How to Neutralize IRI Filtering (Sam Ghandchi)

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How to Neutralize IRI Filtering (Sam Ghandchi)

Postby IPC » Fri Sep 23, 2005 10:21 am

How to Neutralize IRI Filtering

Sam Ghandchi

http://www.ghandchi.com/424-filtershekan-plus.htm

Three years ago in March 2002, I wrote an article about using proxy servers to read the Internet content that are filtered
http://www.ghandchi.com/119-Proxy.htm

At the time, only a few political sites were censored by Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) using filtering, and the regime did not acknowledge that it was doing it. Still the Internet was not that important for the regime and IRI was busy shutting down the newspapers.

And those who were technically doing the work of IRI's filtering, and were seemingly the builders of the Internet in parts of Iran, when I confronted them on a Usenet newsgroup, and asked them directly about their filtering, they answered that they were filtering the porn sites, which showed that they were involved in the work of filtering in Iran. I told them that an Internet user like a family can decide the kind of content they like for themselves or their children and filter their accessed content accordingly, but the regime cannot decide this for all companies and the people of Iran.

In the meantime, I noted a couple of political sites that I had heard were filtered in the Internet access of school networks in Iran at the time, schools that these people were involved with, and they answered that those are the terrorists, and I then asked them if those people were doing terrorist activities on their Internet site, and asked what guarantees that they will not do the same censorship about others tomorrow.

They became silent and did not answer and it has been years that they are not saying how much they were part of this censorship in Iran and did the technical work of filtering for IRI, today that not only very moderate political sites are not tolerated by IRI, but even the most important discussions of documentaries and science and history sites are censored in Iran.

I hope one day these people to come forward and tell the world how this Evin prison of the Internet was built in IRI. This is not a personal matter and the same way that the likes of Oppenheimer after world War II acknowledged their mistake, these people also owe this to the Iranian people.

This is how our people are being deprived of access to knowledge and thought, and these people do not say that they had used their knowledge of computers and the Internet to serve IRI this way and still do. Yes, the mollahs are not the ones making the filters, but it is the computer experts, when some of them, are still thinking that they are helping the Iranian people with their knowledge, when they do this wicked job of filtering for money, and such a pity that if fifty years ago the scientists who made the atomic bomb, were ashamed of their work for years,whereas today some people who at first wanted the spread of knowledge and the Internet in Iran, have changed and have become the makers of the prison fence of Internet filtering around Iran.

A year after the above article, and the noted discussions, the main censor of Iran's political sites happened in May 2003. I remember that at the time Dr. Shaheen Fatemi in his Iran va Jahan site announced the filtering of his site and still my Iranscope site had not been filtered, but I immediately updated my article about how to technically do counter filtering, and noted that by using proxy servers, one could go around filtering [Please see the postscript to my article:
http://www.ghandchi.com/119-Proxy.hm
which was also published by Iran va Jahan at the time
http://iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news_en. ... &d=12&a=11Â I also published a listing of the filtered web sites that I had received at that time
http://iranscope.ghandchi.com/0103-Banned_Websites.htm

Three years after I had noted about censorship through filtering of the Internet, today even the documentary and news sites that the regime does not like, are filtered and the number of filtered sites has been noted as 600,000 to a million and it is said that IRI is now using semantic filtering, which means that they have a database of a great number of words that are given to the system and depending on how the content of a website uses a number of these words, the site gets filtered. Not only the documentary news sites, like my futuristic news portal site of Iranscope.com, but even my personal site
http://www.ghandchi.com
is filtered, that I wrote about in an article in May this year
http://www.ghandchi.com/407-FilteredSite.htm

The truth is that one cannot expect any more from a regime that executes someone like Esmail Mohammadi who had not been involved in any armed activity against the regime and had only done political activism against the regime
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Iranscope ... ssage/6345
and what else can one expect of a regime that pushes the opponents like Ganji, Mohammadi, Tabazadi, and Darab-zand to the border of death in the IRI prisons. If censorship has been reduced at any particular time, it has been because of people's protests, economic needs, and international pressures, or else the wishes of the retrogressive leaders has been to shut down the newspapers, radios, televisions, and as Ayatollah Jannati had tried for years, they would not even allow the Internet to enter Iran to have the need to filter it..

