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But as of the end of November,
Rhim had published a blog post saying
that they were expecting to leave.
So we'll see how that how that goes.
Back in East Asia, Korea
has implemented
a thing to protect children called
Smart Sheriff, and
I mean, that's one of the implementations,
but it comes out of a policy to
to add additional filtering.
It's required on sort of mobile devices
need to have this child protection thing.
And there was a report this fall after
the implementation in the spring saying
that it actually opens up a bunch of
security issues and a bunch of
surveillance issues on the devices that
it's on. So there's there's sort of an
ongoing conversation about how to do this
and what the right level of safety
versus.
The other type of safety is.
Not to be outdone, North Korea has added
a squid proxy.
So from the European
segment size, I would like to
mention a new so-called,
as I used to say it senses it and
also known as gambling
censorship.
Apparently the governments have
decided that they need to
better regulate the gambling and betting
resorts on the Internet.
And they have initiated
a sort of putting more
and more regulation and policies to
block, filter and
somehow reduce access to
these resources.
Unfortunately, there are many mistaken
blocking
virus cases of forward blocking
as far as collateral
damage cases like Ecosystem's
DNS, Mellick Saints record
or actually less
time out on websites
that goes on the same IP.
It's quite common in the webspace
environment where actually we said
hosting. You said the same IP
with the rest of the other side.
What I would like to mention
here, it's a report
from an organization
in Switzerland for the European
Commission.
It's like more
than 1500 pages
and it's from 2006.
What is happening actually here?
It's like a table
that mentions the
the counties from left to right.
Like from left are the stricter controls
with policies and gambling
and betting regulation to the right,
which they have less and less
regulation. This has changed already.
So, for instance, UK, on the
far right side, it
actually does some
extreme blocking, which I'm going to be
mentioned later in my slides.
What I would like actually to give
to point out, it's a case
that we did some work
later.
Uh, before this summer
was the case of Greece.
We did some extensive study
on quite many ISPs.
Actually, we cover most of ISPs
and we.
Well, sorry for that.
So what's actually
happening in Greece is that
the ISP, somehow they
have started
blocking at will.
So they just decided
that they need to do this regulation.
Okay, so they were they were forced from
the Gaming Commission to do this.
But as you can see on this table,
actually in this field, you are covering,
like most Greek ISPs,
they have have inconsistency in
blocking.
Uh, so they're
there to represent the site that has
been blocked, actually, that far right
column. It's like the total side on this
snapshot of the blacklist that should
have been blocked and
the green was this.
The result is the end result
hasn't been blocked yet.
Uh, I can't cover
the whole research about
Greece, but I'm going to give some
examples of what
have happened after this and what was
happening during the.
So mostly they had done like DNS
blocking.
Some companies decided
to just don't, uh,
administer this well.
And they have issued like eighty
four hundred three errors.
And in some cases like
Vodafone, some of them,
they have done some
VPI.
Uh, so what's uh what
the uses were
used to uh.
Experience actually was that this
blocking page, this is this is
quite important if you consider that
Greece was considered to be too hard,
like quite liberal
views on the Internet, you know, like you
still have a
can download some
torrents. And you can I mean,
there is there was some IP blocking or
there were some defamations.
But in other words, there was not such
extensive filtering.
So most of the of the
ISPs were making like.
It's like this one that you see right now
where the other users were being
landed. What is actually
happening now is
that the Espy's are
redirecting them to
the Gaming Commission website.
A reminder to the Gaming Commission
is actually the commission that is
the blacklist, forcing the blacklist
and making laws.
One of them is to punish or
like it's considered
a crime to even access
these forbidden
web resources.
So the users are actually experience
such a block right now with these
these generic emad's
from custom new
data center binding that everything's
fine.
What is quite interesting
to mention and hasn't been mentioned yet,
and I think it makes sense to
something at some point and even.
So this right now is
that since the Greek
escapees implemented
these.
Filtering infrastructure,
they have started actually using the same
infrastructure to block different
resources, lots of so-called
illegal content, as you can see,
that is encoded domain
name, it's in Greek.
So for those of the other
candidates TV, it's like it's quite
simple.
The body, it's it's not
it's there's nothing there.
And it's returning there to be status
for zero three, no Knoblock
page, no nothing.
So and this
has been done by a vote of this
specific segment.
Has it done by Vodafone
in June 2015
that they have used the local
proxy for
utilizing DPI
of.
Moving on, another interesting
case, United Kingdom,
we actually have two presentations for
United Kingdom, but yeah, that
have only one and we could
not mention so many things that happened
the last years, but
something quite important happened in
2005 or and was
increased in intensity
in 2013, that the government
has started pressuring
a lot for the of promoting
filters to Espy's.
