined government like the Chinese government can compile a list of all bridge nodes, and block those too.
2. Distinguishing Tor from an HTTPS connection; this is a more technically advanced method that is favored by governments that lack the resources to compile lists of bridges. Since Tor has a unique pattern of TLS connections, it can be identified and blocked by a national firewall; fixing this problem is an ongoing effort (the goal is to make Tor look like Firefox).

Ethiopia's been like this for decades

[billstewart]

A friend of mine was doing development work in Ethiopia and Somaliland back in the 90s. He's Dutch, and his wife's Somali, and he often worked from Addis Ababa, the capital. At one point he was having a phone call, and the phone operator came on and told him to stop speaking Dutch - speak English, Italian, Arabic, Amharic, or one of the other local languages the police could understand. We talked about whether he should use PGP, but he decided it would just give the police more of an excuse to "confiscate" his PCs, which they'd been wanting to steal anyway.