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4th November
2009
   Citizen Lab...

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Monitoring and Circumventing world internet blockers

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Citizen Lab logoA basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. We are doing free expression forensics, says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab.

Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and companies that restrict what we see and hear on the Internet. They are also trying to help online journalists and bloggers slip the shackles of censorship and surveillance. Deibert is a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project of the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. ONI tracks the blocking and filtering of the Internet around the globe.

We are testing in 71 countries, says Deibert. We are testing all the time. We are the technical hub of ONI.

We started out in 2002 with China, said Jillian York, project coordinator for Berkman. The work evolved, and then with Cuba we cracked it. However, as Citizen Lab and Berkman gained expertise and resources so did the censors they battled.

We are now onto third-generation controls, York said of Internet censorship. The first generation was simple filtering, IP blocking in China, for example. The second generation was surveillance, which ranged from placing spies or closed-circuit cameras in Internet cafés to installing tracking software on computers themselves. The third generation controls combine all the above. We see it in China, Syria, and Burma. It's a very broad approach, York laments.

ONI's research and public awareness-raising provides just one weapon in the increasingly sophisticated armory that bloggers need to deploy against government encroachment. Some free-speech campaigners engage across a wide battlefront, taking on authorities in Tunisia or Pakistan, for example, to keep blogging and video platforms open. Others, like Deibert, devise tools for an individual user to tunnel beneath a firewall or slip past a digital spy undetected. He helped develop Psiphon, a free, open source application that channels data through a network of proxies to circumvent censorship. Anyone can use it. It's fast and there's nothing to download onto your computer for the Internet police to find, said Deibert.

It's a game of digital cat-and-mouse with authorities hunting down circumvention nodes, and Psiphon switching to an alternate as soon as a node is compromised. Citizen Lab launched Psiphon in December 2006 but did not have the resources to develop it further. So in May this year, Deibert and another ONI founder, Rafal Rohozinski, spun it off as a commercial enterprise. It is still free to users but charges companies to deliver their blocked content. Clients so far include the BBC and the U.S. government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors. Social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a boon to Psiphon and other circumvention tools like Tor, spreading node connection information among bloggers and journalists. This was evident during the media crackdown in Iran that followed the disputed June presidential elections, when Twitter proved difficult to shut down.

 

2nd October
2009
 Update:  Art and Law Cannot be Reconciled...

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Chinese internet censors block most of the Tor nework

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 full story: Great Firewall of China...All pervading Chinese internet censorship

Core OnionChinese authorities has begun blocking the intermediate nodes and servers, directory services on the basis of the Tor anonymizing their IP addresses.

In the columns of Tor's blog can be read that the great firewall (GFW) is blocking communication with about 80% of the Tor node. Author of note also admitted that it was expected this turn of events.

Already in the middle of last year, China blocked Tor website. Therefore, the operator of the website and its creators tried to be the protection of the new Tor servers, to prevent the Chinese authorities to get into the list of public nodes - the intention is apparently failed.

Although the establishment of an anonymous connection is still possible using the remaining 20% of the nodes, but such an operation takes a long time. Author of this blog entry advises users that you run a Tor private goals (so-called bridge relays) if they want to help Chinese colleagues. This kind of goals do not appear on public lists, and thus difficult to find and block.

 

14th August
2009
   Feed Over Email...



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US Government working on news feeds via email to circumvent web filters

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The U.S. government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet.

The feed over email (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system.

The news feeds are sent through email accounts including those operated by Google Inc, Microsoft Corp's Hotmail and Yahoo Inc.

We have people testing it in China and Iran, said Berman, whose agency runs Voice of America. He provided few details on the new system, which is in the early stages of testing. He said some secrecy was important to avoid detection by the two governments.

 

24th May
2009
   Out of the Frying Pan...
 
Blocked website workaround that only works for approved sites

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Al Kasir logoNew software aiming to circumvent web censorship in the Middle East and beyond was recently launched at a summit on blogging in Cairo. The tool "Al-Kasir" - meaning "the circumventer" in Arabic, is now available for public use in its first test version.

Developer Walid Al-Saqaf, a Sweden-based Yemeni, said he is using the device to work around government web censorship.

The tool also performs periodic checks on censored sites to track whether they remain constantly blocked or if the filtering is lifted at times. Meanwhile, users of the program can report information about filtering and blocking in their respective countries.

While primarily intended for use in Arab countries like Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen where web censorship is widely imposed, Al-Kasir can be used in any country.

Al-Saqaf explained the process of using the tool to access blocked websites.