But in the difference with
UK that they didn't they
don't really have a gaming commission or
they don't have like a commission that
makes what should be blocked and, you
know, makes a blacklist and whatever.
So it's ISP decide on what
is right that needs
to be blocked, filter and
censor so you can actually find out
what happened to like, you know, like
dentist websites have been blocked, some
bars have been blocked or some
websites that used to do like to do
a forum like the the keyword
six have been blocked.
So a lot of false positives
are what is
quite important. Medicine is
Blocked Project from Open Rights
Group.
They have done some impressive work
monitoring all this.
Uh, like all I, Espy's or
most ISPs in, uh,
U.K., uh, they
have used their legs up to
K and these are
results like are from there
yesterday snapshot.
So they have actually, uh, find
out that they're are around 20 from these
hundred gather around twenty
twenty one thousand, uh,
websites. Being a resource is being
blocked by strict filters and
around 11000 websites
block by default filters.
Let me get clear, what is default
filters? So when you buy a new one,
you are becoming a subscriber or you
buy a new cellular number in U.K.,
you're coming with this default filter.
So you actually need to opt out.
You need to say, hey, you know, I want to
watch porn. I want to have like
an uncensored Internet
connection. Uh.
And this is like the latest
stop of the yesterday snapshots
on their page.
You can actually click on the slides,
which we're going to publish online.
They're actually having their
provider, the presenters
of sites that have me blog and
some discrepencies.
Hmm, so I
would like to move to a different
segment right now.
This is the Middle East
and continue with Saudi
Arabia.
This is an exit forum and
only a report from
an active request.
This I will explain more later.
What is happening actually here in the
case of Saudi Arabia is that they have
actually blocked the Arab times.
This happened like this is 2015.
And they have just, uh,
brought like a random I just,
uh, saw this page blocked
with an indication of this, uh,
uh, resource having been blocked by
Widefield.
Uh, I did some
search and I found out that that's
the wire filter.
It seems like a Web proxy, GPI, whatever,
with, you know, uh, supposedly
on their website, uh, you should be used
for good ways.
And so, you know, for, as
they call it, for a worry free
Internet experiences.
Continuing with Iraq.
Does anyone know what happened on to on
the normally happens end of July
or specifically on twenty seventh
of July in 2015?
OK, so
on this, during this time,
normally there, the
school, the student class exams
in Iraq
and what would
happen actually between
two to five, like seven
to 10 local time is that,
as you can see from this BTP dataflow,
is that Iraq decided to actually
stop a bit saying they're not, you know,
for the students to have to
worry free exams without teaching.
And then we're.
We moved on with our exam's.
Another interesting report that we found
by scaping their only
report was the
HTP involved request Linowitz,
so that there were some instances of
squit proxy and
proxy that has been used from
the Mensing here, from this Firebaugh,
from Vod's lying.
I don't know what they do, uh,
moving on with Iran and
specifically a very
small segment of what happened
in Iran, as I mentioned, that
it's a very short presentation.
We need to cover a lot of
things.
So Iran decided to actually
they have been blocking telegram
and so many other things about.
What's interesting in this case is that
on No.
20 twenties,
they were their users were starting
wondering social
media sites like, hey, what's happening?
Is it blocked or not?
And then said, no, actually, it wasn't
blocked. There were some
disturbances that are
technical issues that help us, too.
That didn't help.
And we had somehow
this.
Brought this side of line,
this telegram offline,
and now I'm giving the waterwheel.
Cool, so,
yeah, so in the.
West, one of the main things that's
happened is trying to understand how to
deal with this rise of
Daesh or ISIL or whatever we're going to
call it at the moment.
And there's sort of this recognition
in politics that, you know,
suddenly there's bad stuff on the
Internet again and we need to, you know,
do do something about it.
And lest we think it's, you know, from
one side, this is sort of a thing that's
sort of generally
in the political mindset right now of,
well, you know, it's not censorship if if
Twitter, you know, solves this problem
and maybe we should talk to Bill Gates
and he'll close the Internet for us.
And there sort of seems to actually
be this response from
Silicon Valley and these big companies
to try and police their content more.
Right. And we've seen also that as
the safe harbor agreement with the EU
sort of fell apart over the summer, that,
again, all of these content providers are
taking a closer look at management
of their their networks and their user
generated content.
And so you're seeing things like Twitter
is suspending the ISIS affiliated
accounts and similar things
on like Facebook or whatever.
Right.
And so this is actually showing this big
hole that we've got, which is many
of these companies have transparency
reports.
We can see when the government is asking
for subscriber information and we can see
when they ask for explicit content
to be removed and we can see what other
companies make copyright notices.
