Comments on: How to beat Chinese Censorship — Operation Peking Duck

By: How to protect our freedoms, strengthen developing economies, and make money | The Monash Report

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:57:12 +0000

[...] your websites. (I’ve done that already on four sites.) The other is to help me theorize about a badly needed next-generation improvement on [...]

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:46:03 +0000

I disagree with the spammer vs. spamfighters analogy. While in a simplistic way it is similar, it neglects the fact that spam, to be fought effectively, must be unwanted and have public support behind it. If a “spam” goes out to people and it is accepted, or even ignored, no one will be able to prevent its forward progress. The only conceivable would be for there to be a large scale community uprising against it, which I can’t imagine happening. Even if there was, I doubt it would stop it. As the saying goes “the only thing better than good publicity is bad publicity.”

By: The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Anonymizer – penetrating the Great Firewalls of China and Iran

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 05:27:40 +0000

[...] That said, Anonymizer’s heart and head both seem to be in the right respective places. What Lance told me doesn’t go nearly as far as my Operation Peking Duck proposal, but it’s in the same direction, right down to requiring the Chinese citizens to have a secure piece of client software, and hoping the authorities don’t criminalize the very act of running that software, or defeat it via a spyware blocker. More fundamentally, he seems to understand that he can’t win long-term without being, in his great phrase, a “freedom spammer.” Indeed, right now a significant fraction of the e-mail list subscribers are actually spam recipients, to provide legal cover should anybody get into trouble simply for being on the list. • • • [...]

By: The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Scatterchat and Tor vs. The Great Firewall of China

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 07:37:26 +0000

[...] Hacktivismo has just released Scatterchat, an IM tool intended to beat repressive regimes’ firewalls. Unlike other anonymizer types of tools that use Chinese repression mainly as a marketing hook, Scattershot seems to truly be focused on its stated goal. I haven’t figured out whether it does much clever other than leverage Tor, an anonymous network established by the Electronic Freedom Foundation to try to beat traffic analysis. This all sounds like a perfect example of what I’ve been calling for — technological creativity directed at beating technological repression. But I must admit — I question how well Tor can be made to work inside a repressive country. If all internet communications can be monitored, what’s to keep Tor servers from being quickly identified, and their operators punished? And so I continue to doubt that any one magic bullet will ever beat Chinese repression; rather, an ongoing cat-and-mouse-game is needed. • • • [...]

By: The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Fighting internet censorship

The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Fighting internet censorship — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 11:33:45 +0000

[...] Ultimately, this becomes a battle of spammers vs. spamfighters, only in this case the spammers are the good guys and many of the recipients want to be spammed. That should put the odds on the side of getting information through the Great Firewall of China (and similar abominations in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, etc.). I’ve previously outlined some of the technical issues that need to be addressed, and I’d be very interested in your thoughts on these. [...]