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Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

en.greatfire.org

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Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#31

Post by charliesmith »

salient wrote: post #20

Google doing this would be great, and I do support it. However, the effect would be so much greater if all US companies allied against stuff like this, and form some kind of BSA against censorship and surveillance by governments around the world. The last time Google did this with the Chinese government, I remember Microsoft was ecstatic at potentially replacing Google in China with Bing, by following the same reques…

In the past we have strongly suggested that all sites switch to HTTPS. If this happened on "World Global HTTPS Awareness Day", i.e., at about the same time, then I think China would be faced with some tough decisions.

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#32

Post by untothebreach »

onedognight wrote: post #25
livnev wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, this is an (admittedly broad and difficult) issue with CAs and the trust element of SSL authentication. By the theory of SSL, an 'attacker' is not supposed to have control over a 'trusted' CA, so SSL is 'supposed to' protect against this.

> By the theory of SSL, an 'attacker' is not supposed to have control over a 'trusted' CA, so SSL is 'supposed to' protect against this. Every major government has a CA cert in your browser. SSL was obviously designed to be subverted in exactly this way. You won't even get a warning. Google pins their own certs in their own browser, but Moxy's Convergene.io or something like TACK would need to be implemented by Googl…

Is convergence.io still a viable project? Last time I checked the github repo it looked to be abandoned.

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#33

Post by charliesmith »

smoyer wrote: post #21
teawithcarl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sincerely, that's not correct. GreatFire.org is at the cutting-edge of research (including from Harvard, Princeton, and many software engineers globally and in China) to end the censorship in China. GreatFire.org is on the front lines of solving censorship. This idea is new research that works. Google has a preponderant position in search in 125 nations, and is not hurting that much from retreating to HongKong. Baidu…

I won't dispute that GreatFire.org is at the cutting edge of research, I just think the solution is naive. And you haven't addressed my real point which is that they're giving up nothing (certainly nothing of their own) if Google gets kicked out of China but you've conceded my point that there's an economic reason Google has behaved the way it has. All I was stating is that part one of the two-part proposal (encrypti…

We're not giving up anything of our own, but we really have nothing to give up. If Google ignores this and life goes on, life will go on for us, too. We will continue to do what we are doing. If I could do what we suggest Google does, then I would. But we are not Google. They have the power to do this, they can do it now - we should not have to wait for ten years. Eric Schmidt is saying today that Russia is taking cues from China on web censorship - this idea can stop them, too. It can stop all of them.

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#34

Post by livnev »

onedognight wrote: post #25
livnev wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, this is an (admittedly broad and difficult) issue with CAs and the trust element of SSL authentication. By the theory of SSL, an 'attacker' is not supposed to have control over a 'trusted' CA, so SSL is 'supposed to' protect against this.

> By the theory of SSL, an 'attacker' is not supposed to have control over a 'trusted' CA, so SSL is 'supposed to' protect against this. Every major government has a CA cert in your browser. SSL was obviously designed to be subverted in exactly this way. You won't even get a warning. Google pins their own certs in their own browser, but Moxy's Convergene.io or something like TACK would need to be implemented by Googl…

Exactly. But the important point is that the current situation with CAs may be flawed, but since ultimately the user has control over which certificates to trust, it will be possible to use better trust models (like convergence.io) to eliminate censorship. After that, we can indeed use encryption to fight censorship.

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#35

Post by charliesmith »

tokenrove wrote: post #30

Google has employees in China, and making a strong-arm motion like this could put them in danger.

That is a valid point and past Google blog posts have alluded to this danger. I made this point in the longer blog post which appears on our web site, but not in The Guardian article. http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/new-approach-to-chi...

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#36

Post by oddx »

I'm not native english speaker, so sorry if I wrong. But does Schmidt actually means '10 days'? If I understood correctly Schmidt mean that if we (all people who do internet) starts to encrypt everything (http 2?) then it will be more difficult to do censorship. And he unlikely mean 10 days, probably 10 years.

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#37

Post by smoyer »

charliesmith wrote: post #33
smoyer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't dispute that GreatFire.org is at the cutting edge of research, I just think the solution is naive. And you haven't addressed my real point which is that they're giving up nothing (certainly nothing of their own) if Google gets kicked out of China but you've conceded my point that there's an economic reason Google has behaved the way it has. All I was stating is that part one of the two-part proposal (encrypti…

We're not giving up anything of our own, but we really have nothing to give up. If Google ignores this and life goes on, life will go on for us, too. We will continue to do what we are doing. If I could do what we suggest Google does, then I would. But we are not Google. They have the power to do this, they can do it now - we should not have to wait for ten years. Eric Schmidt is saying today that Russia is taking cu…

I think we're agreeing ... and I think what you're standing up for is admirable, so I'll stand along side you. I also have nothing to give up, so that doesn't mean much - other than we're kindred spirits, perhaps with a real libertarian bent.

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#38

Post by lambda »

lucb1e wrote: post #14

> The code-sharing site Github uses encrypted-only access and, perhaps not intentionally, broke the pattern of Internet control in China. Encrypted-only access is not a solution, it's a patch. Here is how China could break it if they wanted to: 1. Choose domains that you want to monitor in this way. E.g. github.com. 2. Requests to any IP for that domain on port 443 will return a certificate that the Chinese governmen…

If they do that, Mozilla, and most of the other browser vendors, will immediately revoke and blacklist that CA.

There was already a lot of debate about adding the CA, but the final consensus was, I believe, "as long as they don't actually abuse it, we should trust them; as soon as we have evidence of someone doing a MITM attack with that CA, we will blacklist it".

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#39

Post by jpollock »

Are you sure Google's big enough in China to have an impact?

http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/4371/search-engine-market-...

Even worse, that's by revenue, not searches:

http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/3809/china-search-engine-m...

3% of search is a blip.

[EDIT: Fixed the links mangled by cut-n-paste from other thread]

Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days

#40

Post by lambda »

oddx wrote: post #36

I'm not native english speaker, so sorry if I wrong. But does Schmidt actually means '10 days'? If I understood correctly Schmidt mean that if we (all people who do internet) starts to encrypt everything (http 2?) then it will be more difficult to do censorship. And he unlikely mean 10 days, probably 10 years.

He meant that Google could encrypt their own traffic in 10 days, and offer mirrors of blocked websites via their cache feature; not that everyone could encrypt all traffic in 10 days.
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