But there's really nothing here about how
much is being taken down by Twitter
itself.
And so we don't have great insight.
And so taking this full circle, we
actually do have these technologies.
We use them for sites like Weibo,
the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, where
this open source project called Freebo
Weibo monitors
the Chinese social network finds popular
content that then is subsequently removed
and reposted for posterity.
And so this is open source, I'd recommend
that someone do this for some of the
Western media as well so that we can see
what's happening.
And I guess it's worth also
pointing out that a lot of this stuff is
happening on totally public websites.
Right. As we get into Facebook and
WhatsApp groups and telegram and all of
these content providers that are having
to wrestle with this, a lot of this
content is not public.
It's within small groups.
And so it's going to be very hard for us
to understand what sort of management
policies are happening on what's going
on.
So that's sort of our whirlwind tour
of sort of things that
we thought were worth mentioning, there's
tons more.
And what we want to talk about in the in
sort of the second half of this is
how do we know that?
What are the projects and tools
that we've got that help us
see when
there are disturbances and
what perspectives we can get?
So we mentioned that the.
Initial map, and
that comes from this group called Freedom
House, and they publish a report each
year called Freedom on the Net.
And what that looks like is they
they write up a a long sort
of narrative for each country and
then they have analysts code
free, somewhat free, not free against
that.
And so they do this.
And there's another group called Open Net
Initiative that also does this.
And so you get maybe a few categories
like how free is it on
the political spectrum?
How free is it on, you know, access
to circumvention tools?
But what you don't get is you don't get
the data backing that you don't get the
list of specific sites you don't get when
things were blocked because all of that
is potentially harmful.
Right. If I if I publish all of the
data that I'm using to make my
analysis, whoever is managing
that network can potentially go back and
figure out who it was, who ran those
measurements and potentially say, hey,
knock it off.
So.
This is this is something that's been
sort of struggled with for a while now by
the measurement community, and we're
making progress.
And so we're going to start with sort of
the the big player in the
in the room.
So, yeah. How we measure interference
then.
Only disclosure,
I'm an only developer.
Also known as open observatory
network interference.
It's been around for some years.
It has some peer reviewed
proof of concept.
It has been used to
analyze in general,
like most of the things that I
saw during my presentation.
Uh.
It's free software,
you could tell,
by adding a specific test models.
Uh, long story short,
I can point you to somehow
how this looks like, uh,
weight.
It's a measurement
platform that has a back
end, has parts of
clients that are submitting their
reports.
Uh, Brian,
a new signing pipeline is
being developed.
There is an API that is going
to be online
soon and give users
the ability to search in a visual
way and, uh,
sysadmin part that is going to
Meynard and do all this stuff
like storing the reports.
Because actually what is happening with
is that it stores the reports publicly,
so allows all people,
researchers or
interesting users to search
and somehow
start exploring
through the reports, through the only
report.
A much simpler approach of
a test of a test mission
in the Saudi Arabia case.
It is a HTP request.
I can't I don't have the time to go
into detail onto that.
But I'll give you only a sort of idea
of how this works.
Actually, it's just sent to HTP
get request to the resource that
we like to probe.
One comes through our connection,
which is potentially tampered
or filters or whatever, and
the other one comes from another.
Connection like from door,
and then there is some kind of
deep happening and, uh,
uh, some other
types of, uh,
customizations that are being checked in
order to see if our this resource
has been blocked or not.
Um.
There are many, many more things to say,
but, you know, please come and find
me later if you need more or read
on the website and help if you
want.
Another thing that happened, uh,
and that has been working the last year
was, um, a Raspberry
Pi distribution to increase
the Vinton's points of only and
provides more, uh, reports
from different segments
of the world.
Uh, and in an easy
way. This is Lepidoptera.
Uh, and, uh.
Moving on with I love, it's
a project that has been developed
from the University
of Stony Brook.
Stony Brook.
Yeah, I can't even pronounce the name.
So, yeah, they have
done sort of a closed system of
containing making
measurements.
Uh, another
nice example of collecting
that measurements, but unfortunately
not sensitive
or not
censorship oriented
network measurements collection is that
Atlas
Battler's has a bunch of notes out
there but is being fanned
by the IPCC.
And as you know, or IPCC
has some members like Turkey
and some other organizations that they
would not like to be
associated or to
have any reports that are
negative to their sense.
So, yeah, so in addition to these sort of
distributed platforms.
Right. And so this is a few examples of
places where you've got probes in
networks.
We can learn a lot of stuff by
looking at specific domains.
So there's platforms like Tor
that will provide data.
