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Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#52You need an SSL certificate:
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Request Method: POSTRe: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#53> 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".
How many legitimate websites use that CA? Especially ones Chinese users will visit often? If the browser blocks the CA, those will all break.
Perhaps the browser could do something subtler, but it's not straightforward. Or we could make the https cert protocol more flexible, but changing protocols is hard.
Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#54How is the author overlooking the most obvious course of action the Chinese government could take? China could easily block Google outright -- while the Github reversal the author mentions is certainly surprising, Google represents only a small sliver of Chinese search engine use [1] and probably wouldn't result in much of a mass outcry. [1] http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/09/17/baidu-still-tops-china...
Sincerely, you're wrong. GreatFire.org exists to end China's censorship - they have pondered long, researched, and have not missed your point. China's weakness is they cannot censor where it crimps the economy too much. Read: Collateral Freedom https://openitp.org/pdfs/CollateralFreedom.pdf China blocking all Google products would make such a backlash in China that it's not a feasible move for the China government. J…
--Gmail, Android, Chrome, Picasa, Google Drive, Docs, Translate, Maps, Scholar, Books, Earth, AppEngine, Research, Hangouts. Too many Chinese rely on these financially, and in their jobs--
google docs, google drive, google videos are already blocked in China, google images is almost useless, as it blocks in the second search, then you have to restart the browser to search another keyword for images ( count until 10 before restart the browser ) and even google search is almost useless in most of China, as it takes too long to return the results (except for the big cities, where it works ok) , same for Gmail, it takes 5 minutes to open, and often never opens, the progress bar just stops in the middle.Again, this is not for big cities, but try to open Gmail out of the urban area of big cities and wait. Lan-houses(cyber cafes) dont open Gmail even in big cities. The impact on economy for completely blocking google will be almost zero. I live in China for 10 years, right now using a ssh to open gmail.
Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
How many legitimate websites use that CA? Especially ones Chinese users will visit often? If the browser blocks the CA, those will all break. Perhaps the browser could do something subtler, but it's not straightforward. Or we could make the https cert protocol more flexible, but changing protocols is hard.
Sourceforge and friends are known for injecting badware into binary installers for open-source software.
It will be interesting to see if the Chinese government makes their own alterations to the Firefox binary installers that pass through their network that add the CA back in.
Nobody checks their installers' GPG keys anyways
Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#56How is the author overlooking the most obvious course of action the Chinese government could take? China could easily block Google outright -- while the Github reversal the author mentions is certainly surprising, Google represents only a small sliver of Chinese search engine use [1] and probably wouldn't result in much of a mass outcry. [1] http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/09/17/baidu-still-tops-china...
> How is the author overlooking the most obvious course of action the Chinese government could take?
He didn't overlook it, he addressed it specifically. Read the article.
Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only thought of the Chinese govt issuing a certificate after writing half the post. Initially I was just going to comment on the easy possibility of MITM attacks. These would fail whenever anyone forced https into their address bar, but I think less than 5% of the people do that. That would mean just refusing connections for the <5% and still sniffing everyone else.
Strict transport security ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Securit... ) is an attempt to prevent exactly this. However assuming that the user is always on a MITM'd connection, a preloaded list in the browser becomes necessary.
Yes, doing this attack after a site is already publicly known is hard because of HSTS (if Github uses it), but slowly caches will expire and browsers will reset themselves, and the amount of http traffic will increase a lot.
Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#58Keep in mind this quote comes from the same man who said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
I wish the correct response to that statement (and it's spiritual brother: if you've done nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide) was as widely known as the statement itself.
As an idea, it should be so thoroughly discredited by now that merely stating it approvingly marks one as either morally deficient, an idiot, or both. Making that statement should be at the same level of social disapproval as, say, suggesting genocide as a reasonable way to deal with undesirable people groups.
As of today, though, regular run-of-the-mill people are unable to formulate why that statement is not just wrong, but ridiculously, appallingly so. I fear learning why will come at a rather significant cost to humanity in general. :(
I guess this is how civilization moves forward. It's not pretty.
Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#59Are 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]
Did you even read the article? Eric talks about how American designed encryption paradigms will eventually introduce free speech that cannot be stopped or surveilled even in places like China.
What Google's search market shares have to do with that concept is beyond me, though.
Re: Google Can Bring an End to Censorship in 10 Days
#60SSL is only a minor speed bump when you have control over trusted root CAs or the ability for "force" installation of your own CA.