Censorship

Blocked Websites Everywhere you Surf

You might not believe it but censorship is rife on the internet. I’m not talking about illegal and criminal stuff either. The social sites like wordpress, youtube, facebook and any where else that people can speak their mind and voice their opinions. Of course if you live in a country who likes to control how people think, then they will always have a problem with sites like these.

You might be surprised about how many web sites have been blocked across the world – check out the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship. It’s definitely gathering pace as the internet becomes the medium of choice for citizens all over the world.

It’s kinda sad that we can’t even be treated equally online, where as most democratic countries allow pretty much unrestricted access to the internet apart from obviously criminal sites when they can block them. In places like China, Thailand, Burma and the like you’ll have thousands of websites blocked. No facebook, youtube for those guys, increasingly the countries are taking charge of their ISPs and running themselves, which makes bypassing their restrictions even more difficult. Sure you can use proxies, but the open, free ones soon get blocked anyway and obviously have their own security difficulties. (as many of them are run by individuals and organisations with their own agendas!)

Learn all about the issues across the world about online privacy protection.

How to keep your Internet Surfing Privacy

Everyone’s getting more concerned with internet privacy and with good reason. A large part of our lives is conducted online, we shop, bank, socialise even date on line in some cases. All that involves information, personal information being transmitted online.

So what’s involved in keeping your internet surfing privacy in tact ? We transmit so much personal information across the internet that it is not surprising that online theft is growing at an alarming rate. The simple fact is that the internets success has been built on a very simple protocol called HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol) which is fast, efficient but unfortunately transmits everything into clear text. Anyone who intercepts this data can pick up an awful lot of information about each and everyone of us.

So how do I get some Internet surfing privacy?

Well there’s a few key areas but these are the most important.

Information Stored on your PC
Your browsing is tracked and monitored and personalised by a long collection of techniques of which the most common are cookies. These little text files are stored on your computer to record account details, preferences and personal details. To be fair they are used primarily to improve your browsing experiences mostly but they still represent an extensive record of your browsing. Fortunately if you are concerned with Internet surfing privacy you can easily delete these records. Most browsers allow you ‘delete browsing history’ which will delete all the cookies, temporary internet files and images stored on your PC. Google Chrome even has an incognito mode which does this automatically.

Hiding your IP address
Every web site you visit has logs, and they will record your IP address in these logs. Everything you do, download andlook at is recorded in these logs which can be tracked down to a specific computer via the IP address. This is also quite easy to fix and it requires using an anonymous proxy server. This server sits in between the web site you visit and hides your IP address so that it canot be recorded. There are anonymous proxy servers all over the internet but be careful, a large proportion of them are hacked virus infested servers which actually steal your information anyway. These are much, much worse than just getting your IP address logged in a web server,never use an anonymous proxy server that you don’t know about as it will be the worse move possible for your internet surfing privacy.

Encrypting your Web Browsing

The most important in my opinion for real privacy in your surfing. All your browsing is conducted in clear text as mentioned above, in fact the most detailed and comprehensive list of all your online activities exists in your ISP. This is why governments across Europe and the world ensure that they have access to these logs and ISPs are legally bound to store them for up to two years. However if you encrypt your connection then these and all other logs of your browsing are unreadable. How do you achieve this?  Well there are two main methods using an encrypted SSH tunnel or an SSL Tunnel. This creates an encrypted session which can protect your surfing privacy completely.

This is just a starter but probably the most important thing is to be aware, think of the web sites you are visiting, realise that you could be monitored or intercepted. Be very wary of entering any personal details onto any suspect sites sites.  Here’s a useful video about hiding your location (IP address)

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Learn all about the issues across the world about online privacy protection.

The Technology Lag of Internet Censors

It’s quite reassuring in some ways that the technology that those who wish to censor and filter access the internet have at their disposal is often someway behind. Wiretappers, content filters are far from cutting edge but nevertheless they are unfortunately getting much more sophisticated.

If any one has ever worked with or worse had to configure these content filtering devices, you’ll realise the huge amount of work that is involved even maintaining them. The false positives and perpetual complaints you get when even a minimal level of filtering is applied is extremely surprising. Sure you can block words or URLs or patterns but you’ll always end up blocking more than you intended.

Take for example using DNS modifications to restrict access to banned web pages, most of the Scandinavian countries do this routinely. But it’s a pretty hopeless way of restricting content in my opinion. Firstly all you have to do is point your client at a different DNS server and you’ve bypassed it, secondly reason is that if you use the DNS method to say block a bad page on Youtube that you don’t like, you’ll have also blocked the entire domain Youtube!

But my funniest internet censoring attempt has to go to the Republic of Yemen, they’ve used a pretty decent content filter called Websense, they have control of the two ISPs so they should be able to control pretty much everything. Yemen of course seeks to block loads of stuff but fortunately they’ve done it rather badly. You see they didn’t buy enough licenses for Websense, in fact no where near enough. So if you’re unlucky you’ll be subject to a backward, restrictive internet policy but when enough Yemen users are online you’ll get unrestricted access as when the user amount is exceeded then no filtering happens.

You have to smile 🙂

Learn all about the issues across the world about online privacy protection.