So on metrics, Dottore, I can look at how
many users are connecting from
Bangladesh and I can verify
that report that we showed earlier that
there was something weird going on from
November to December because
while Facebook was blocked, we see a
corresponding spike in the number of Tor
users.
Right. So they are, you know, providing
this data. And likewise, there's a few
other services like Google
shows how much connections it's getting
from different countries.
And we can say they actually label
themselves and say we believe that there
was a disturbance in these places
at these times.
Right. And so depending on
how that data is shown, you have
different levels of ability to,
you know, trust it.
Right. Like, I can't I can't actually
go in and look and verify that Google is
telling me the truth here.
I have a better ability to do that from
Tor.
Beyond this, one of the older projects
sort of in this space is crowd
sourcing verdict.
Webb came out of Berkman Center a while
ago and basically asked users
who visit it, shows them
a website and says, can you or can you
not access the site?
And they they check yes or no.
And that, you know, gives you a somewhat
noisy because now you have to trust that
the users are, you know, you
know, is it you know, their connection?
Is that something else?
Like you don't get the same insight
into why something didn't work as you
would if you were running test code?
But you can learn a lot.
And then focusing on specific
countries, you've got things like grade
fire, which basically
runs its own infrastructure in China
specifically, and then keeps monitoring
or sort of keeps tabs on popular
sites that are accessible.
Are not they're.
Switching over to mobile interference,
right, we're entering a world where
cell phones are gaining importance
and we've sort of found ourselves,
you know, having a harder time to
understand exactly what it means to
interfere there.
There's a few projects these range from
sort of Netlist.
It's been around for a while. It's just
sort of a connection analysis or
diagnostics tool.
It lets you see things like, is
my mobile network preventing me from
opening connections on specific ports?
And is there, you know, noticeable
filtering or proxy's
one of the projects that came out in 2015
is something called Asia Chat's.
And that was, again, out of Citizen Lab.
They basically looked into a
bunch of the popular chat networks.
We chat Kakao talk line, looked
for built-In censorship lists.
So is there are there words that you
can't type over these things and
looked at other management policies that
were going on in those specific apps?
Right. We're moving from a world where
what we care about is the open web
and, you know, a domain to
what is happening within a specific
closed app ecosystem.
Sort of the equivalent from
UNNY as we move into mobile is the
library and corresponding
iPhone and Android app around
this project called Measurement Kit,
which is trying to reproduce some of
these connectivity tests, looking at
DNS and HGP that
we that we have run from uni,
but now in a mobile environment.
The other thing that's gaining popularity
is trying to think about what we can
measure externally, so as we've
been sort of, you know,
struggling with this question about
putting things in networks and what risks
where we're sort of exposing people to.
There was a paper and project that came
out sort of at the end of last year,
beginning of this year called Encore,
which brings in the idea of I can
embed the icon, the little image
for Twitter or for Facebook in my page
and see if it loads for my visitors.
And so if all of my visitors from a
specific country fail to load the
Twitter, Facebook, maybe that means
Twitter's blocked.
And so we can have these visitors
who aren't actually cooperating.
They're not running a probe or a
measurement, but we can still learn
things from them.
Similar to that, we have side
channel work and I can and
this guy used for some of the the Tor
accessability stuff as well, which is
saying even when there's two remote
servers that I don't have control of
either of them, I can
using some packet spoofing and TCP
fragmentation leaks, learn if
they can connect to each other or not.
And so now without, you know, putting
those users aren't like cooperating.
They're not running some probing software.
But I as a remote observer, can
potentially learn about connectivity,
your IP level blocks.
We're also still coming to terms with
a world where the IPV for space is small,
so you've got GEMAP, which is
there's a talk on male security
stuff that Zacchia will give
three to three.
But they've also released something
called Sensis just recently, which
is sort of looking at what's running in
different places.
One of the projects that I'm involved
with is called Satellite, which
is looking at open DNS resolvers
and what sort of DNS consistency we can
learn from a single external
vantage point.
So we find roughly eight million
open DNS resolvers that are willing to
resolve domains for you.
And so you ask all of them for popular
domains and you see if there is specific
ISPs or specific regions where you get
weird responses back.
And so now without having, you know,
anything except for these hopefully
infrastructural DNS resolvers,
I can understand if there's some sort of
country or ISP level policy going
on.
All right, so
we're going to sort of recover
about governance,
what's happened actually lately
from the HGP Working Group.
There have been working and it seems that
it's going to be accepted.
The HTP status code four
or five one.
That's a status quo that has that is
going to be used in case
of legal
websites that have been filtered, blocked
or censored because of legal issues or
political incidents.
I hope that this will not be passed.
