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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."
But how does this help when:
1) Oppressive Regimes don't install this routers, and
2) hosting & DNS servers and CDNs cancel your service?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
"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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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
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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
I would prefer the Nazi sympathizers were made to wear clown suits, because that is what they really are, and it is how everyone sees them in public once they reveal their utterly insane beliefs.
What they are failing to recognize is that repressive governments can dictate what people can and cannot run on a server within their own borders. You can argue they can use servers outside their borders but that's just likely to cause them to completely segment their chunk of the internet.
The real-world result of this tool is going to be enabling individuals that were banned from various sites for ToS violations to continue spreading hate/spam on those sites.
It's good in concept but the reality is the $5 wrench will win.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Anti censorship tools are tools that can be used by the nazi to speak their shit and by their victims to denounce their shit. Also by people smart enough to convince people to not be nazis in first place.
How is this better than FreeNet?
https://freenetproject.org/
You don't pay very close attention do you?
http://grk.am/S1
Caution: Contents under pressure
...so this means that people like the KKK and white supremacists can finally avoid being censored?
That's good, right?
Yes.
Because if you can censor the KKK, you can censor anyone. And those that support censorship are never satisfied.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law#Germany
You lose. Now shut the fuck up, Nazi.
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?
If the KKK and Nazis just wanted to talk then they wouldn't kill people or carry rifles like hand bags. As it is, they bring violence upon themselves, or mockery. I prefer to mock the little fake-ass imitation soldiers who are so stupid they can't even tie their own fucking shoes without pictorial instructions.
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?
And yet, if you go to Germany right now, you will hear much greater diversity in political speech and ideology than you will in the US. Far left, far Right, and everything in between. Loudly spoken and debated. Anarchists, fascists, communists, every possible position on the spectrum is heard in Germany. Just don't be a Nazi. "German Law" hasn't done anything to curtail free speech. Just don't be a Nazi.
Just don't try to pretend the Holocaust didn't happen, because Germany has the fucking receipts for the Holocaust, and they will shut you down.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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:
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The First Amendment only prohibits the government from imposing limits on speech. It says nothing about private citizens.
Terrorist attack? Get real, someone was beaten up by the SWJ extremists and flipped. While of course illegal I would not call that terrorism.
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
At the behest of Muslims, UK police are tracking and arresting as terrorists immigrants who fought for Peshmerga and other anti-jihadist militias.