That’s What I Call a Video
Cracking Video !!
Catch the Criminals – Not the Innocent
One of the problems I have with all the monitoring, filtering and surveillance that goes on online it that it rarely works. For a start surveillance, 99.999% of the time all you are doing is monitoring the innocent. Anyone who has anything to hide can easily takes steps to bypass the monitoring. So in the end all the online big brother stuff does is invade our privacy – it rarely picks up anything from the guilty as they cover their tracks.
It’s the same with blocking and filtering access to sites that we decide are no appropriate. You may argue that it’s right to filter websites with dangerous and criminal content – I would argue back it’s also normally just a huge waste of time. Any site that contains for instance illegal pornography can be copied and rehosted on a thousand other sites with ease. They can be encrypted, sent on usb keys or DVDs or hosted on darknet sites. In effect it’s a great big fat waste of time, the URL filtering slows down our surfing and the only thing you achieve is this
A completely false feeling that you’ve dealt with the problem, when of course you haven’t.
You’ve Blocked access to websites to people who weren’t going to use them anyway
Driven the criminals responsible for this further underground.
Let’s get this straight blocking the website of a paedophile ring does little to help the victim, other than pretending they don’t exist. What we need to do is cooperate and catch the criminals involved.
This is a perfect example of what should be happening – http://www.cps.gov.uk/news/press_releases/140_10/
, a racist uploading videos onto Youtube, don’t put resources into monitoring access, or filtering the web site out. Simply catch the people responsible and bring them to justice.
Internet Censorship Pros and Cons
To be honest the more I think of this subject, the more I fill in the cons category and see little for the Pros. For instance you may have read recently a survey commissioned by Google about the value of the internet economy to different countries. To the UK economy the internet was estimated to be worth over 100 billion dollars – a staggering amount of money I’m sure you’ll agree.
It is potentially one of the biggest benefits to the economies of the world, the chance to open up world markets to people, companies and countries across the world. Some investment in infrastructure could give people the chance to set up online businesses and engage with economies across the planet.
For instance I know loads of people who now make their living entirely online, from web designers, marketers, programmers you name it. An amazing chance to perhaps equalise the life chances of people across the planet.
In reality of course this isn’t happening, the same backward, despotic governments that have created third world countries have spotted the internet and seen it as a threat rather than an opportunity. But of course they’re probably right it is certainly a threat to them, alas the opportunities for their people will be denied. I strongly believe there is no real argument, there is no internet censorship pros and cons discussion to be had.
You will see investment in internet technology, Saudi Arabia have spent a fortune in hardware to spy on their citizens, Syria force Cyber Cafe owners to monitor their customers – whilst they filter at a packet level every single web request from their country. Of course we know about China and Iran who live in fear of every web site that allows people to communicate and talk to each other.
There is no ‘pro’ to internet censorship only excuses…
Internet Filtering Increases Across the World
There have been lots of surveys and research into the growing menace of internet filtering. I say menace because although there are obviously web sites that nobody should encourage or even allow – filtering does very little to tackle the real issues behind these web sites.
Casually blocking and pretending these sites don’t exist is not the way problems are solved, and the huge irony is that the people who do wish to access criminal sites will almost certainly be able to use the various work arounds that are available. In effect Internet filtering usually ends up filtering people who have no intention of visiting these sites in the first place – in essence an exercise of futility. Whilst the filtered site grow and flourish away from the eyes of governments and states who are best placed to make more direct action against them.
What has also somewhat lagged behind the increases of filtering our internet access is awareness of the practices. The internet is increasingly part of all our lives and the idea that what we are allowed to access is being decided on by our governments is not very popular.
A Sad Song
I love this song, it’s actually quite inspirational, this version was posted in tribute to a father who was murdered. Read the introduction, and listen to the song ,it’s very sad but at the same time beautiful. My thoughts are with the family of Lance Del Goebel..
Evil Twin Spoofing – Bye Bye Passwords
Ever hear of this – Evil Twin Spoofing? Sounds quite weird but it’s a very simple way of stealing peoples accounts, passwords and basically their entire identity. So that you’re aware here’s a how it works. An identity Thief makes himself comfortable in an airline lounge or his local Starbucks and gets out his laptop. Instead of just then browsing like everyone else, he sets up his laptop as a wireless access point using some free software. He calls his Access Point something friendly and plausible – perhaps Starbuck-Free-Wifi for instance, they then sit and wait.
It won’t be long before people start connecting to this bogus access point and as long as it’s been set up correctly – IE to relay all connections through the legitimate wifi AP then noone will be any the wiser.
Why Would He do This ?
Hopefully you’re one step ahead of me by now, everyone who is using the bogus access point will be unaware that they’re sending every keystroke, every password and every account name they connect to through this computer. Checking their paypal account, buying something from the internet, online banking – anything vaguely like this and the identity thief has struck gold.
You’re not likely to find out straight away of course, depending on the skill of the online thief and what lengths he intends to go to. But likely when you visit the ATM and find your balance at zero or worse then you might find out. Be very careful when connecting to Public free Wifi anywhere if you do use it, either use a product like Identity Cloaker or never check anything with a username or password.