And this is
somehow like acknowledging the problem
of and saying that's
OK with censor and block
Internet.
But I would rather
protest for a more free Internet.
What did happen to good on
the terms of governments is the
forming of a group called Human Rights
Protocols Consideration Research
Research Group
that is exposing
the relation between protocols and human
rights, having a focus
on the rights of freedom
of expression and freedom of assembly.
And now it's going to
call.
So and I guess the
point of this HRP
group is that they're hoping to
sort of upend the policy on further
IETF standards to include a section
sort of expressing what's going
on in terms of the implications to
freedom of expression and freedom of
assembly with new protocols as they come
in. So this is something that we should
be thinking about as we start
standardizing protocols.
What are the implications?
Are we doing this in a way that is going
to be supporting these universal human
rights?
The other major thing in the
measurement community space is that open
tech fund, a branch of the US government
under a few layers, got
a big injection of like twenty five
billion dollars to support sort of
circumvention and censorship measurement
stuff. And so a bunch of projects
have gotten money over the
last year and that's continuing now.
And so there's been this injection of
sort of excitement and people working on
it as a result.
And so it'll be interesting to see how
long that continues.
But that's really sort of.
Boosted a lot of stuff, but again,
the community is sort of struggling at
the same time with trying to understand
what it means that so much of this work
is now funded by by the U.S..
OK,
so it's not all roses, although I think
you've already come to to notice that
there's a lot of stuff that the tools
that are out there aren't doing a good
job of measuring.
Just to give you some examples,
in addition to blocking.
Right. Which is a thing that's pretty
binary. I can see if I get the wrong
result or no result.
What happens if I just get the result
really slowly?
My my automatic test is going to have
a hard time coming up with those
heuristics.
And we really haven't written these tests
that actually are doing a good job with
rustics to understand that this is just
throttled and isn't actually going to be
usable and differentiate
that that accessible but really slow
from normal.
We still are pretty far behind on
platform self-censorship.
So our ability to understand what sort of
management and and,
you know, removal of content platforms
are doing by themselves and unilaterally,
like the Greece example points out, a lot
of times policies are not implemented
on a country level, which is
sort of how we try to think about it and
how those maps that we've been showing
show it, but really are at Espy's
or specific regions.
And so we need to tear this data apart
and get down to the specific, you know,
how is it going to work for these home
users in this place?
And it's not a question that we have a
good way to answer right now.
And we also don't have a good handle on
the social impacts.
Do people notice this?
Is this what does it mean to be extreme?
How often are people hitting block pages?
Like is is there other stuff that people
are choosing not to visit,
even though it's not explicitly blocked
because they they
feel unsafe on the Internet because of
the policy like these are these are
things that we really haven't even begun
to explore.
On the academic side, there's been a big
conversation about ethics that's
continued to sort of emerge in the last
year.
Part of that is trying to understand
when it's OK to make measurements right.
If I get abuse complaints, telling me to
knock it off, like
if it's if it's someone who owns an
organization.
Sure. That seems like I probably
shouldn't be doing something they don't
want me to do. What happens if it's a
country that tells me to knock it off?
Do I just not measure their country?
So so where where are these sorts
of things where these boundaries
for our more traditional things inside of
countries?
What does it mean to get informed
consent?
Right. Are the users who are running
probes or who are taking measurements on
these systems, understanding what
they're getting themselves into?
Do we as researchers even know what they
were getting into? And are we able to
tell them those risks in a way
that they can give informed consent?
There haven't been a huge number of, you
know, retributions or anyone getting in
trouble, but we don't know what could
happen. We don't know how technically
savvy the people who would be getting
them in trouble are. And if they
understand the nuances, we don't
understand the nuances.
So these conversations are happening,
a lot of this
there's a bunch of ethicists, weirdly,
it's the US Department of Homeland
Security that that published
something called the Mendelow Report on
Ethical Principles for Communication
Technologies in 2012.
And what that document says
to some extent is that if you can't get
informed consent, you should be
practicing sort of
minimizing risk.
You shouldn't be doing anything
unnecessary in order to get the
measurements that you need.
So now what is at risk?
How do we you know, what measurements do
we need?
Where are these boundaries?
We're still drawing these.
There aren't clear lines yet on any of
this stuff.
But we had the first workshop on ethics
in August at the sitcom
conference. So this is sort of,
I think, at the forefront of a lot
of people's minds in the space is what is
OK, what is safe.
You know, are we are we doing a good job
of both collecting the
measurement data that we need to,
but also doing it in a good way?
So we're going to end
by, you know, the pitch of what you
can do, how you can help.
You can measure, right?
You can collect the data.
You can work on the code.
A lot of these projects are open source.
