The Technology Lag of Internet Censors

It’s quite reassuring in some ways that the technology that those who wish to censor and filter access the internet have at their disposal is often someway behind. Wiretappers, content filters are far from cutting edge but nevertheless they are unfortunately getting much more sophisticated.

If any one has ever worked with or worse had to configure these content filtering devices, you’ll realise the huge amount of work that is involved even maintaining them. The false positives and perpetual complaints you get when even a minimal level of filtering is applied is extremely surprising. Sure you can block words or URLs or patterns but you’ll always end up blocking more than you intended.

Take for example using DNS modifications to restrict access to banned web pages, most of the Scandinavian countries do this routinely. But it’s a pretty hopeless way of restricting content in my opinion. Firstly all you have to do is point your client at a different DNS server and you’ve bypassed it, secondly reason is that if you use the DNS method to say block a bad page on Youtube that you don’t like, you’ll have also blocked the entire domain Youtube!

But my funniest internet censoring attempt has to go to the Republic of Yemen, they’ve used a pretty decent content filter called Websense, they have control of the two ISPs so they should be able to control pretty much everything. Yemen of course seeks to block loads of stuff but fortunately they’ve done it rather badly. You see they didn’t buy enough licenses for Websense, in fact no where near enough. So if you’re unlucky you’ll be subject to a backward, restrictive internet policy but when enough Yemen users are online you’ll get unrestricted access as when the user amount is exceeded then no filtering happens.

You have to smile 🙂

How to keep your Internet Surfing Privacy

Everyone’s getting more concerned with internet privacy and with good reason. A large part of our lives is conducted online, we shop, bank, socialise even date on line in some cases. All that involves information, personal information being transmitted online.

So what’s involved in keeping your internet surfing privacy in tact ? We transmit so much personal information across the internet that it is not surprising that online theft is growing at an alarming rate. The simple fact is that the internets success has been built on a very simple protocol called HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol) which is fast, efficient but unfortunately transmits everything into clear text. Anyone who intercepts this data can pick up an awful lot of information about each and everyone of us.

So how do I get some Internet surfing privacy?

Well there’s a few key areas but these are the most important.

Information Stored on your PC
Your browsing is tracked and monitored and personalised by a long collection of techniques of which the most common are cookies. These little text files are stored on your computer to record account details, preferences and personal details. To be fair they are used primarily to improve your browsing experiences mostly but they still represent an extensive record of your browsing. Fortunately if you are concerned with Internet surfing privacy you can easily delete these records. Most browsers allow you ‘delete browsing history’ which will delete all the cookies, temporary internet files and images stored on your PC. Google Chrome even has an incognito mode which does this automatically.

Hiding your IP address
Every web site you visit has logs, and they will record your IP address in these logs. Everything you do, download andlook at is recorded in these logs which can be tracked down to a specific computer via the IP address. This is also quite easy to fix and it requires using an anonymous proxy server. This server sits in between the web site you visit and hides your IP address so that it canot be recorded. There are anonymous proxy servers all over the internet but be careful, a large proportion of them are hacked virus infested servers which actually steal your information anyway. These are much, much worse than just getting your IP address logged in a web server,never use an anonymous proxy server that you don’t know about as it will be the worse move possible for your internet surfing privacy.

Encrypting your Web Browsing

The most important in my opinion for real privacy in your surfing. All your browsing is conducted in clear text as mentioned above, in fact the most detailed and comprehensive list of all your online activities exists in your ISP. This is why governments across Europe and the world ensure that they have access to these logs and ISPs are legally bound to store them for up to two years. However if you encrypt your connection then these and all other logs of your browsing are unreadable. How do you achieve this? Well there are two main methods using an encrypted SSH tunnel or an SSL Tunnel. This creates an encrypted session which can protect your surfing privacy completely.

This is just a starter but probably the most important thing is to be aware, think of the web sites you are visiting, realise that you could be monitored or intercepted. Be very wary of entering any personal details onto any suspect sites sites. Here’s a useful video about hiding your location (IP address)

Blocked Websites Everywhere you Surf

You might not believe it but censorship is rife on the internet. I’m not talking about illegal and criminal stuff either. The social sites like wordpress, youtube, facebook and any where else that people can speak their mind and voice their opinions. Of course if you live in a country who likes to control how people think, then they will always have a problem with sites like these.

You might be surprised about how many web sites have been blocked across the world – check out the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship. It’s definitely gathering pace as the internet becomes the medium of choice for citizens all over the world.

It’s kinda sad that we can’t even be treated equally online, where as most democratic countries allow pretty much unrestricted access to the internet apart from obviously criminal sites when they can block them. In places like China, Thailand, Burma and the like you’ll have thousands of websites blocked. No facebook, youtube for those guys, increasingly the countries are taking charge of their ISPs and running themselves, which makes bypassing their restrictions even more difficult. Sure you can use proxies, but the open, free ones soon get blocked anyway and obviously have their own security difficulties. (as many of them are run by individuals and organisations with their own agendas!)

The Danger of Internet Proxies

I’m not sure how this happened but many people online seem to now equate, Internet Proxies with some sort of anonymity. As if the mere act of inserting a proxy into your browser connection settings covers you in some sort of cloaking device which protects your internet privacy.