When you open the program, you will get information about your ISP, country, etc. If someone using the same ISP as you had already reported through Al-Kasir about a blocked website and that website got approved (by the moderators), then it will be accessible by you. If not, then you could report a blocked website and then it will be moderated and if approved, it will be accessible by you as well as everyone else using Al-Kasir and accessing the Internet through your ISP.

Al-Saqaf told MENASSAT that the program only circumvents human-moderated websites that have been blocked by governments due to political or informational reasons: In other words, the program allows access to human rights and activist websites, political websites, discussion groups, and social groups. It was a tough decision to make but it was necessary because otherwise, the bandwidth and the legal constraints would be costly.

 

13th March
2009
   Anonymous Blogging with Wordpress and Tor...
 
Guide from Global Voices Advocacy

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Global Voices logoGlobal Voices Advocacy announce that the third update to the Anonymous Blogging guide with Wordpress & Tor is now available online!

The guide outlines several methods of protecting one’s identity in order to avoid retaliation and can considerably reduce the risks that a blogger’s identity will be linked to his or her online writings through technical means.

In order to provide you with the most up to date information on how to blog anonymously, the guide has been updated once again so that all the tips are compatible with Tor’s recent updates.

This update introduces the Tor Browser Bundle, an open source version of a portable browser developed by Tor Project, that lets you use Tor with zero install. Tor Browser is a great pre-configured Tor bundle with self contained Mozilla Firefox browser for USB drives or any other portable media (SD Card, Hard Drives, Compact Flash Card).

If you’re going to pursue your blogging activities primarily from shared computers (like cybercafe computers) or if you’re unable to install software on a computer, please follow the steps on how to run Tor Browser Bundle without needing to install any software.

The update includes tips on how to acquire the Tor bundle if your internet connection blocks access to the Tor website. It also includes tips on what to do if you encounter problems connecting to the Tor network.

Please link to it, download it and help disseminate this important information. Feel free as well to help us translating the guide into your own language.

 

27th February
2009
   Is This Site Blocked?...
 
Herdict Web lets users keep track of blocked sites

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Herdict logoHerdict Web crowd sources reports from users to discover, in real time, what users around the world are experiencing in terms of internet website blocking.

Herdict is a named coned from joining ‘herd’ and ‘verdict.’

Using Herdict Web, anyone anywhere can report websites as accessible or inaccessible. Herdict Web aggregates reports in real time, permitting participants to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem, giving them a better sense of potential reasons for why a site is inaccessible. Trends can be viewed over time, by site and by country.

Herdict Web is the brainchild of Professor Jonathan Zittrain (The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It) and is part of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

 

23rd February
2009
   Searching for Privacy...
 
Proxy strips out id sent to Google and deletes records after 2 days

Permalink

scroogle logoScroogle is a web service that disguises the Internet address of users who want to run Google searches anonymously.

Scroogle also gives users the option of having all communication between their computer and the search page be SSL encrypted.

The tool was created by Google critic Daniel Brandt who was concerned about Google collecting information on users, and set up Scroogle to filter searches through his servers before going to Google: I don’t save the search terms and I delete all my logs every week. So even if the feds come around and ask me questions I don’t know the answer because I don’t have the logs any more. I don’t associate the search terms with the user’s address at all, so I can’t even match those up.

Traffic has doubled every year and as of December 2007, Scroogle had passed 100,000 visitors a day.

Besides anonymous searches, the tool allows users to perform Google searches without receiving Google advertisements. There is support for 28 languages, and the tool is available as a browser plug-in.

 

18th December
2008
   Tor2Web...
 
Opening up anonymously hosted Tor sites to the wider world

Permalink

Core OnionRegular web users can now access anonymously-published websites that are masked by Tor's hidden services thanks to a new tool called tor2web.com.

The tool, created by former Reddit developer Aaron Swartz and WikiScanner creator Virgil Griffith, enables people to view these hidden websites (designated by the .onion domain suffix) without diving into Tor, which can be a pain for casual surfers.

The creators hope that the existence of tor2web will encourage more organizations to publish content anonymously through Tor, now that such a heavy access restriction has been lifted.

The Tor project is most famous as a tool that allows Internet surfers to access websites privately and anonymously from within the onion router. Put simply, it works by passing your requests to another node that acts as a middleman between you and a website, which in turn passes the request onto other nodes, and so on. Every step is encrypted except for the final exit node to the content server connection, and the network is run almost entirely by volunteers.

Tor's hidden services allow web publishers to publish content anonymously so that law enforcement (and general snoopers) can't detect where the information is coming from. The only problem with publishing websites under Tor is that they can only be accessed from within Tor, meaning that the available audience at any given time is infinitesimally small compared to the overall Internet-using population. This is the problem that Swartz and Griffith hope to address with tor2web.

