

Show HN: A different approach against online censorship - DonPellegrino
http://unblock.us.org/

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DonPellegrino
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](https://github.com/SGrondin/unblock.us.org)

~~~
krisoft
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.

~~~
DonPellegrino
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.

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

~~~
DonPellegrino
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.

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

~~~
DonPellegrino
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.

~~~
Tosh108
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.

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

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

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

~~~
oscargrouch
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

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higherpurpose
I think [http://www.blockaid.me/](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](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/](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...](http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat-censorship-
for-good-140105/)

~~~
itistoday2
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...](http://blog.okturtles.com/2014/02/introducing-the-dotdns-metatld/)

\+ whitepaper that gives overview:
[http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf](http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf)