We'll put these slides on the linked from
the talks so that you can click on all of
them and find the project that you're
most excited about.
You can skip the whole measurement thing
and work directly on circumvention.
Pluggable transports are, you know,
gaining standardization.
There's a nice website, pluggable
transports, dot info that talks about
the spec, which is pretty easy to
implement. And so you can make your own
different way of connecting
and you can have the conversation in your
local jurisdiction or on the Internet as
a whole to advocate for
transparency, if nothing else, so
that you can, you know, understand what
is blocked and figure out where
your community is comfortable having
that.
So we'll be around to answer questions.
Thank you.
So I assume there'll be some
questions, OK,
for questions, please line up.
There is one, two, three, four mikes here
and we'll also take some questions from
the Internet.
The first gentleman is lined up.
Go ahead and talk.
Please talk to the microphone.
So we got it on tape.
Thanks.
As you're probably aware, more and more
countries, which we do not usually
think of as restrictive,
are now blocking something.
It's not only I suppose it's not
only because of the attacks.
So I'd like to I ask for
advice on advocacy.
So in my country, there has recently
been some blocks implemented
because of lobbyists
trying to stop you or your
companies if you don't want to
go ahead. So and I've been
trying on behalf of the civil movement to
advocate to not do that.
And what I get in return is, well, we
here's the thing. We need to block this.
So they are if I give them something
that can minimize collateral collateral
damage, they're OK.
But in my mind, that indicates
deep packet inspection.
So is there a recommended
way, if we are OK to
block this small thing, but we don't want
to blow the whole IP, the whole domain,
do we go DP or is this is there some
magic pill?
I don't think there's any magic pills,
unfortunately.
I mean, so there's a few things.
One is whenever you get this sort
of thing, you need to focus first on
transparency, because that's something
that's much easier to get public
opinion. Right.
There's always going to be debate about
where the line of what is acceptable and
unacceptable content is.
But I think most people are going to
be pretty happy to say that we need to
have public record and public
knowledge of what is blocked so that we
can have the conversation, that we can
audit, that what's being blocked is what
we've decided is worth blocking.
So the first thing is if there's these
regulations or things that are coming
without that ability for people to
inspect and understand what's happening,
that's something that's really important
and I think much less controversial that
you can push for.
And that's worth having
in terms of should you be blocking
Phillips and the collateral damage thing.
That's a hard question.
It depends a lot. I mean, I think we're
going to we're going to enter
and we are we are moving towards a world
with more encryption through let's
encrypt in some of these things.
And so what you could imagine
is if you're doing things like just
taking Sanai or specific domains
and trying to block those, that's
something that potentially
technology is going to surpass
in the next three, five years.
Something like that will enter a world
where that sort of block isn't going
to be nearly as effective.
Hopefully, we'll get to a world with
encrypted DNS and with, you know,
good encryption in
some of these newer HGP like protocols
where you can't do these fixes.
So putting in boxes like that,
the hope is they become obsolete faster,
whereas doing IP blocks, that's something
that's harder to rectify that damage.
That's that's my personal opinion.
OK, thank you.
Tell me back there, Mike, number five, is
that a question?
OK, please. Talking to the mike.
Thanks for taking my question.
I'm going to ask about the funding that
you mentioned.
So you mentioned that the American
government funds much, if not
all or most of
the work that you do and a lot of the
work on censorship research.
I'd like you to talk more about that.
What do you make of it?
How do you think this fits?
Your work fits into America's foreign
policy objectives and if it does
in any way.
Sure.
So so I guess what I'll say is there are
other sources of funding to
a bunch of this stuff happens from
academics who get funded through through
grants and through the university
grant process rather than
directly through through governmental
funding.
I think it's reasonable to see
this as in line with U.S.
foreign policy.
Right. They they would like to have
generally that
freedom of expression.
That's something that, you know, I think
that that group at least.
Right, the the Radio Free
Asia Broadcasting Board of Governors
is pretty in favor of.
And so I think for the projects where
their incentives align, it's
not like you're not agreeing
to do anything right.
What it's potentially doing is it's
shifting the work.
Right. And so what we need to be careful
about is that
the work that we're doing isn't getting
shifted purely to circumvention and away
from something like surveillance, which
is maybe less exciting or less less
funded.
And so that's the thing where we need to
be careful. But I think that, you know,
the specific things that they're funding
are all great projects that I'm happy to
see getting that injection of support.
And I think, you know, the call
that I would make is that we should have
more people also stepping up to fund.
I think that's something that you know,
what I've heard from Open Tech Fund is
they would also like to see that.
Right. This isn't something that's
sustainable from a single government
because of, you know, the optics don't
necessarily look great and also because
why should they be able to make those
decisions?
