How Russians are outsmarting Internet censorship | Hacker News Reader

How Russians are outsmarting Internet censorship

advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org

69 pointsjdmitch24 comments

Opera web browser is quite popular in Russia and it has "turbo" mode supposed to compress the data using Opera proxies, so just turning it on is enough to have an IP outside of Russia.

But the problem is not technical, it's a social problem that must be resolved with public means. Any technical "solution" is just a workaround that potentially makes the situation even worse.

> But the problem is not technical, it's a social problem that must be resolved with public means. Any technical "solution" is just a workaround that potentially makes the situation even worse.

I am very happy to see that other users are sharing the same views as mine on the subject. I also believe in public means for resolving privacy issues not technical (which as you said, could turn the situation even worst).

Why are the two mutually exclusive? You can set up redirecting proxies and mirrors and simultaneously take to the streets to bring down the evil dictator.

Yes, you're right. And the example of active defense in the article is quite social too: put pressure upon the government to get them understand that harm to the internet is harm to themselves.

To add to 'making the situation worse'..

One thing that I suspect China finds to their great benefit is using technical loopholes of all sorts as a steam valve. One famous and official example is "Special Economic Zones" if some centralization policy is really hindering business so badly, just take your business to Hong Kong or Xiamen. This relieves the pressure from concentrated pain points.

In the censorship context a Chinese person who wants to access Facebook or some censored magazine can get around the firewall. It's easy enough that it's not a big deal and not some serious dissident act. To most expats, intellectual or student reformist, internet censorship in China is a minor inconvenience. It doesn't prevent businesses in China from doing business effectively. To the average Chinese Internet user, censorship invisibly impacts the headlines they see shaping their worldview a little towards the pro-CCP side. They essentially get a moderate win at minimum cost. Locking down the internet more thoroughly would help them control information more fully, but the cost would be much higher.

Another commonly occurring example is black markets for currency which emerge in every country with a failing currency policy (surpassingly common). Without those black markets failing policies hit a wall much sooner by completely shutting down tourism, international trade, etc. If you tolerate traffic light money changers, you can go on with your stupid policy of currency control.

Without these technical steam valves Russia might seem less livable to certain people who are especially agitated by censorship. Concentrated social or economic interest is a very important component of political change. 5% of the population who make something their no. 1 issue is much more powerful that 50% with a slight preference.

That's a very astute observation. As that Dead Kennedys album title says, Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death. Most people most of the time won't care enough to do anything. You only need to redirect the energy of the 5% who care enough to do more than complain.

I mostly agree with your point, I just want to remark that Russians are very keen at circumventing what they consider to be stupid (alas, this includes laws and rules). I suspect that an average Chinese respects the authority, whereas in Russia it's a kind of a national sport to cheat the system. We can hope that such system of safety "valves" will be unstable in Russia.

They could use Browserling to access censored sites:

For example:

https://browserling.com/queue?uri=http://censored.com&browse...

This will open httx://censored.com in Firefox/28.0 within your Browser. (We run the browsers on Windows servers and stream the desktop to your browser.)

Honestly, not a new concept, but an effective implementation non the less.

I remember a few students at my old school creating sites that would be picked up on the schools filter (which would look for words like porn/games/curse words) and link a lot of the schools resources.

The IT department being rather inept, saw the school website being blocked, and took down the filter until they could find out why.

Surely this relies on the successful identification of the regulators? While novel, it doesn't fundamentally solve the grand game of cat and mouse, just moves it to the realm of ip addresses and browser sniffing. Or am I misinterpreting the article?

At first the ISPs were blocking the sites by their IP addresses. But it is easy to change the IP address, so now they are required to constantly follow the changes of A records of the blocked domain and block all the new IP addresses as well. This is where the exploit comes. If your site is blocked you can add kremlin.ru's IP address to your domain's A records and the kremlin.ru will be automatically blocked.

a pessimist could say this drives the gov even faster into a whitelist-only internet

Yes, I am pretty pessimistic. It's getting worse. Today Rostelecom again completely blocked Livejournal, this time without any legal reason, because Navalny's blog was already blocked by Livejournal for Russian IPs with error 451. They already talk about cracking down on Opera Turbo, the easiest block evasion mechanism, soon DPI will be deployed, etc.

Fortunately, the internet is large and adds a huge number of new domains daily such that whitelisting is so disruptive to everyday browsing it's rather difficult (e.g. Amazon cloud front CDN makes new domains with one click and you couldn't block the base domain with breaking several major websites)

How do Americans outsmart NSA spying? Oh wait,they cant.

Think..the obvious one is become an IT contractor for NSA or CIA...:)

They can. Use strong point-to-point encryption. Of course, doing this over email/IM requires special setup that can be pretty clunky and certain habits which require discipline to maintain, and you can not rely on any third-party providers, but in principle that is possible. It's just inconvenient.

Of course the NSA can just issue a NSL to the certificate authority and then all the encryption in the world won't help. Of course you can sign your own keys but then exchanging them becomes difficult.

This assumes you use certificates generated by the third party. However this is not at all a requirement for cryptography, this is only a convenience to set up an easy key exchange. You can set it up in the hard way - i.e. meeting in pubs and exchange USB drives with keys, for example. May be more interesting but less convenient. That's exactly what I am saying - you can have stronger privacy, but you'll have to pay for it with convenience.

Not relevant here. The NSA isn't blocking you from reading political websites.

Can anyone give me some explication of where this situation is coming from?

Putin's last name is Vladimir which means literally "rule the world". His fear of any kind of opposition.

ITYM first name. And patronym. But his last name is "Putin" ;)

Wikipedia suggests a different etymology and meaning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_(name)#Etymology

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