Show HN: A different approach against online censorship | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A different approach against online censorship

unblock.us.org

51 pointsDonPellegrino17 comments

I'd like some feedback about the idea and implementation. If you've got any ideas to make it better, I'd love to hear them.

The code is also on Github: https://github.com/SGrondin/unblock.us.org

If this is meant primarily against Turkish censorship (assumption motivated by the Turkish translation on the site) you should know that Turkey bans more than 40 thousand websites. Twitter and YouTube have just been two recent high profile bans.

Here's a full list:

http://engelliweb.com/

The site is not a government resource. It's being run by volunteers who track the bans. I'm sure they'd be happy to send you the data in the format of your choice if you contact them.

http://engelliweb.com/iletisim/

That's fantastic, thank you very much!

Impressive idea!

So you say that you ever aspire to have enough bandwidth to tunnel youtube for a whole country? That's quite a pledge. Or you trust that only a small enough part of the population will ever use the service?

It sounds great. Keep up the good work.

Tunneling the Youtube webpage and flash player is tiny, tunneling the video itself isn't. The video is loaded from googlevideo.com and the Turkish government forgot to block that one...

But yeah, if it becomes popular enough I'm ready to look into ways to pay for more servers and a whole lot more bandwidth.

Even a VPN does not work in China, how can this one help? refer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN_blocking

According to my traffic stats, there's a few people in China using it and tunneling "stuff" over it. I don't know which sites, but I know that it's being used there successfully.

Won't countries that censor the web just sensor the DNS requests?

VPN traffic and VPN providers aren't even seriously targeted in pretty much every oppressive country I can think of. The authorities know that there'll always be a way to pass data through short of scealing the whole country off the internet. The goal is to lower the entrance cost by making a service that combines the speed of VPNs with the no cost aspect of TOR.

If it ever gets enough traction to end up on some government's radar (and keep in mind that VPNs and TOR are hugely popular and mostly left alone), then I'm hoping there'll be enough people running their own servers with the code I open sourced to mitigate that.

When I was in China my university VPN stopt working after a while. Don't know what happened, but they seemed to have blocked it.

China use DPI(Deep packet inspection) to detect vpn and block it. refer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN_blocking

VPN traffic is targeted in countries like China. I don't know the technical details of it but proper VPN providers need to propose several IPs in various countries, and frequently change them if they want their service to keep running.

I never really understood how they can block VPNs considering the traffic is encrypted but they do.

what if "they" just block DNS access to "176.58.120.112" ? (this needs to get very low-profile to work under the radar)

Read my response to willvarfar. If you have ideas and suggestions on how to deal with that problem, I'm all ears!

I think, if you are against a powerful opponent, it would need something like controlling the hardware infrastructure..

One idea that is organic and can work with simple Wifi routers is something like mesh networks.. so the people with wifi routers next to limits of a free neighbor country would have access to routers with internet..

Of course, to build such a network, some sort of incentive are needed.. maybe creating some sort of bitcoin for mesh networks would do it?

This would also help in war times.. anyway.. at least you are giving something back, a starting point.. maybe this will end in a org for you.. and you will have the means to achieve more?

Congrats for the attitude.. it may mean a lot for people who really need it

I think http://www.blockaid.me/ has been doing this, too, and I believe there were others.

Some other approaches I've seen are based on Namecoin somehow. DNSChain for example uses a custom "regular" DNS server to resolve .bit domains. So in works in a similar way, but in a much more distributed way, I think, because you can also create your own DNSChain server, and then be able to visit all of those .bit domains, once you use a DNSChain server's IP.

https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain

Then there's the FreeSpeechMe Firefox plugin that when installed also allows you to view .bit domains.

http://www.freespeechme.org/

My favorite right now is DNSChain, because it's federated, but ideally, both Firefox and Chrome would have support for .bit domains built-in. Then as long as you'd be using these browsers, nobody could censor those .bit domains.

I doubt they will do it anytime soon, though, so until then the only browser that will do something like this seems to be the upcoming browser from ThePirateBay, which is meant primarily to save TPB from global censorship, but any website that's compatible with their protocol will work within their browser, and while it won't get the customer base of Chrome or Firefox, it should be a few million strong.

http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat-cen...

Some more info on what DNSChain does (it goes a bit beyond access to .bit, it also provides a RESTful and securely authenticated HTTP API to the blockchain, currently reading but writing is possible):

+ *.dns metaTLD (blockchain agnostic): http://blog.okturtles.com/2014/02/introducing-the-dotdns-met...

+ whitepaper that gives overview: http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf

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