Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
As described in the article, it seems like this might be ripe for abuse as a hard-to-block DDOS tool. How would that be prevented?
#DeleteChrome
The technologies are already there.
The former two need more development work, since many of the obfuscation formats for networks utilizing DPI have been fingerprinted sufficiently to kill connections/flag suspected users.
The latter, vpngate, works out of the box and has rotating IP addresses and many 'volunteer' outproxies. Unlike Tor it works with both TCP and UDP, doesn't support port forwarding (limiting p2p apps running through it to client-only modes.)
I2P supports both stream and datagram style packets, can tunnel either over the other, with the streaming mode offering a performance penalty, and only has a single http outproxy enabled by default, although it could in theory support TCP+UDP outproxying if someone wrote the socks5 support for it.
How is this better than FreeNet?
https://freenetproject.org/
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".
Germany and free speech, Germany and free speech, where have I heard this trope before? Oh right, last year where a comedian was being charged for the crime of "insulting a foreign head of state". Now to be fair they did eventually drop the charges and made moves to drop that particular crime, though the current status of that effort I do not know. Who knows, maybe the made the motion of repealing it but it "Died in committee" only for the law to be dusted off again when it is convenient.
But the question remains, why was that particular thing codified into law? What prompted the German leaders to make it illegal to criticize foreign heads of state? Was there some pressing crisis of low moral foreign dignitaries in need of a safe space in Germany? I am not sure, but the after effects remain. This is yet another example of the chilling effects that free speech restrictions can have upon "loud political discourse". While you may say there is no slippery slope, I would say that this is but one example of one. Nazi's may not have freedom of speech in Germany, but neither do political comedians.
P.S. For those Slashdotters living in Germany, I am not aware of the current status of your Lese-Majeste laws but do be aware that U.S. President Trump is also a big fan of expanding Libel laws, so unless you know for certain that the law mentioned above was repealed you may want to keep quite about him. Because he will certainly use them against you if he can.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
Correct me if Im wrong but weren't you, Americans, the ones that beat the crap out of the nazis and chest pounded over that fact for the next 60 years? And now you are getting all triggered because some wannabe nazi gets bitchlapped on the street? What the fuck happened to you America? How many RPMs do your grandparents are getting on their graves? How come you got so easily manipulable all for defending a $party that does not give a fuck about you.
Is this karma for all the presidents you planted on "banana republics" that now you are going even lower in the cognitive dissonance regard?