 

13th October
2008
   Global Pass...
 
Enabling web browsing and other applications to circumvent blocks

Permalink

Global Pass logoFree application GPass helps you bypass censorship and blocked web sites by tunneling network traffic through encrypted proxy servers.

After you install GPass, launching an application using the proxy is as simple as double-clicking the app from inside the GPass interface.

 GPass will launch the program with all the necessary tunneling in place.

GPass is easy to use, and requires no setup on your part unless you want to do a little tweaking. It's also impressively fast for a proxy—it appears to choose the proxy server with the quickest response rate when it starts up.

We've mentioned other tools for accessing blocked web sites with previously mentioned Hotspot Shield—whether they're blocked by location or by a corporate filter—but GPass looks like an excellent ad-free alternative. If you give it a try, let's hear how it worked for you in the comments.

 

22nd September
2008
 Offsite:  The Advocacy 2.0 Guide...
 
Tools for digital activists

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Advocacy 2.0 logoThe Advocacy 2.0 Guide (Tools for Digital Advocacy) describes some of the best techniques and tools that digital activists - and others who wish to learn from this subject - can use as part of their online advocacy campaigns. While our previous guide (Blog for a Cause!) focused on the effective use of blogs as an advocacy tool, this guide will explore creative uses of other web 2.0 applications.

Our goal is to:

  • Aggregate web 2.0 tools for advocacy
  • Provide detailed instructions on how to use them
  • Highlight successful experiences of web 2.0 activism by local digital activists around the world..
  • Inspire other activists to adopt these strategies in ways that serve their specific goals and needs.

From “Geo-bombing” to “multi-blogging” and Twitter to “mash-ups”, we explore the field of digital advocacy, helping activists reach out to audiences they may never have reached before.

We are releasing the first from a series of Advocacy 2.0 Guides that will show you how to use the web 2.0 as an advocacy tool:

...Read full article

 

27th August
2008
   Building Blocks...
 
Bypassing the Great Firewall of China

Permalink

Great Firewall of ChinaInternet users trapped behind China's so-called "Great Firewall" are finding ways to scale the wall, but experts say software programs that allow unfettered access to the web are often cumbersome and difficult to find from inside the country.

China's efforts to restrict access to the Internet have faced renewed criticism during the Beijing Olympics, especially after international journalists discovered their access was still affected despite earlier promises by Olympic officials.

We face so many shared global problems right now, you need some kind of global communications medium through which citizens around the world can communicate and share ideas, says Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.

Two years ago the Citizen Lab released a program called Psiphon, which allows users in countries such as China and Iran to circumvent their governments' Internet censorship. The free software uses computers outside the censoring country - known as proxies - to fetch web pages and send them back over encrypted connections.

Groups like the Citizen Lab and Reporters Without Borders have produced how-to guides for getting around Internet censorship.

Some techniques are relatively simple but not very effective, such as using saved or cached pages on search engines. Other methods are better but more complex, such as "tunnelling" software that hides content inside other forms of Internet traffic.

Another popular option is a browser called Tor, which also uses proxies.

A group of German programmers have created what they call the Freedom Stick, a self-contained version of the Tor browser on a USB drive that the group distributed to German journalists heading to the Beijing Games.

And with a little money and technical know-how, just about anyone can pay for what's called a virtual private network located outside the country, which essentially uses the same technique as Tor and Psiphon.

There are many options for Internet users in China and other countries to get around web censorship, says German IT security expert Sebastian Wolfgarten, but access to the software and information about how to use it are often blocked themselves.

Wolfgarten rented a server in China two years ago so he could browse from a China-based connection and examine how exactly the Great Firewall works: It's really pervasive, and from a technical point of view it's very well done.

He says the filtering works on multiple levels, including: restricting sites based on their web addresses and domain names; using technology to cut off and freeze connections accessing banned content; and requiring search engines to tailor results if they want to operate in China.

Suggested website for further reading

 

16th March
2008
   Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents...
 
An update from Reporters Without Borders

Permalink

Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-DissidentsReporters Without Borders is making a new version of its Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents available to bloggers.

The handbook offers practical advice and techniques on how to create a blog, make entries and get the blog to show up in search engine results. It gives clear explanations about blogging for all those whose online freedom of expression is subject to restrictions, and it shows how to sidestep the censorship measures imposed by certain governments, with a practical example that demonstrates the use of the censorship circumvention software Tor.

