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Knocking Down the Great Firewall of China
New submitter Nocturrne writes: The FOSS project Lantern is having great success in unblocking the internet for many users in oppressive regimes, like China and Iran. Much like Tor and BitTorrent, Lantern is using peer-to-peer networking to overcome firewalls, but with the additional security of a trusted network of friends. "If you download Lantern in an uncensored region, you can connect with someone in a censored region, who can then access whatever content they want through you. What makes the system so unique is that it operates on the basis of trust. ... Through a process called consistent routing, the amount of information any single Lantern user can learn about other users is limited to a small subset, making infiltration significantly more difficult." The network of peers is growing, but we need more friends in uncensored countries to join us.
I had great success plowing your dads while your moms tossed my salad.
The day I lost a lot of respect for Open Source is the day they went political.
Why don't they mind their own business and stop trying to push their ideology worldwide? China isn't a democracy - neither are 99.9% of those that claim to be but that's beside the point. They have their own rules and regulations and you should respect them and not interfere.. You have no right to decide what's right or wrong or to push your means to them, the same way as they don't or shouldn't push their ideology to your countries.
Its not our job to knock it down. Its the job of the chinese citizens.
I know it sounds un-American and like I'm not a team player in the Us Vs Them battle, but fuck it, not my job.
You can't see a lantern from far away. They could have chosen a better name, such as Lighthouse.
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This submission is about China's censorship of the Internet.
The one below it on the main page is about spying and China.
The one below that is about Apple storing data on servers in China.
The one below that is about Lenovo buying IBM's server line.
Yeah, I know China is an important player in the world today, but I don't come to Slashdot to read just about China. Let's have some diversity when it comes to the submissions posted to the main page, okay Slashdot editors?
When will someone make a proxy-style program so that we can bypass our small monthly caps?
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I do not want to be negative, but networks being based on "trust" and "people you know" work only to a certain size, then it breaks down under the own weight.
So this sounds like a pretty good thing while it's small, but it cannt be a big alternative or solution.
Very clever. While most of the volunteers will be the NSA, this won't provide much extra security, but at least you get plenty of proxy servers with practically unlimited bandwidth for free :-)
The NSA already taps most of the data somewhere along the route, but running the proxy servers could provide a bit of extra meta data, which helps them when sorting the recorded data.
Sounds like you could use some reeducation. You will be subjected to pictures of Stallman in a dress until you see five lights.
Yesterday, Slashdot ran this story about China moving data inside the borders, and therefore presumably inside the firewall... it seems like they could turn the firewall off if they have everything they want there already.
Can anyone explain how this should make anything more secure? I do live in a country where there is internet censorship done by an ISP or anything yet, I would like to provide access through my connection but I cannot do that without signing up for an account with Google? Hmm...
How about fucking off?
I'm sick of americans pretending to have the moral high ground. IIRC, you have bombed Iraq and Afghanistan to the stone age killing hundreds of thousands just because it was business for one of your lobbies. And you wanted to loot and indebt too. You people also fucked with Ukraine, have made countless attempts on Cuba, made up this ISIS bullshit and ARE STILL SUPPORTING ISRAEL. Your fucking nigger started bombing Irak again this very week.
Yet you pretend to have the right to whine because some censorship in some country.
Fuck you americans. You are the cancer of this planet.
... this? Just no.
Peer-to-peer based on trust.
What could possibly go wrong?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
dedicate the resources to that tool. It works, it's been available and the community is strong.
Why why why? Because you can? TOR Needs all the resources it can get and this is doing nothing to help.
Lantern has a crowd funding project running on Indiegogo:
https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
Bert
What makes the system so unique is that it operates on the basis of trust.
It does sound like a unique privacy system, if it is based on trust.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
'laws' change every day now like herding us ordinarians around...in the spiritless unlawfulness we now face it is freedom of spirit & the truth that cannot be controlled as usual...
Assuming you ran that program, would you feel safe running it on your actual computer on your actual network?
I wouldn't. Its basically a free for all VPN that you throw on your machine. Anyone could use that thing. yeah, people in repressive regimes trying to be free. Also terrorists and pedophiles.
And lets not forget hackers that want to exploit your good will to gain access to your system.
Now lets assume you really want to help so you're going to run this thing. What sort of precautions would you have to take to do it responsibly?
I'm thinking I would have to run it sandboxed or VMed somehow. Or on a spare machine that I don't care about. Possibly on a raspberry pi because why not.
Then I'm thinking it would have to be on a different VLAN. Because I am sure as hell not sharing a private network with that thing.
And even then I'm thinking that isn't enough because what is to stop the hacker that takes control of the raspberry pi on VLAN2 from simply hacking the router, gaining access to VLAN1, and then proceeding to rape my network from the inside out?
You see the problem. I like the idea of this thing. I just can't trust it. Maybe if I put it on a hosted system data center or something and let them deal with it. After all they have no reason to trust anyone that hosts programs on their systems. They should firewall everything from everything else as a matter of course.
Does it make any sense to bridge the first router that creates VLAN2 to a second router so that if someone accesses the gateway they won't actually be accessing the router that controls the VLANs? That is, bridge a second router on VLAN2 to the port and let it act as the gateway for the suspect system?
Would that make this operation safe or is this just needless abstraction that doesn't accomplish anything?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If you download Lantern in an uncensored region, you can connect with someone in a censored region, who can then access whatever content they want through you. What makes the system so unique is that it operates on the basis of trust. ...the amount of information any single Lantern user can learn about other users is limited to a small subset, making infiltration significantly more difficult.
