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Japanese Police Urge ISPs To Block Tor

hypnosec writes "Authorities in Japan are presumably worried about their inability to tackle cybercrime and, in a bid to stem one of the sources of anonymous traffic, the National Police Agency (NPA) is asking ISPs to block Tor. The recommendation comes from the special panel formed by the NPA after a hacker going by the name Demon Killer was found to regularly use Tor to anonymize his online activities, like posting of death threats on public message boards."

17 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sure, go ahead. by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Informative

    TOR is not the problem... Well, not the problem the Japanese police claim.

    It IS a problem for the corporate/government control of information. It probably bothers TEPCO greatly, that this is out there - and damned near impossible to filter.

    Cybercrime. The great Emmanuel Goldstein, needed to keep in place, proles and party members alike.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  2. Thank you by Weezul · · Score: 4, Informative

    Thank you for reminding us about TEPCO as well as posting that specific link.

    After Fukushima, the Japanese government lied about the radiation until a hacker space started building GPS radiation sensor devices. They gave an excellent talk from 29c3 :
    Safecast: DIY and citizen-sensing of radiation [29c3]

    Did I mention they used Open Street Map? Open Street Map rocks! It's basically the wikipedia of maps, blows away google maps.

    --
    The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
  3. idiotic by slashmydots · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can't "block tor." It's just 100% encrypted SSL web traffic. You'd have to block all SSL web traffic. Good luck with that.

    1. Re:idiotic by cultiv8 · · Score: 4, Informative

      You can block known exit nodes.

      --
      sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
  4. Re:Japan by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Informative

    You would be very wrong.

    Boston has the lowest rate of gun violence in the US at 3.6 / 100k each year.

    Since the population is about 600K, that's 22 per year.

    These people were killing at a rate of about 1 per day.

  5. Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor by CodeBuster · · Score: 4, Informative

    If violent and repressive regimes, willing to kill without trial or mercy, cannot stop Tor then how much less will a western style constitution democracy be able to stop it? Unless the Japanese are prepared to cut off all electronic communications with the outside world, which would be tantamount to economic suicide, they will fail. Blocking known relay nodes will slow Tor down, it won't stop it because people will still be able to use bridges to get onto the network.

    1. Re:Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor by CodeBuster · · Score: 4, Informative

      The TOR network is designed to make two things very difficult: tracking packets back to their source and shutting down the network itself. In addition to the well known relay nodes there's an ever changing list of bridge nodes, private operators who forward traffic to and from the well know relay nodes. It's these bridge nodes especially that make TOR difficult to stop completely. Even the Chinese, with their great firewall, haven't been able to stamp it out completely because it's a constant game of whack-a-mole with the bridge nodes on dynamic IPs.

    2. Re:Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor by Koutarou · · Score: 3, Informative

      FLET's is not filtered at NTT's level. It all gets passed off to the individual ISPs who have to handle transit and filtering themselves.

      au Hikari is a different situation.

      Disclaimer: I work for a japanese ISP.

  6. Re:Sure, go ahead. by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Informative

    Two problems here.

    (1) The article has nothing to do with Fukushima or TEPCO. It's about someone who sent anonymous death threats.

    (2) Sherman and Mangano, the authors of the paper you linked to an article about, are kooks. Just google on their names together, and you'll find plenty of info discrediting their claims, e.g.: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/20/researchers-trumpet-another-flawed-fukushima-death-study/

    (3) The Open Journal of Pediatrics appears to be one of the many open-access journals these days that have no standards for publication. See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html for more about these journals. I support the concept of open-access journals, but many of them are junk journals.

    (4) Sherman and Mangano's junk science didn't get blocked by evil governments or evil corporations. They put it on the internet and nobody interfered with them.

  7. Re:Sure, go ahead. by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just as an informative point, the headline on the TEPCO link is a gross mis-statement of the actual facts.

    One third of US born west coast babies are NOT suffering from hyperthyroidism.

    What happened is the RATE of hyperthyroidism, which is quite low, increased by 28% for a couple of months, and to a level 16% higher than normal for a period of 9 months.

    That corresponds to about 40 cases in 600,000 births. Still a problem but about 1/5,000th of what the headline claims.

  8. Re:Japan by Uberbah · · Score: 2, Informative

    ummm, Japan was always a police state...

    Which is why most of their cops don't even carry guns. Or, maybe, you're using that term "police state" but it doesn't mean whatever it is you think it means.....

  9. Re:Japan by Mr.+Slippery · · Score: 3, Informative

    Which is why most of their cops don't even carry guns.

    I believe you may have confused Japan with the U.K. Cops I saw on the street in my months in Osaka routinely carried revolvers. Not that it matters; a police state has nothing to do with whether police carry firearms, it has to do with totalitarian government -- which, when the population has been disarmed, can function quite well even with low-level functionaries not carrying firearms.

    --
    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
    You cannot wash away blood with blood
  10. Re:Japan by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Wrong, as another person said gun death rate in Boston is 22 per year.

    These people who were caught/shot were throwing yet more bombs at the authorities as they were being chased. They had a whole house full of them as well.
    Do you think they stock piled them just for fun?

  11. Re:Japan, a new Iran ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not US, nor UK, nor most other countries, TOR are not officially blocked, at the ISP level

    You better check out this http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2009/06/features/the-hidden-censors-of-the-internet

    Yes, this IS the UK we're talking about, now go cry a river to your representatives.

  12. Re:Demon Killer Hacker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I live in Japan. There's 3 hardware stores within 5 kilometers of me. All of them carry axes. Of multiple varieties. You're full of bullshit.

  13. Re:Sure, go ahead. by Reschekle · · Score: 4, Informative

    They caught the guy who sent them so I'm not sure why Tor needs to be blocked.

  14. Re:Sure, go ahead. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    That corresponds to about 40 cases in 600,000 births.

    Assuming that you mean 40 cases against an expected number of 31.3 (which is a 28% increase) ... the sqrt variance in the number of cases should be sqrt(31.3) = 5.6. Approximating the Poisson distribution as a Gaussian, that means that the extra 8.7 cases constitute a 8.7/5.6 = 1.6-sigma excess, or a p-value of 0.06 (i.e. 94% confidence). Heck, that's practically nothing. You could pick twenty random diseases, look at them, and you'd *expect* that one of them would show that much of an excess. Relevant xkcd.