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An Internet filter is software that restricts or controls the content an Internet user is capable to access, especially when utilized to restrict material delivered over the Internet via the Web, Email, or other means. Content-control software determines what content will be available or be blocked.
In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. It improves privacy, security, and performance in the process.
IP address blocking or IP banning is a configuration of a network service that blocks requests from hosts with certain IP addresses. IP address blocking is commonly used to protect against brute force attacks and to prevent access by a disruptive address. It can also be used to restrict access to or from a particular geographic area; for example, syndicating content to a specific region through the use of Internet geolocation.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.
The Great Firewall is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. If the keywords or sensitive words appear in the TCP packets, access will be closed. If one link is closed, more links from the same machine will be blocked by the Great Firewall. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations.
Psiphon is a free and open-source Internet censorship circumvention tool that uses a combination of secure communication and obfuscation technologies, such as a VPN, SSH, and a Web proxy. Psiphon is a centrally managed and geographically diverse network of thousands of proxy servers, using a performance-oriented, single- and multi-hop routing architecture.
Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains but exceptionally may extend to all Internet resources located outside the jurisdiction of the censoring state. Internet censorship may also put restrictions on what information can be made internet accessible. Organizations providing internet access – such as schools and libraries – may choose to preclude access to material that they consider undesirable, offensive, age-inappropriate or even illegal, and regard this as ethical behaviour rather than censorship. Individuals and organizations may engage in self-censorship of material they publish, for moral, religious, or business reasons, to conform to societal norms, political views, due to intimidation, or out of fear of legal or other consequences.
Most Internet censorship in Thailand prior to the September 2006 military coup d'état was focused on blocking pornographic websites. The following years have seen a constant stream of sometimes violent protests, regional unrest, emergency decrees, a new cybercrimes law, and an updated Internal Security Act. Year by year Internet censorship has grown, with its focus shifting to lèse majesté, national security, and political issues. By 2010, estimates put the number of websites blocked at over 110,000. In December 2011, a dedicated government operation, the Cyber Security Operation Center, was opened. Between its opening and March 2014, the Center told ISPs to block 22,599 URLs.
On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux shattered-glass effect obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under English law which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist are used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed.
UltraSurf is a freeware Internet censorship circumvention product created by UltraReach Internet Corporation. The software bypasses Internet censorship and firewalls using an HTTP proxy server, and employs encryption protocols for privacy.
Internet censorship circumvention, also referred to as going over the wall or scientific browsing in China, is the use of various methods and tools to bypass internet censorship.
VPN blocking is a technique used to block the encrypted protocol tunneling communications methods used by virtual private network (VPN) systems. Often used by large organizations such as national governments or corporations, it can act as a tool for computer security or Internet censorship by preventing the use of VPNs to bypass network firewall systems.
PirateBrowser is an Internet browser by The Pirate Bay used to circumvent Internet censorship.
Telex is a research anti-censorship system that would allow users to circumvent a censor without alerting the censor to the act of circumvention. It is not ready for real users, but a proof-of-concept mock system exists. As of 2018, Telex has evolved into refraction networking.
The precise number of websites blocked in the United Kingdom is unknown. Blocking techniques vary from one Internet service provider (ISP) to another with some sites or specific URLs blocked by some ISPs and not others. Websites and services are blocked using a combination of data feeds from private content-control technology companies, government agencies, NGOs, court orders in conjunction with the service administrators who may or may not have the power to unblock, additionally block, appeal or recategorise blocked content.
The child abuse image content list is a list of URLs and image hashes provided by the Internet Watch Foundation to its partners to enable the blocking of child pornography & criminally obscene adult content in the UK and by major international technology companies.
J. Alex Halderman is professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, where he is also director of the Center for Computer Security & Society. Halderman's research focuses on computer security and privacy, with an emphasis on problems that broadly impact society and public policy.
Domain fronting is a technique for Internet censorship circumvention that uses different domain names in different communication layers of an HTTPS connection to discreetly connect to a different target domain than is discernable to third parties monitoring the requests and connections.
Collateral freedom is an anti-censorship strategy that attempts to make it economically prohibitive for censors to block content on the Internet. This is achieved by hosting content on cloud services that are considered by censors to be "too important to block," and then using encryption to prevent censors from identifying requests for censored information that is hosted among other content, forcing censors to either allow access to the censored information or take down entire services.
Snowflake is a software package for assisting others in circumventing internet censorship by relaying data requests. Snowflake relay nodes are meant to be created by people in countries where Tor and Snowflake are not blocked. People under censorship then use a Snowflake client, packaged with the Tor Browser or Onion Browser, to access the Tor network, using Snowflake relays as proxy servers. Access to the Tor network can in turn give access to other blocked services. A Snowflake node can be created by either installing a browser extension, installing a stand-alone program, or browsing a webpage with an embedded Snowflake relay. The node runs whenever the browser or program is connected to the internet.
References
- 1 2 "Refraction Networking". refraction.network. Retrieved 2020-12-06.
- ↑ Frolov, Sergey; Douglas, Fred; Scott, Will; McDonald, Allison; VanderSloot, Benjamin; Hynes, Rod; Kruger, Adam; Kallitsis, Michalis; Robinson, David G.; Schultze, Steve; Borisov, Nikita (2017). "An ISP-Scale Deployment of TapDance".
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - 1 2 Braga, Matthew (2017-08-16). "In fight for free speech, researchers test anti-censorship tool built into the internet's core | CBC News". CBC. Retrieved 2020-12-06.
- ↑ "$1M grant to develop secure, high-capacity research network at U-M". Michigan Engineering. 2020-01-29. Retrieved 2020-12-06.
- ↑ "'Clever' TapDance approach to web censorship that works at ISP level". Naked Security. 2017-08-25. Retrieved 2020-12-06.
- ↑ "Telex: Anticensorship in the Network Infrastructure | USENIX". www.usenix.org. Retrieved 2020-12-06.
- ↑ Wustrow, Eric; Swanson, Colleen M.; Halderman, J. Alex (2014). TapDance: End-to-Middle Anticensorship without Flow Blocking. pp. 159–174. ISBN 978-1-931971-15-7.
- ↑ Houmansadr, Amir; Nguyen, Giang T.K.; Caesar, Matthew; Borisov, Nikita (2011-10-17). "Cirripede". Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. CCS '11. Chicago, Illinois, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 187–200. doi:10.1145/2046707.2046730. ISBN 978-1-4503-0948-6. S2CID 11019789.
- ↑ "Decoy Routing: Toward Unblockable Internet Communication | USENIX". www.usenix.org. Retrieved 2020-12-06.
- ↑ Ellard, D.; Jones, C.; Manfredi, V.; Strayer, W. T.; Thapa, B.; Welie, M. Van; Jackson, A. (2015). "Rebound: Decoy routing on asymmetric routes via error messages". 2015 IEEE 40th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN). pp. 91–99. doi:10.1109/LCN.2015.7366287. ISBN 978-1-4673-6770-7. S2CID 12887876.