Outside of the geek's virtual worlds and ways of thinking ---
The more you know about someone, the more you are willing to trust them. Particularly when the stakes are high.
Who gives you the right to impress your concepts of right and wrong onto the citizens of another sovereign nation and its people?
How would you feel if another country did it to you?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What about unblocking Internet in oppressive regimes like the UK?
other than the quasi-religious argumebt that "we are right amd thwy are wrong" what gives us yhe right to intwntionally try to subvert yhe authority of another sovereign nation with whom we are not at war? This seems an awful lot like spy-games...
It claims to be "Available for Linux", but it's only available for Debian/Ubuntu (and the d/l link is kinda broken). Why don't they just say that it's for Ubuntu and not "Linux"? That's misleading. That's like saying it's available for Windows but they only provide a WFW3.11 version.
And no easy-to-find links to any source code, no mention of source code in the FAQ, so it's difficult to characterize this as a FOSS project, even though they claim the GPLV3 license. Where is the source if they are releasing the binaries?
I mean really... ACs make wild claims and can't / won't back it up.
greg, REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!
Where's the source code for the FOSS project? The license is GPLV3.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I can just see places like England and Australia, where they block such sites, using my American isp to look at kiddie porn. I would never open myself to a damaged front door, screaming beast with badges tracking up my house, throwing flash bangs in my baby's crib, shooting my Chihuahua claiming they were in danger, possibly killing me, the family bread winner, grinding me under their feet with hours of a brutal Reed interrogation method questioning, throwing me in jail with harden, vicious criminals, requiring me to pay a lawyer to get me out, and afterward have the feds confiscate my bank account so that I couldn't keep my lawyer. Governments are far too dangerous everywhere to set yourself up for such a destructive trip.
but we need more friends in uncensored countries to join us
There are no uncensored countries on this planet.
What stops the chinese from seeing the pattern and then arresting people or just cracking the system.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
What if someone uses the connection to download illegal material? I'm pretty sure I don't want my computer being used for that sort of thing, even if I supposedly have an excuse.
I am a Chinese who studies China for a living, and it is becoming more and more apparent to many people, that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knows it is on its last straw of survival.
The party is facing severe and increasing systematic stress on all fronts:
1. Increasing external oppositions from all other countries in the world, forming more and more alliances and becoming more outspoken with rising strengths against China, as well as increasing anti-China sentiment from people in all other countries.
2. Increasing internal severe and massive violent social unrest and anti-CCP mutiny from people of all Chinese living places e.g. mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, Macau etc. To suppress internal dissent, the CCP every year is forced to spend even more money than on its massive military budget.
3. Fierce and unstoppable purges and mutually-destructive infighting among different factions within the party, who are imprisoning and killing each other every day. This power grab goes on under the thin guise of "anti-corruption drive" when everyone knows all officials in china are corrupted.
4. Its own economy never able to develop to higher level beyond mass skill-less manufacturing, due to complete absence of law and common morals. This is a death knock to the "growth-based legitimacy" of the CCP, which is the only thing CCP can rely on for continuing ruling power. The CCP is on its last resort of printing literally trillions of worthless renminbi to dump into the economy, causing way more long-term harm than short-term help, and when that is over there is nothing else the CCP can do to prop up the failing economy.
4. China's mass skill-less manufacturing itself is going away due to increasing costs and openly hostile and unfair business environment full of frauds and government robberies. This is worsened by the rise of robotic automatic manufacturing and 3D printing.
5. Its many suppressed fatal problems have grown too big to be contained all breaking out at the same time e.g.
- severe carcinogenic poisonous pollution everywhere in air and water and soil and their own food etc
- skyrocketing unrepayable bad debts of all kinds everywhere, its true scope unknown because all data from China are faked
- biggest housing bubble in human history, in addition to innumerous crumbling ghost cities and shoddily-built infrastructure that cannot and will not be used
- rapidly aging and gender-lopsided demographics (from one child policy, culture of "leftover women", and all Chinese families killing their own daughters so as to chase boys)
- world's no.1 wealth inequality
, with a Gini coefficient rivalling 18th century France just before the French revolution
- complete absence of soft power and cultural/social influence
- all Chinese chasing foreign-brand goods and services while ditching low-quality poisonous Chinese-brands, dashing CCP's hope to build domestic consumption economy
- corruptions and fraud throughout the whole rotten core of a system
- desperate mass exodus in all levels of Chinese society to escape the country, by all able Chinese with talents and money going elsewhere
- the law of large numbers and the "middle-income trap" all work against the "growth-based legitimacy" CCP desperately needs for its survival
Most importantly, the CCP knows that if 1.3 billion Chinese learn about basic morals, truth, fairness, human rights, rule of law, freedom, universal values etc the CCP will be toppled very quickly. Therefore its brainwashing education and propaganda machine ensure a complete lack of morals and regard for laws in all Chinese.
This results in failure in all basic aspects of human interactions with every modern Chinese, whether it is business trading / personal dealings / technoholgy development / creating innovations / human communications / scientific research / artistic expressions / teamwork collaborations / academic exchange etc.
All these festering fundamental systematic problems are getting worse and worse everyday until one day when the system can suddenly no longer bear. Think USSR in 1989.
This software requires you to have a GMail-account and it uses Google's XMPP-servers for communication. This makes it a no-go for me.