Investigating TLS Blocking in India • Hacker News Board

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#131

Post by ponker » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 7:44 PM UTC

dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #112

ponker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful what you wish for... while I've always been a huge fan of the First Amendment, the consequences of completely unrestrained speech have never been clearer, with quite significant numbers of people believing that Bill Gates engineered Covid-19 to implant computer chips in your brain through vaccines, and other stuff which would be hilarious if it weren't so destructive.

I am glad they exercised those freedoms in the examples you mentioned. I did however miss the destruction they caused. And why wouldn't they poke fun at some dinosaur who desperately tries to remain relevant? I should start making more memes targetting billionaires, think of all the havoc!

The destruction, in this particular case, is that a lot of people aren't going to get a vaccine when it's released, which will kill a lot of people. More broadly, the fact that mis- and dis-information spreads more widely than real information today has led to a complete breakdown of a shared factual reality, which is a prerequisite for any kind of consensus-based or democratically based system of government. If we're trying to get to Chicago and half of us believe we're in San Francisco and the other half believe we're in Philadelphia, we're not going to make any progress beyond which of us is better at tug of war.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#132

Post by fomine3 » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 5:52 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #75

sbmthakur wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intra also sets up a VPN connection, right?

Yes, but not in the traditional sense, like, say ProtonVPN.com or Psiphon.ca or Latern.io do. Intra merely captures DNS traffic on port 53 and tunnels it to any DoH endpoint. It circumvents SNI censorship because it essentially sees all TCP and UDP traffic and can manipulate it on-device, and it does so in a way that bypasses most (but not all) censorship implementations.

So it's not VPN but uses Android's VPN API.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#133

Post by fomine3 » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 5:53 AM UTC

Santosh83 wrote: post #109

ignoramous wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of problems: 1. ESNI isn't a standard yet. So, support in mainstream web-clients is lacking. 2. Unfortunately, TLS v1.3 is blocked in countries with stringent censorship already.

Wait what?? TLS 1.3 is blocked by some countries? As more and more of the Web, especially CDNs move to TLS 1.3, won't these countries be effectively crippling the Net for their citizens? Also ESNI needs server support I believe and very few servers support it. Right now it is effective only for sites fronted by Cloudflare if I'm not mistaken, and while that isn't a small number still its by no means the wider Net.

China is now blocking all encrypted HTTPS traffic that uses TLS 1.3 and ESNI

https://www.zdnet.com/article/china-is-now-blocking-all-encr...

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#134

Post by rishav_sharan » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 9:27 AM UTC

_8gfe wrote: post #92

rishav_sharan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Indian, knowing the journalistic persecution and state of free speech in India, I wouldn't be surprised if India is tied up with Pakistan. Here is some stuff to read up on this http://www.rightsrisks.org/banner/india-medias-crackdown-dur... http://attacksonrtiusers.org/

This is totally wrong. We have free speech but the major problem is that poor and educated aren't ready for this level of openness in our society.

Here's something fresh for today; Amnesty India quits India operations due to govt' reprisals. https://amnesty.org.in/news-update/amnesty-international-ind...

Reality, I fear is fairly dystopic and I can keep posting such news articles all day which show India's slide into Authoritarianism.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#135

Post by abtom » Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

justDankin wrote: post #108

abtom wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great work man! Installed the app and ran the tests. If there is any way we can see the results do share. From what I can see, there is no way to bypass the SNI filters without using a proxy/VPN of some sort. Do let me know you have any tips for it.

Thanks for running it! We are in the data collection stage at this moment, will definitely be publishing our findings and releasing the data publicly. P.S. Our previous paper talks about censorship in India, albeit the data is from just one vantage point https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.08590 As for circumvention, TLS 1.3 + ESNI + DoH should do the trick. Firefox has the capability to enable these options

I have enabled ESNI + DoH but most websites do not seem to support ESNI yet. VPN looks like the only option until then.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#136

Post by sdoering » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 12:51 PM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #71

sdoering wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably won't get a reply. At least a rational one. I experienced similar sentiment here on HN when discussion the topic of freedom a while back. Reporters without borders is probably one of the best sources to evaluate the quality of Freedom of Press worldwide. But for some people arguing that not all is great with their freedom in the US challenges a part of their identity. And that makes rational discussion a…

> As an example: Growing up near the Iron Curtain (on the western side) I believed for a long time, that we were the universally free side, while there was no freedom in the east. > During the last 10 years or so I realized that there were freedoms on the other side I didn't know of. And have never had in this so called free society. Mind sharing some examples?

For example there were many instances, were people were telling their boss what an idiot he/she was and I know of many cases were it even came to push, punch and shove. They did not loose their jobs for speaking their mind freely. On the other hand - while the west was allowed to tell their government what idiots they were, they boss was spared, because he/she could fire you (more or less) at will.

Also the freedom of social upwards movement was way greater in eastern Germany than in western Germany. Also the freedom of a better educational system (propaganda was massive in both systems none the less).