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Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

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11–20 of 83 posts

Re: Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

#11
post #5
post #3

Freedom of speech. It always seem to be under attack. I wonder though, do we have more or less freedom of speech over time? I tried to google those things, but I couldn't find the graph of freedomness over time. (No, ancedotes don't count. Our perceptions can be skewed by media bias.)

I remember reading an article a couple weeks ago, I'm not sure where, but I think it was posted on HN, about democracy over time. While not the same, that's a good proxy for measuring freedom. It said that democracy reached a peak around 2000, and that it's declined a little since then, but much slower than it was increasing before then. I think this article was either on The Atlantic, The Economist or BBC, if you wa…

I thought of the same thing when reading the OP's question. Wikipedia has a trend chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Trends

And Freedom House's latest report talks about the recent decline (8th straight year): http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/freedom-house-sees-autho...

Re: Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

#12
It's amazing what humans beings will do for information. This reminds me of a time in 2007 where my friend was a teacher at an elementary school. The school blocked MySpace and Facebook to stop the students from visiting those sites. Somehow, the students figured out how to use proxies and get around the firewalls and what ended up happening is that the teachers were the only ones who couldn't figure out how to get around the firewalls. My friend came to me asking how the kids were getting around the firewall, but my explanation was over his head.

Re: Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

#13
post #12

It's amazing what humans beings will do for information. This reminds me of a time in 2007 where my friend was a teacher at an elementary school. The school blocked MySpace and Facebook to stop the students from visiting those sites. Somehow, the students figured out how to use proxies and get around the firewalls and what ended up happening is that the teachers were the only ones who couldn't figure out how to get a…

I remember being one of these kids.

My high school put in a transparent squid-based filter for all HTTP content in my second year, and all traffic going to ports 80 and 443 went through it. They blocked all UDP traffic (even internal to the school, and all outbound TCP traffic except to ports 80, 443... and port 21, which the Yearbook people needed to upload files somewhere. Once I realized that the traffic on port 21 didn't go through an active sniffer, I just started running my SSH server at home on port 21, and bringing PuTTY around on my USB key.

Re: Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

#14
post #4

Thank you. I looked at other countries' graphs as well. India's [1] make no sense. Distorted sinusoidal wave?! [1] https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...

Drops every Sunday¹. Employees of companies are using Tor to bypass company site blocks.

¹ https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...

Re: Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

#15
post #12

It's amazing what humans beings will do for information. This reminds me of a time in 2007 where my friend was a teacher at an elementary school. The school blocked MySpace and Facebook to stop the students from visiting those sites. Somehow, the students figured out how to use proxies and get around the firewalls and what ended up happening is that the teachers were the only ones who couldn't figure out how to get a…

Hell, I remember this being common when I was in high school between 1999 - 2003. It started with the computer savvy kids figuring it out, but eventually the word spread and before you know it football players were using proxies to play stupid games on Newgrounds. Good times.

Re: Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

#16
post #12

It's amazing what humans beings will do for information. This reminds me of a time in 2007 where my friend was a teacher at an elementary school. The school blocked MySpace and Facebook to stop the students from visiting those sites. Somehow, the students figured out how to use proxies and get around the firewalls and what ended up happening is that the teachers were the only ones who couldn't figure out how to get a…

The solution I used to use in high school: add a period to the end of the domain name. E.g. "www.facebook.com" became "www.facebook.com.". Apparently, the last dot does nothing, but gets around almost all pattern matchings. Everyone I told was amazed, but it actually worked (and teachers/administration were clueless).

Re: Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

#17
post #8

Also: "As the Turkish government’s effort to ban use of Twitter continued Friday, the country’s Internet users rushed to install apps such as Hotspot Shield, which had 270,000 downloads from Turkish users within 12 hours, according to David Gorodyansky, the company’s chief executive." I think Tor's a bit of an overkill. This message sent over Hotspot Shield from Vietnam because of my Facebook addiction (blocked on an…

Why and how is Tor an overkill? With Hotspot Shield, you are trusting them with everything you are doing. With Tor, there is no trust with a single server because it is decentralized.

Re: Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey

#18
post #5
post #3

Freedom of speech. It always seem to be under attack. I wonder though, do we have more or less freedom of speech over time? I tried to google those things, but I couldn't find the graph of freedomness over time. (No, ancedotes don't count. Our perceptions can be skewed by media bias.)

I remember reading an article a couple weeks ago, I'm not sure where, but I think it was posted on HN, about democracy over time. While not the same, that's a good proxy for measuring freedom. It said that democracy reached a peak around 2000, and that it's declined a little since then, but much slower than it was increasing before then. I think this article was either on The Atlantic, The Economist or BBC, if you wa…

It was probably The Economist. Paired with an interesting experiment (for them) in their presentation of long-form essays.

http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-...

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