Well I’m afraid it’s not exactly true. Sure proxies can help protecting your privacy, but then so can a blanket. Perhaps it’s best to think first about what a proxy server is actually doing. I’m world famous (well not actually true) for my completely crap real world analogies which make little sense but here goes…

A proxy server is no more than a middle man in your communication online, so here’s my promised analogies… Using a proxy server is the same as asking someone to deliver and receive all your postal mail.

If you pick an anonymous proxy from a list on the internet – it’s the equivalent to handing all your mail to someone you picked out on the street. Ask him to deliver all your mail and recieve all your post too (for nothing). Now you may get lucky and find someone who does just that, but then again you might also select someone who throws all your outgoing mail over a hedge, and opens all your incoming mail to steal any cheques and valuables.

It’s a pretty good parallel to an anonymous proxy on the internet, it’s pot luck you know nothing about it and you are not paying for a services so fingers crossed.

Of course you could pay for a service, which is the same as selecting perhaps a mail forwarding company who send and receive mail on your behalf. THey take care of you because you’re a customer and they want to keep you. A paid VPN service or a private proxy provide a service and they want you to remain.

The danger of internet proxies is that if you pick one run by hackers or the bad guys (and yes they do set many of these up) it’s incredibly dangerous to your privacy, it is in fact much worse than using no proxies at all. Do yourself a favour and either use a paid proxy service run properly and securely or save yourself the trouble and don’t bother with internet proxies at all.

Internet Privacy Protection – Is there a Need?

o we really need to be concerned with protecting our privacy on the internet? Are there really legions of people spying on us and watching our every move. Well hopefully this article will give you some knowledge of the issues that are really involved in priivacy protection on the internet.

So who is likely to be spying on us and why?

Well let’s be clear, internet crime is big, very big, the totals are never going to be exact as we simply don’t have a record but you’d be safe to assume it’s going to be counted in billions of dollars world wide. Many, perhaps the majority of these crimes are not listed, recorded or even noticed so an estimate is all we’re going to get.

There are many major crime syndicates who are targeting the internet. Cyber Gangs in places like Brazil, China and Eastern Europe have very sophisticated criminal networks. Stealing over the internet from you and me is immensely rewarding and relatively risk free. You can see the attraction to the criminal fraternity big rewards, safe and very low risk.

So we know that gangs will routinely target the average internet surfer, furthermore many will be extremely careful in how they steal from you but there are literally endless ways to steal your information and ultimately your money. For instance I have seen a sealed copy of windows XP which looked 100% legitimate bought from Eastern Europe, it was shrink wrapped, had a licence, manual included but it had an extra bonus. The CD contained a version of Windows XP with spyware and trojans already installed, as soon as you used this version of XP your details, accounts and passwords would be passed out to a remote site on the internet.

Just like you lock your doors to protect your possessions and home, many people do the same on the internet. I want my privacy protected because online I pay bills, order goods, do my banking and many other activities which involve my financial and personal details. Do I want these details logged on servers, routers and at my ISP – well no not really.

You see it’s not that hard to steal personal details online, it’s slightly harder to make money from them but not too difficult. It’s certainly the only way a gang of cyber criminals in Rio De Janerio will be able to steal from you without you holidaying in Brazil. If you did discover your bank account has been raided like this, what could you do? IN reality all you can do is try to get your money back from your bank or credit card provider, either way the criminal will be unlikely to pay for his crimes.

It’s certainly worth checking out how you can add another layer of protection when you surf online, proxies and VPNs are one possibility. However you should stay away from unmanaged, free proxies that you can find online, simply because they are often run by the criminals themselves in order to harvest passwords and email accounts. Try this as a useful introduction –

Bypassing Internet Censorship

It sounds strange, I mean the need to bypass Internet censorship. I mean why should we all be treated so differently on the internet? Why are the people we trust to run our countries, governments and legal systems be allowed to control what we see, say or do on the internet.

Of course I’m not talking about the plainly illegal activities, we’d all be better off if all the countries could unite to catch and jail these people. No I’m talking about matters of opinion, freedom of speech and just plain social interaction with our fellow man. Isn’t that what the internet is about?

So is there a need to bypass internet censorship?

Well yes, I believe there is, take for example a country I spend lots of time in – Turkey. A wonderful country with warm and kind people, a place you can feel safe and where there is a tangible sense of democracy. A vast secular country, a republic created by an inspirational man called Kemal Ataturk. But Internet access is not following his secular ideals, or more to the point certain elements are using weaknesses in Turkeys Internet policies to censor content and websites.

For instance, you’ll find until recently that all of wordpress self hosted blogs have been banned and blocked in Turkey. It’s true a website which contains words and expressions from millions – all blocked because a few people disagreed with some content. Same goes for Youtube although I believe this might have changed since my last visit, Turkey had recently blocked access to the whole site.

Pretty bad, huh and turkey are rightly taking some flak from this ridiculous censorship from other democratic nations.

To be fair they are trying to change this – there is an interesting article here on some of the issues – Turkish Internet Censorship – the original article from Columbia University seems to have been removed.

The simple fact is that there are very real reasons why we should bypass internet censorship. No government has the right to block free speech and open political discussion at least if it wants to be though of as a democracy.

So if you won’t to learn how to bypass the censorship on the internet, please keep reading and I’ll explain some issues and methods where you can browse the internet freely.

dotslash

So is there a need to bypass internet censorship?