And so the way that we counter that is
not by refusing to take money,
but it's by saying, hey, maybe Germany
should be giving more money, maybe a
bunch of these other countries that care
about these same, you know, freedom of
expression issues should also be stepping
up to help us.
What's the mix right now?
Private to government funding off the top
of your head?
That is like I have
no idea.
There's a bunch of companies, there's a
bunch of VPs and stuff that are making
money from users, they're
not going to tell you how much money they
make, but there are pretty big players
in the space.
OTF, right, they do publish
that they're their grant from the
government. Twenty five million, so we've
got that. But I don't know what how big
the overall spaces.
OK, we
are a question from the Internet here.
Yes.
So talking to your mike, please.
This is a question from Jay Nixon.
Hamiet, what's better
about recognizing censorship if I record
five one and
because the page was blocked nonetheless
and it's good to know what happened.
Right.
OK, so I think that by having
an established code to
recognize censorship is like Bagnolet,
as I mentioned, the president will
acknowledge the fact that, OK, yeah,
censorship is for granted.
And we should assign a status code,
I guess, to my opinion, instead of
just assigning new status code of
something that we can't
really happen, like like
Internet should not be censored.
So assigning a status quo to the
piece would not happen.
So if if they would like to do it,
we do it in a different way.
But assigning like changing
the status code and assigning and
acknowledging the fact that we
still have more, you
know, like a blocking code.
No, I, I don't think that is
a way to go.
I'm I don't
have any alternatives on that.
But, you know, I mean, why
why we need to to have alternative
on blogging then they do it otherwise
without status code.
So why do give the freedom of using also
studies because OK, so these websites
ability and the status quo.
So now we know that OK, know these
sites are blocked. Yeah.
They will still block.
Still block.
As I mentioned, the presentation started
sites and resources legally
and illegally.
So now that we have also the four or five
one stats of the legal.
So this is a legal like status code.
And, you know, this will continue.
They will continue blogging again, you
know, websites illegally.
OK, thank you.
Number two years ago.
I thank you for it.
OK, I have a question about talking
to you. Mike, please.
I have a question about the gambling,
about the gambling censorship,
because this seems like the beginning of
a general kind of censorship.
Do you have any idea if anywhere in
Europe it was possible to get this
removed in some way by any
legal measures, lawful measures,
something like that?
Well, actually, most of of these
blogs are quite trivial.
They are there.
They were doing the DNS blocking.
So you could just change your name,
server, your resolver, and you could look
out around this issue.
Many of these sites can be
seen from other like
they can be seen by via Tor or
they they are just trying to
block these locally.
They were they were just trying to do
this in a local way.
They are not they are not doing
it well right now.
They are just
like to, let's
say, stop viewing this content from
the non power users.
Let's say so.
So I come from Bulgaria and there they
switched from just DNS blocking to
IP blocking, and they've been
doing that pretty thoroughly for the
sites they were ordered to block, which
results in a lot of collateral damage for
this. And
we know that, yeah, using tor using
any kind of it can just go around.
But it's extremely trivial, but it
creates a lot of problems.
It creates a very bad precedent for
everything else, because right now it's
gambling sites. Then we have the
infrastructure and then anything else.
So are you aware of anyone that
is working to stop this on a political
level?
We should we should speak to these
people. We should do stuff like
maintaining that, hey, you are destroying
the Internet. You know, you can just
start blocking IP.
You know that there are like thousands of
websites hosted.
Right. So, again, this is this is the
place for advocacy.
Right. Finding your local groups that are
caring about Internet freedom,
working with them to find especially
instances of collateral damage are a
great place for advocacy of look at these
sites that for whatever reason, are
being blocked.
This isn't a cool thing to be doing.
We really are overstepping.
We're losing transparency.
These are all great arguments that you
can take to
your politicians and lawmakers and
and find the ones who are going to help
champion the issues for you.
We tried that didn't work.
Thank you.
OK, thank you.
Number six years ago.
I thank you very much for an interesting
overview. I wondered if you
would like to share some thoughts on
maybe combining or proposals
to combine censorship measurement
with censorship circumvention.
There have been some proposals recently
for tools that could bind the.
And I just wondered what your thoughts
were on that.
Yeah, so there was there was a there was
a paper that came out about
the circumvention tools, our way to
understand measurement.
Again, you've got exactly the same
issues about
what are the risks that users are facing.
Right. And and that's now maybe
you're having a harder argument
about not
knowing what's going on, that you know,
that this is a user who is actively,
you know, worried about something and
trying to get around something.
And so are you now comfortable trying
those sites that are blocked, which are
the ones that are being looked for?