The leaders of authoritarian countries are becoming more and suspicious of bloggers, these men and women who, although not journalists, publish news and information online and who, worse still, often tackle subjects the so-called traditional media dare not cover. In some countries, blogs have become an important new source of news. It is to protect this source that Reporters Without Borders has updated its handbook.

 

Getting To Blocked Websites Not As Hard As You Think

A particular target of governments' efforts to control what their citizens read is the Internet -- and blocking websites has become common practice in some countries.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent Heather Maher asked Bruce Scheier, chief technical officer of computer-security company BT Counterpane, about how such blocking works and what can be done to counter it.

From Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
See original article

See also Everyone’s Guide to Bypassing Internet Censorship [pdf]

July 2007

Copyright (c) 2007. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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RFE/RL: How exactly does someone -- a government official -- block a website?

Bruce Schneier: You would put rules in the firewall. If you're a country, there are a number of [Internet Service Providers (ISPs)] that service that country. And all of those ISPs will be simply told to block those URLs. So if you type in those URLs, they would not go through and you'd get nothing. It's not hard to do.

RFE/RL: Okay, I'm sitting at my computer in my flat in Dushanbe or Minsk and I can't access an article because it's been blocked. What do I do?

Scheier: Well, that's the trick. There are many things you can do. These blocks are really just for the people who aren't sophisticated enough to get around them. There are proxy servers you could go to, which basically is someone that will go to that [banned] website for you, so it doesn't look like you're going there. There are anonymizers you can use, which will hide the website you're going to so that the ISPs can't see them, and can't block them. You just type "web-anonymizer tools" -- or "web proxies" into Google and you'll find all sorts of tools to bypass any of these filters.

RFE/RL: If you search for "web proxies," you get a page of results with a list of numerical addresses to choose from, with their location in the world listed next to them. Then what?

Scheier: It depends how they work. Some of them are so easy to use: all they do is get the website they want, and there's no weird user interface. Some require a little bit of configuring, but basically they're ways to get around these firewalls.

RFE/RL: You often hear that a banned website is available as a "mirror site." What exactly does that mean?

Scheier: A mirror site is simply a site that has the same information as the site it's mirroring. A lot of times this is done for efficiency, so a [mirror] site might be a big news site that gets a lot of traffic, and it will just get overloaded. So they might have a mirror site, which has the same information, which just allows more people to access it. Now sometimes the mirror site has the same URL and you don't even know you're using it. Sometimes the mirror site has a different URL, and they're keeping that information [there] because they're afraid they might take it down, or it might get censored.

RFE/RL: Is a mirror site ever put up by a content provider who knows that their original site has been banned by a government, for example? If a website is banned in Belarus, would its creators, for instance, establish a mirror site with a Ukrainian server that isn't banned by Belarus?

Scheier: Sure, that's very common. Especially if you're a politically minded organization and you want your information out there. If you know your URL is being blocked, for whatever reason, you might establish a mirror [site] somewhere else to get around that blocking.

RFE/RL: Some of the governments that regularly censor the Internet are not what you would call very modern. So how did they figure out so quickly how to censor the Internet?

Scheier: There are easy tools you can buy for censorship. There's not a lot of figuring out; there's not a lot of fancy stuff here. These are commercial, off-the-shelf tools. Any ISP can block pieces of the Internet. They might do it for reasons of efficiency; they might not want to carry it [the entire Internet]. If the government says to its ISPs, "Block these URLs," they can block them. And it isn't hard; it isn't subtle. It's easy.

RFE/RL: Say someone wants to bypass their in-country ISP and try to gain access to blocked websites by using an ISP outside their borders. Can they go to a technical-support chat room on the Internet to ask questions and get advice on how to configure their web browser?

Scheier: Honestly, it's way easier than that. Just type "anonymizer tools" into Google and you'll get how-to's. You'll get tutorials; you'll get tools. There's no reason to go into chat rooms and talk to geeks who might speak in a language that's way too [complicated] for you. It's easy to do. It isn't even hard.

RFE/RL: You work for a company that helps people both block and unblock websites. Is the trend moving toward more Internet censorship or less?

Scheier: It's an oft-repeated phrase that the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it. The odds are in favor of the information. Yes, there are a lot of attempts to block - the "Great Firewall" of China is a prime example. And some of these anonymizers are [even] blocked. And it's a constant arms race.

But really, the battle is in favor of information. Because information wants to be out there, wants to be disseminated, and blocking it is a never-ending battle. So, yes, it can be hard. Some of these tools can be blocked. I'm sure some of these tools we're talking about are illegal in some of these countries. But information will get out there.

 

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