50,000 Users Test New Anti-Censorship Tool TapDance (www.cbc.ca)

The CBC reports: What if circumventing censorship didn't rely on some app or service provider that would eventually get blocked but was built into the very core of the internet itself? What if the routers and servers that underpin the internet -- infrastructure so important that it would be impractical to block -- could also double as one big anti-censorship tool...? After six years in development, three research groups have joined forces to conduct real-world tests.
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week, Professor Eric Wustrow, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, presented An ISP-Scale Deployment of TapDance at the USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet. TapDance is an anti-censorship, circumvention application based on "refraction networking" (formerly known as "decoy routing") that has been the subject of academic research for several years. Now, with integration with Psiphon, 50,000 users, a deployment that spans two ISPs, and an open source release, it seems to have graduated to the real world.
"In the long run, we absolutely do want to see refraction networking deployed at as many ISPs that are as deep in the network as possible," one of the paper's authors told the CBC. "We would love to be so deeply embedded in the core of the network that to block this tool of free communication would be cost-prohibitive for censors."

Comments

Not A Moment Too Soon

[Crashmarik]

With Google, Facebook, Twitter and Cloudfare all deciding they get to be the worlds nannies this may just what the doctor ordered.

Re:Not A Moment Too Soon

[JaredOfEuropa]

"First they came for the Nazis...". If a couple of entities get to decide what speech is acceptable and what isn't, and can effectively keep "undesirable" speech from reaching the public, then who is to say who's next? If the nazis don't have freedom of speech, we don't have it either, even if it feels good to be rid of them and we ourselves don't yet have to feel limited in what we say. Just wait.

Re:Not A Moment Too Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you want to see this in action, you just needed to see the anti-First Amendment rioters in Boston yesterday. They prevented people from holding a rally in support of the First Amendment and required something like 500 riot police in order to contain. All because they decided that anyone who supports free speech is by definition a Nazi.

You might not like what they say, but it is absolutely vital to a healthy society that they be allowed to say it. Otherwise, things like the violence in Charlottesville and Boston will continue.

Re:Not A Moment Too Soon

[PopeRatzo]

If the nazis don't have freedom of speech, we don't have it either,

That's not even close to true. Nazis don't have freedom of speech in Germany, haven't had it for over half a century, but you still hear loud political discourse from all over the ideological spectrum. Nobody was "next".

Slippery slope arguments are for dopes. Don't fall into that trap. Free speech isn't a suicide pact. Societies, like any natural organic system, has the right to reject cancer, harmful bacteria or viruses.

Re: Not A Moment Too Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong. They literally are arresting people now who blaspheme against Islam, under the same anti-Nazi laws. The slope is real.

I know that you feel really good about all of this, but you of all people should fight for the right to say incredibly stupid and ignorant shit, because that's what you do constantly.

Re: Not A Moment Too Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law#Germany

You lose. Now shut the fuck up, Nazi.

Re:Not A Moment Too Soon

[hsthompson69]

Yeah, but something doesn't smell right - if friendly ISPs can recognize this protocol and aid and abet the bypassing of firewalls, then censoring entities can *also* recognize this protocol.

Where's the method for preventing interception of the initial handshake?

Re:Not A Moment Too Soon

[PopeRatzo]

Though please please please, tell me how this comedian was a Nazi.

He wasn't a Nazi and his freedom of speech was not curtailed and he was not prosecuted. Merkel said the prosecution could move forward, but it never did. And all this happened after his poem was published and distributed widely. And the law was changed.

Go back and read the article more carefully. And remember, free speech does not mean consequence-free speech. You can still be dragged into court for libel or slander. If you cry "fire" in a theater, you can be prosecuted. Even right here in freedom-loving Texas, you can be prosecuted for "fighting words", defined as:

1. Use “abusive, indecent, profane, or vulgar language,” of the kind likely to provoke a physical altercation.

You think flying a Nazi flag or telling people that you're going to put them in ovens or promoting the Klan in a majority black community might fit that definition? Of course it does. Free speech does not give you the right to say whatever kind of shit you want without consequences. It didn't in 1789 and it doesn't now.

Re: Not A Moment Too Soon

[JaredOfEuropa]

This happened in the Netherlands. A case was made against a cartoonist who made fun of Islam, descendants of slaves on a guilt trip, politics in general, that sort of thing. Hate speech? Not at all a clear cut case, nevertheless an indictment was made and 9 heavily armed policemen broke into his flat in the middle of the night to grab him and his laptop. In the end all charges were dropped, but the guy got the message and stopped making cartoons. Mission accomplished, one undesirable voice silenced.

This sort of thing shouldn't be possible in a society that takes free speech seriously. And that starts with not having vague delimitations of that freedom. In Europe, critique of Islam is increasingly seen as "hate speech". In the USA, you don't have to wave a swastika around to be branded a nazi, it is enough to defend a statue of a confederate general. Or maybe a trump bumper sticker is sufficient these days. Look at what happened on some social media sites in the wake of events in Charlottesville: suddenly all of alt-right (whatever the hell that is) is branded undesirable.

U.S. Citizens right to speak

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: It's what I believe in. No matter who you are/what your views are you have the right to speak (especially if you back it w/ fact. Not just "relative truths" but absolute hard fact). It's up to others to listen (or not) but if "a truncheon is used in lieu of conversation" we have a problem.

APK

P.S.=> A truly VERY serious problem that subverts 1 of this nation's fundamental values & rights... apk