And what sort of dangers are you getting
your user into?
At the same time, there are
plenty of tools that are already doing
this right. You've got a set of tools
that do fallback stuff.
So they first try to make the request
locally and then if it doesn't work, they
run it through a proxy.
So they're already exposing the user to
that risk. You might as well collect that
data. Right.
And so then it's just a measure of
what sort of anonymity and protection
against that collected data do you get
so that if that data gets public because
expect data to leak to the people, you
don't want it to, how does it not get
anyone in trouble? Right.
Because it's easier to just take that
whole database of all of the users in the
country who tried to visit these bad
sites than having to do the network like
measurements of them individually, and
that fortunately, they do collect data of
these users and they don't know what to
do with these data.
Some sense of perceived
synchronization tools.
Thank you.
OK, another question
from the Internet and please talking to
much.
All right. This is a question from
Jennings.
It's a two parter. So there are
a lot of methods for future evasion
just on those ICMP DNS tunnels.
That being said, is there is any
government able to effectively censor a
block experience users
who are able to use these,
I guess, tunnels?
And is it too paranoid
to believe that they might intentionally
allow the government might intentionally
allow some protocols that they can
decode
because, you know, they want
to actually inspect what people are
doing.
It is not too paranoid to expect that
there are instances that, you know,
have shown up of proxy's
or other things that are being run
by governments to be able to get a sense
of what users are doing.
If you are looking for your technically
competent adversary, you're probably
looking to China.
We've seen different things from that
network.
And because of how big it
is and the diversity of ISPs, you see
different things and you get mixed
reports. But there's a sense that at
least some of the time you get
weirdly
like long term connections that don't
look like teals will get throttled or
become, you know, flaky.
And that affects a lot of these tunneling
solutions. We still need more work on
being able to get reliable things.
Maybe you use ISP or IP diversity,
maybe you use lots of short lived
connections. UDP, there's a bunch of
different things out there to try.
There aren't good things that seem
that, you know, everyone feels are
reliable and are hard to
find for a technically competent
adversary to block.
OK, there's somebody waiting
on number five.
Go ahead talking to them.
Yes.
About I think it was
around six months ago, there was a Web
site that was forced to shut down that
archive, political tweets from
politicians,
essentially the politicians strong
arm them into shutting
down. My question is,
what kind of
implementation or capabilities
would you suggest to try
to prevent that kind of strongarming
from happening again with archiving
suppressed tweets and things
like that?
So depending on what threats you are
worried about, we've got a number of
technologies that our community knows
about. We've got hidden services.
If you want to run something where it's
IP address and the server is not known.
So if you feel like the infrastructure
you know, is in danger,
there are ways to make that site run in
a way that it is anonymous.
You can look at the different legal
jurisdictions and come with a
jurisdiction where you are,
you know, not going to have the same
ability. Right.
If it's in a different country, it
becomes much harder.
And then you can find a set of
lawyers. If you believe this is legal,
which I mean, in a lot of places it is,
you just need to find the right
representation where you don't give in
and show that this actually is an
instance of free speech.
If I remember correctly, they actually
strongarm Twitter into revoking the
developer access of the website
in question.
OK, so then it's things like Free Wabo
that are crawling and scraping,
right? We you can't expect that
the platform is necessarily going to be
happy about that.
You can potentially raise a stink and get
the platforms to reverse those
sorts of policies.
Or you can try and show the value of the
system so that they realize that this is
something that is worth having.
Right. In the same way that we have
things like chilling effects, archiving
the DMCA takedown request, it
may be worth having, you know, this sort
of transparency and trying to convince
the platforms.
But at the same time, you can again make
the argument that even without the
platform support, there's there's value
in doing this sort of thing.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you. We have a tight schedule.
So this will be the last question were
taken from before.
Is there anybody else you'll have to come
up front for later?
No, for go ahead.
Just a short question.
You mentioned EPP's very shortly.
There is like this debate, especially
around Apple, that they have like
a very special way of thinking about,
like what is a good app and what not.
And is there anybody out
there who measures like taken
like apps that are not approved or
something like that?
Is there something like this?
Or don't you consider this as censorship
because it's from a company and not from
a state that absolutely seems valuable?
I don't know of any projects that are
doing a good job like that are that are
out there yet doing that.
So I'd love to hear about one.
And I again, there's been reports of
the Google Play store entering China
that's going to involve some sort of
management of what apps are allowed.
And again, like keeping track of that
stuff is maybe maybe someone could do
that because I think.
Quite important today.
I agree, if you want
to do this, please come and find us.
OK, we close this talk
now because we're tight on schedule.
Thank you very much. Let's have a last
hand. Thanks.