Posted By Mimenta on February 25, 2012
The US has recoiled from the blast of criticism over their attempt to police the Internet and shelved the SOPA submission, but don’t think it’s all over.
Before long some other “do-gooder”, thinking they are a gift to humanity, will design something similar.
Now for the master stroke, just to show you how dumb the law makers really were:
If the USA Thought Police had blocked your favourite sites, all you needed to do was enter the IP address (a few numbers) rather than the URL .
Sounds too difficult? . . . It’s not here’s all you do
For example, If the US Thought Police were to ban, say the Mimentum blog, here’s all you do:
Today without any filter, to get to the Mimentum website, using your Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome browser (did you say Internet Explorer? – read no further, you need to use a more secure browser!) . . . to go to the Mimentum blog, you typed: “www. mimentum.com” in the browser window (assuming you weren’t using bookmarks).
If a filter came in, all you do is type in the IP address for the Mimentum blog, into the address bar, which is http://69.89.22.117/~mimentac/mimentum/ and press Enter. Simple as that. In most browsers you can even leave off the”http://”
Try it.
How do I find the IP address?
Let’s say you are looking for the IP address for wikipedia
For Windows users:
Go to your computer’s Start menu, and either go to “run” or just search for “cmd.” Open it up, and type in ping www.wikipedia.com the result will be the IP address.
For Linux users:
Open the Terminal, type ping wikipedia.com and press Enter.
The next line will read
PING wikipedia.com (208.80.152.201) and a lot more data. Press Ctrl and Z to stop it
The IP address is the number in the first set of brackets 208.80.152.201
If they are monitoring you, you can use a mirror site. This is a website that opens up another website within it’s page and opens a host of possibilities.
In countries that don’t have free speech, people use this method to get news out. It works like this:
You are in a restricted country and I want to communicate with you. I create a website and in the tags etc, I make it appear like a friendly site. Your filter will let you access that site. If your filter blocks all Western powers sites, I could register it in China, Japan or Bahrain even. In the site somewhere, I hide a video clip, except instead of a video file, I put a video link to a browser. Most basic mirror sites only have a header line to give the user the largest screen size, however to really sneaky ones have a smaller screen area which can be expanded on your computer screen. This is currently in use in places like China, where IT savvy students want news from the outside world, that is uncensored by the party. The mirror sites last for a few days and are closed down because it takes several days before the censors find and investigate the website. By the time they trace it’s origins, it’s gone.
The next most secure level uses an encrypted link for the video feed – you are at the espionage level now. This works by adding a number to the code of each character.
Because computers work in binary, (0 and 1) and we need more than 2 characters to write with, each letter, punctuation mark, number and a few extra characters that are invisible (like “line feed”, “paragraph” etc.) all have a number which the computer sees in binary. By adding a number to that, we can turn “A” (upper case) into say, an “f” (lowercase). If we added the same number each time, it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out the code. The master stroke is to vary the number we add to the character code. Unless you know the rate I vary the number, you cannot extract any information. You will get some characters correctly but won’t know which ones amongst all the other, were correct.
One level lower down on the “dirtyworks” scale, is the super encryption, where the rate of change of the encryption varies and only if I know that varying rate as well as the rate of encryption change, can I get any information out at my end. Even if I know the encryption rate, I might get one character in a thousand out correctly but I won’t know which bunch of letters and numbers is that one correct character.
In countries like Iran and Syria where the government tries to suppress all communications, the solution is to sent that signal by some other means, like short wave radio, FM band (for short distances across a border), mobile phone network or at the espionage level, via infrared or as waves in a laser beam of light.
What the “do-gooders” fail to realise is that old addage – “Make a better lock and you create a smarter criminal”.
By blocking material on the Internet, you make the prohibited material more exclusive and therefore more expensive. The criminals will be able to sell material that is currently free and all the while, become harder and harder to trace as they step up their encryption.
The other side of the coin is, more and more people become frustrated at being blocked and turn their attention either to cracking the filter or taking down the organisation that created it. Look at the action against Wikileaks, it created Anonymous – a nebulous cyber-army like organisation with no actual headquarters, that appears out of nowhere, conducts a cyber attack and vanishes again. Playing policeman on the Internet is only going to drive programmers into Anonymous’s ranks.
If the “do-gooders” really want to fix the problem, get out from behind their desks and go home to their families. Spend time being a parent with their kids. Isn’t it time we started to ask;
What type of parent gives their child access to all the information in the world – the good and the bad, then leaves them unattended to browse it?
Maybe we need to filter parents!
Category: Business, Computing, Consumer advice, Current Affairs, Mimentum |
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