31–40 of 176 posts
There's no feasible way of blocking circumvention tools without causing massive collateral damage. If they block SSH tunnels for instance no sysadmin will be able to do their job. Same for VPN. A lot of people work remotely. I will laugh my ass off if they try to do that. At the same time I won't be able to access my VPS anymore :(
If the concern is actually about enabling people to restrict what their children see, why not create and distribute a free, open-source software package that citizens can run on their own? Obviously the question is rhetorical, but I'd like to see someone ask it.
ISPs said they offer opt-in filters (and opt-out on mobile products) that people could use.
politicians now say those filters must all be opt-out.
So what are the speculations on circumvention? Would an unblocked proxy suffice, or do we think UK internet users would need to purchase a VPN? Also, is the idea to block porn sites, or any site that contains pornographic content, like NSFW subreddits?
2) Click checkbox by "Filters on [ ]" so that the box is unchecked.
There's no feasible way of blocking circumvention tools without causing massive collateral damage. If they block SSH tunnels for instance no sysadmin will be able to do their job. Same for VPN. A lot of people work remotely. I will laugh my ass off if they try to do that. At the same time I won't be able to access my VPS anymore :(
But you can tunnel encrypted data over anything that can carry a signal, and stuff IP datagrams inside it. This will only stop people that are "casually" looking for stuff and don't really care.
Latency might suck. But if the filters become a problem, you'll start seeing VPN applications with "UK filter modes" that use whatever the current simplest circumvention method is. Heck, I'm in the UK and I'd go into business selling VPN solutions like that myself if the filters get obnoxious enough for that (through suitable shell companies somewhere more favourable). The trouble with a business like that, of course, is that the market will be limited as long as the filters are not mandatory.
But just as an illustration of how ludicrously infeasible turning this into full censorship is: If they allow HTTP through at all, you could easily create a VPN were the packets are exchanged by ensuring every Xth character is lowercase for 0 and uppercase for 1, and serialise your packets by downloading / uploading hacker news comments to the VPN server, with the case changed. Or you could use a thesaurus on both ends, with an algorithm for assigning 0/1 to words, and rewrite the text by looking up the next word and deciding whether (and if so what) to rewrite it to.
Of course that'd also be ludicrously slow and waste tremendous amounts of bandwidth, but it's an example on the far extreme end. More likely if they ever try to make this mandatory and actively filter, it'd likely start out with just be a matter of changing port numbers. The next step up in escalation would likely be wrapping the data in something that looks like you're talking to a DNS or mail server or similarly slightly massaging the data.
It'd only be somewhat tricky if they get to the point of trying deep packet inspection and validating that the contents matches expectations from the protocol and doesn't look "too random" for every protocol people might use.
(As a last resort we'll just have to implement IP over Avian carriers: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 )
A possible silver lining - if you're against the filters that currently exist (blocking child porn), someone might infer you're a paedophile, which would be bad for you. If you opt out of porn filters, you'll go down on a list of people who want porn. If you opt out of everything-filters, the only thing that can really be implied is that you want access to something , which is somewhat less easy to blackmail with.
There's no feasible way of blocking circumvention tools without causing massive collateral damage. If they block SSH tunnels for instance no sysadmin will be able to do their job. Same for VPN. A lot of people work remotely. I will laugh my ass off if they try to do that. At the same time I won't be able to access my VPS anymore :(
Dirty, filthy sysadmins :)
As I've been saying for years, the Great Firewall of China is -- or was -- the prototype. Look at its early history: Built with "Western" technology and consulting. Did you think all these firms were creating a one-off? And, the following observation is perhaps stretching the interpretation a bit (or not), but I find it somewhat ironic that, after all this, it is a Chinese company that is pushing this implementation…
So you could call this one the China Firewall of Great Britain.
B.O.L.L.O.C.S
Well DUH! Some of the politicians like to say it'll be the same sort of system that's on mobile phones here. These have two characteristics - 1. The filter is full of holes 2. What's blocked is pretty arbitrary For instance, I was at a music festival last year (Beautiful Days), and access to the online site map and festival schedule was blocked as 'adult' content. The festival itself was full of kids and teenagers (b…
Yup its the randomness that is the issue. Health education type material for teenagers springs to mind. I have seen issues in the past with 'walled garden' type software in schools/colleges blocking content of that nature unless specifically unblocked. Suspect there will be backlash, then weakening of system to the point of uselessness once it gets going. Usual expensive UK government IT mess.
This project is hopeless, and it's going to be reasonably expensive for someone, but as understand it the government isn't paying for the filters.
Thus, it's not going to cost the government anything.
Well DUH! Some of the politicians like to say it'll be the same sort of system that's on mobile phones here. These have two characteristics - 1. The filter is full of holes 2. What's blocked is pretty arbitrary For instance, I was at a music festival last year (Beautiful Days), and access to the online site map and festival schedule was blocked as 'adult' content. The festival itself was full of kids and teenagers (b…