
How Russians are outsmarting Internet censorship - jdmitch
http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2014/03/25/how-russians-are-outsmarting-internet-censorship/
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dmytrish
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.

~~~
netcan
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.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
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.

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pkrumins
They could use Browserling to access censored sites:

For example:

[https://browserling.com/queue?uri=http://censored.com&browse...](https://browserling.com/queue?uri=http://censored.com&browser=firefox&version=28.0)

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.)

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TOMDM
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.

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lclarkmichalek
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?

~~~
slashdotaccount
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.

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eik3_de
a pessimist could say this drives the gov even faster into a whitelist-only
internet

~~~
trycatch
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.

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camus2
How do Americans outsmart NSA spying? Oh wait,they cant.

~~~
smsm42
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.

~~~
anaphor
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.

~~~
smsm42
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.

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

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

~~~
TheEzEzz
Wikipedia suggests a different etymology and meaning:

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

