Daily Archives: April 12, 2015

North Korea Breaking Government Censorship For $50
50 dollar portable media players are being smuggled or legally imported from China into North Korea, much to the government #39;s dismay, giving the repressed citizens there a window to the outside...

By: TheLipTV2

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North Korea Breaking Government Censorship For $50 - Video

GamerGate: Pillars of Eternity and self censorship
Pillars of Eternity is a video role-playing game whose development kicked off with a kickstarter campaign. A campaign that was succesful and on March the 26th, 2015, it went on sale. All good...

By: Atheist9000

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GamerGate: Pillars of Eternity and self censorship - Video

Sage of Quay Radio - Max Igan - Censorship, Rabbit Holes and Zionism (April 2015)
Returning to the show tonight is our very special guest Max Igan. Max is an activist, radio host and political commentator and one of the most empowering voices in alternative news and research...

By: The Sage of Quay Radio Hour

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Sage of Quay Radio - Max Igan - Censorship, Rabbit Holes and Zionism (April 2015) - Video

Obama speaks out against censorship
Obama spoke out against censorship. He will probably have offended some social justice warriors with his statement that people should not self-censor themselves just to prevent people from...

By: Atheist9000

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Obama speaks out against censorship - Video

WASHINGTON China has expanded its Internet censorship efforts beyond its borders with a new strategy that attacks websites across the globe, researchers said Friday.

The new strategy, dubbed Great Cannon, seeks to shut down websites and services aimed at helping the Chinese circumvent the Great Firewall, according to a report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the Great Cannon, the report said.

The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses.

The report supports claims by the activist organization GreatFire, which last month claimed China was seeking to shut down its websites that offer mirrored content from blocked websites like those of the New York Times and others.

The technique involves hijacking Internet traffic to the big Chinese search engine Baidu and using that in denial of service attacks, which flood a website in an effort to knock it offline.

The report authors said the new tool represents a significant escalation in state-level information control by using an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users.

The Great Cannon manipulates the traffic of bystander systems including any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing (encryption).

The Citizen Lab researchers said they found compelling evidence that the Chinese government operates the GC (Great Cannon), despite Beijings denials of involvement in cyberattacks.

Because the Great Cannon shares code and infrastructure with the Great Firewall, this strongly suggests a governmental actor, said the report, which included collaboration from researchers at the University of California and Princeton University.

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Great Cannon Internet traffic diverter widens Chinese censorship powers: researchers

Provided by Quartz Dark designs

China has acquired a powerful new weapon in itsefforts to strictly controlinternet access and content.

Thats according to anew report released Apr. 10 by Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Torontos Munk School of Global Affairs. It sheds more light on the recent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacksagainst popular programming siteGitHub, and the nonprofit site GreatFire.org, which replicates websites already blocked by Chinese censors.

Citizen Lab says it had identified the new weaponwhich it has named Chinas Great Cannonresponsible for both attacks.

Located within Chinas massive Great Firewall censorship apparatus, the Great Cannon appears to operate asa separate tool thathijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses, and canarbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle,according to Citizen Lab.

In the case of online code repositoryGitHub, the Great Cannon was able to alter script distributed by Chinese search engine Baidu, redirecting massive amounts of bad trafficback towardsGitHubs servers in late March, reports the Verge. The attack, which lasted several days, was the largest the companyhad ever experienced.

While the Great Cannons ability to target and potentially take down websites is worrying enough, its also possible that the technologycould be tweaked in order to plant malware in millions of computers communicating with vulnerable Chinese servers, according to TechCrunch.

Those familiar with Edward Snowdens revelations may remember that the US already has this capability through the formerly top-secret NSA program QUANTUM.Unlike the US government, which attempted to keep the existence of QUANTUM a secret, China doesnot seem particularlyconcerned with hidingthis newest addition to it censorship arsenal. This brazenness both confuses and concerns the researchers at CitizenLab.

We remain puzzled as to why the GCs operator chose to first employ its capabilities in such a publicly visible fashion. Conducting such a widespread attack clearly demonstrates the weaponization of the Chinese Internet to co-opt arbitrary computers across the web and outside of China to achieve Chinas policy ends. The repurposing of the devices of unwitting users in foreign jurisdictions for covert attacks in the interests of one countrys national priorities is a dangerous precedentcontrary to international norms and in violation of widespread domestic laws prohibiting the unauthorized use of computing and networked systems.

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Chinas aggressive new censorship weapon can cripple your website