Users Flock To Firewall-Busting Thesis Project

itwbennett writes "Daiyuu Nobori, a Ph.D. student at Japan's Tsukuba University designed 'VPN Gate' to help individuals in countries that restrict Internet use circumvent government firewalls. The service, which has drawn 77,000 users since its launch last Friday, encourages members of the public to set up VPN servers and offer free connections to individual users, aiming to make the technology more accessible. Nobori had originally planned to host the service on his university's servers, but they have been down recently so he switched it to the Windows Azure cloud platform. He has spent about US$9,000 keeping it up so far."

Comments

Public list of VPNs?

[schneidafunk]

"His service maintains a public, real-time list of freely available VPN servers for users to choose from" - What's to stop a country (say Iran) from blacklisting the public list of VPNs?

Re:Public list of VPNs?

[flyingfsck]

Exactly. That is the whole problem with VPNs. They only work till they get popular.

Re:Public list of VPNs?

[bluefoxlucid]

Yes it's called "Potential Problem Analysis" and it's what's done by people who actually know how to get things done and not find themselves falling down a hole with no idea what went wrong or how they're going to get out of it.

Let's try Tor:

Supply a list of Tor connection nodes at

Potential Problem Analysis: "What if China blocks those 4 IP addresses on their firewall?"

You: "Stop being morons, stuff like this is still useful." (6 months later) "Oh, shit. Well uh, start distributing updates. Oh, they're getting shot down too. Uh."

Intelligent people: "Hmm, that could be a problem. China probably will do that when they see the circumvention, so Likelihood is 'HIGH'. It'd be crippling, so Severity is 'HIGH'. We should make it part of the protocol to be able to trade information about the network, but not force synchronization of full information, that way the network won't have desync issues and it also will be harder to insert nodes on the network to quickly collect a list of all nodes and block them all."

Another Potential Problem, in this case, is that the VPNs are direct and traceable--the country may leave the list of VPNs accessible, track it, and track connections to those addresses. Then they know who the offenders are. In that case, this project would still be useful: Iran could find the Blasphemers, come to their house at night, and behead them.

Re:Public list of VPNs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose in this case they'd have to be constantly scanning the list and updating the national firewall rules. It's a dynamic list of participants hosting VPN service.

My question is more Tor-like in nature... how do you prevent people from doing something illegal (in the host country, like the US) through your connection?

I'd be happy to let someone in China read and post from behind the great firewall, but I obviously don't want strangers sending death threats, looking at child porn, etc. through my home ISP connection. At least with Tor you can participate without being an exit node. As a VPN host, you are the exit node.

Re: Public list of VPNs?

[Urza9814]

So, what, they don't have the technology to write a three line bash script and a cron job to run it every half hour?

So...

[pushing-robot]

(a) we already have TOR and other services
(b) this guy makes a nice, handy list of server IPs for oppressive governments to block.
(c) I doubt he will come to your aid when folks use your connection for [piracy|drug deals|child porn|planning a terrorist attack].

Re:So...

[pipatron]

Yeah, this is pretty insane. Tor already does this FAR MORE SAFE. Not only does it give governments a nice list of server IPs, it gives governments a nice way to catch offenders.

Re:So...

[griffjon]

b) Exit nodes don't matter for blocking purposes. Bridge nodes are discoverable, but Tor has made them difficult to discover the complete set, https://bridges.torproject.org/ (or, since that'll be blocked in most useful places, emailing bridges@torproject.org with the "get bridges" in the body) only gives out a few at a time with a captcha requirement, and only sends to https-enabled webmail hosts.

Tor also has an unknown number of private bridges people run and disseminate through their own channels to friends and family and so on. This, plus obfsproxy and related tricks like the flashproxy work from Stanford, make it really really difficult to discover and block enough bridges into the network.

Think of the Canadians

[CohibaVancouver]

What *I* want to know is when someone is going to implement a system to help we poor Canadians freely access Hulu and US-Netflix. The pain of being unable to view SNL archive clips is unimaginable to the average American.

Re:Think of the Canadians

[aristotle-dude]

What *I* want to know is when someone is going to implement a system to help we poor Canadians freely access Hulu and US-Netflix. The pain of being unable to view SNL archive clips is unimaginable to the average American.

Are you really that cheap? Really? It only costs 5 bucks per month to "unblock" "us" content. That will give you access to US-Netflix and Hulu. I access both US Netflix and Hulu Plus from Canada. If you want to access Hulu Plus, just use your Canadian (non-prepaid) credit card to sign up but take the DIGIT portion of our postal code and then add additional digits (try zeros) until it becomes a valid ZIP, then find the city and state that zip corresponds to and enter that in as your billing address city and state. You can keep your street address the same as your real billing address.

God damn that expensive

[stewsters]

Wait, 77,000 / 9000 = 8 people per dollar spent? 9000 and only launched last Friday? How much does Azure cost to operate? Throw together a cheap php site or something for $20 a month.

Re:God damn that expensive

[SuricouRaven]

He probably paid for high-bandwidth unlimited hosting for a few months in advance.

Re:$9000! Really?

[localman57]

Because if you don't spend up all the money budgeted to your department, you can't apply to get more next year?

Sigh, I know I wasn't this cynical back in my 20's...

Re:Windows Azure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe. And if they are, good for them.

Re:$9000 in the hole

[roman_mir]

Genious! And really his VPN clients should just save the money and use the Internet like everybody else does, because you know, they can.

Good, still not enough.

[Corwn of Amber]

Yeah, so, one more sort-of-TOR, but with fixed servers in easy-to-raid locations.

They don't get it.

There is ONE way to make a REALLY resilient network. It's been proven over and over.

NO. CENTRAL. COMMAND.
MESH EVERYTHING.
ROUTE ERRYTHING BY DHTs.
ALL NODES EQUAL PEERS. With the same capabilities. All nodes are routers. All nodes are relays. All nodes are bridges. All nodes are cell towers. Until we get rid of telcos/ISPs, all nodes are gateways, too.

Like TOR, but if everyone were a bridge and an exit relay and a cell tower.

THAT is unstoppable. Else there WILL be censorship and control and criminalization and destroyed lives like Aaron Swartz's.

Re:Windows Azure?

[MLCT]

The same MS who collude with the Chinese government to enable monitoring of dissidents on skype?