Watching Media Sites like Hulu on the Internet
It’s actually quite frustrating, all the incredible media sites that are available online like Hulu, Pandora, BBC and NBC to name but a few but most people can only access a fraction of them. The culprit is a technology called geotargeting which controls what we have access to online.
Geotargeting works in quite a simple way, when we connect to the internet our IP address is readily available to every web site we visit. This IP address can be used to locate our exact geographical position and that’s what many web sites do. When we connect to a site they look up in a database where the IP address is registered to and this determines what content we see.
In many instances this is quite beneficial, for instance the search engines use this technology to give us relevant results to our queries. When we type in a search query, the results are tailored to our actual position – meaning if we search for an electrician we will get local results rather than ones in a different continent.
The other effects of geotargeting are not so useful, American users get blocked from online casino sites due to their laws on gambling, media sites restrict access to local audiences due to licensing issues. You’ll not get blocked when accessing web sites based in the same country, but you will if you accessing from a different one. People who emigrate or spend a lot of time outside their own country are especially affected, I travel a lot and when I’m away from home I can’t access the BBC Iplayer abroad for example.
The only way to access these sites is to disguise your IP address, you can do this in two main ways. The first is to use a proxy server – this is a server that sits between you and the website you visit forwarding requests as required. The benefit of this is the web servers only registers the proxy server address not yours. Many of the media sites like Hulu and NBC though will block this access and you will need to connect through a VPN (virtual provate network) . There’s loads of information online about these workarounds, so just check online for a solution.
The Role of the ISU and Saudi Censorship
You may not be surprised to learn that Saudi Arabia is amongst the leaders in filtering and censoring the internet. A rather strict political and religious regime combined with lots of cash to spend on filtering technology meant it was always on the cards.
The department who are in charge of ensuring that the citizens of Saudi Arabia don’t access anything their rulers don’t like is called the ISU ( Internet Services Unit). THeir official remit is quite benign – blocking anything that is against the Qu’ran and pornography. Unfortunately this scope seems now to have been extended to include lots of other topics – freedom of speech, womens rights, any non-muslim religions and loads of humanitarian websites. The other main category that keep the ISU busy is any web sites that says anything negative about the Saudi Royal.
The technology used by the ISU is based on quite an old technology called Smartfilter – recently bought by McAffee. It’s not actually that smart compared with some other products but it is quite effective against most users. The filter is just a large list of URLs from a central database, supplemented by all the urls added by the ISU including all the ‘free speech’ sites.
You can actually beat internet filtering like this fairly easily by using a VPN based function, or sometimes just a simple proxy will work. However remember Saudi Government take their spying quite seriously and have recently installed hidden cameras in many internet cafes. Alas the internet is not quite as free in some countries as others, who knows what will be accessible in Saudi in a few more years.
What’s the Deal with ‘Hide my IP Software’
Could you imagine why anyone should want or need these IP hiding software? Well actually you may be surprised but there are actually lots of reasons but let me provide you with a small sample.
- There are lots of countries where you actually risk your safety if you speak too freely online
- Many of us resent consistently being spied on and having their privacy intruded on
- Cybercrime and Identity theft are very common crimes
- Lots of individuals object to the fact that absolutely everything you do online is logged and monitored by your ISP
Needless to say there are plenty of people using the greatest innovation (the Internet) of our time for criminal activities. Just as they use other communication mediums like telephones, faxes and the postal service! The irony is that when governments and their agencies monitor internet connections, it’s only the innocent they spy on as the criminals and terrorists all block them.
This is one of the most annoying parts of the ‘well if you’ve got nothing to hide’ – why do you care – type arguments against anonymous surfing. It’s then just that some of us who are subject to the spying and surveillance that is carried out by even the most relaxed western governments. The European Directive instructs ISPs to record and log all the web sites, emails and electronic communications of it’s citizens for up to 2 years.
However it is also worth reminding people that just using a simple IP hiding software, or some super elite proxy you found listed on a web site is not really going to help your privacy. Most of this software does very little, remember HTTP is clear text protocol and that’s where most of your browsing and details are passed. The IP software protects your privacy from the web server you visit but that’s it. But every other details of your browsing is in the clear and traceable to your IP address, sitting in your ISP is a list of virtually everything you’ve ever done online over the last two years or so.
The very worst hide IP software is the little software front ends that search for free proxies when you start them up. They then route all your web browsing through the fastest, free proxy that they find available. It wouldn’t matter if the proxy was being run by a gang of identity thieves (which many of them are) purely to harvest user details, the software would still send you there. You would be much more secure using nothing than one of these.
Simply staying secure online actually does take some work, far too many people are misled by tales of free proxies and they actually put themselves at huge risk. You need to use secure private proxies, you should know who is responsible for them and ensure that the logs are deleted instantly. Any proper security product will also ensure that all your browsing is encrypted as otherwise your details and IP will be visible all along it’s route.
Surf safely, protect your privacy,