Here the topic of my discussion is not about activities in the UN against the Internet filtering, IRI censorship in Iran, or the violations of human rights by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which I have discussed in other articles
http://www.ghandchi.com/209-UN.htm
My topic here is how to *directly* counter the filtering.

Three years ago I wrote of a technical way to use the proxy and since then a great number of public proxies have been made for Iran, and most of them are free, and they provide very good service and this shows that many have recognized the need of our people in this area and have made a commitment to help. But most of these proxies themselves are either filtered or are filtered quickly. Even some institutions that make a new proxy every few weeks, and their proxies are of very high quality, are immediately filtered by IRI, and therefore become useless very quickly.

Of course, the technical solutions are not limited to public proxies. For example, if you have a friend living outside of Iran, who has Internet access at home, you can ask them to set up a private proxy at home, and to give you its address, and you can use that proxy to read the sites of your interest, and the address is not public for the regime to know it to filter.

Another way is that there are proxies that work by email and you send the web address of the site that you want to access by email, and they will send you the front page, and then you click on the links that you want to access, and the page related to those links will be sent to you by email and again you can click and again receive by other pages email. Of course, as far as I have seen the providers of this kind of service, the number of pages one can retrieve free are very little and soon one has to pay for each page making this a very expensive solution and also very tiresome, unless one can build this method inside the Internet browser itself, and of course once that happens the regime can trace the IP address and block the email port too.

Beside the existing technical options, and the solutions I noted above, one can invent new ways too. In my opinion, inside Microsoft's IE, Netscape's browser, or Mozilla browser one can make modification to make them stronger to access proxy servers. For example, if the browser can understand an address is blocked and automatically use an effective proxy server, it will make accessing filtered sites very easy for ordinary computer users.

Also if a maker of browser like Microsoft which is the maker of Internet Explorer (IE) creates a series of proxy servers with *unannounced* separate IP addresses and if those addresses are encrypted inside the IE browser code, and if inside the browser code to have a randomizer to pick one of them each time the browser needs to access a proxy site, and if it makes a *key* to contact the maker of the browser and each time the two sides agree on an IP address to use the related proxy, yet the address to stay encrypted, and that way the user without knowing what the IP address of the proxy is, or even without knowing how proxy works, can use the service, and the user is only entering the name of the filtered site in the browser as usual, and can see the site without even knowing that the proxy service has made this access possible.

Of course, if the Islamic Republic wants to decipher and filter all such proxy addresses that IE or Netscape or Mozilla make, they will have to use the browser with an automated tool repeatedly, and by monitoring the network traffic to see the IP addresses that are generated and used, and like deciphering radar codes, it will take a long time, and especially if the number of addresses in the pool is a few millions. Of course, every few months a company like Microsoft can change the addresses and send a definition update to IE users and thus the random IP address will now picked from a new pool. At any rate, such an invention and work can be done by companies like Microsoft, Netscape, Mozilla, and other web browser makers.

Of course, there are other technical ways too. For example, yahoo or google can increase the web caching of the filtered sites in their search engines, like the Internet archives, and this way those sites can be read from the Internet sites rather than direct.Â

Or those companies can allow their users who have user account with them to create private proxies in the yahoo system on the net and this way the users can use those proxy servers to read the content that are filtered in Iran.

These technical solutions were not my goal in this article, and actually most of these solutions are not directly doable by the Internet users.

We have about 4 to 6 million Internet users in Iran. Many of the more expert users of computers and the Internet can get to the materials of web sites by email from friends or thru the news lists or by proxy servers. In my opinion, if all those who have access to the Internet, create their own sites, and if they put the content of the filtered sites in their own sites, regime cannot arrest 4 to 6 million people, and either the regime will have to block them all which will paralyze the whole Internet system in Iran, which is in conflict with the economic and political reason that Internet was allowed to grow in Iran in the first place, or else in practice regime's filtering will lose its effectiveness.

In fact, the difference of radio, where the past regimes would paralyze them by static, and the Internet, is that the listener of a radio could not make his/her own broadcast station inside his/her country to re-broadcast the programs, and therefore the foreign radios were easily censored by static. Whereas in the Internet system, every user can also be a broadcaster, and not just in the sense of forwarding email, but in the sense of building one's own site, whether by using a blog or by using the services of a webhosting company which are cheap both in Iran and abroad, and regime cannot block them because they are so many. Moreover, by using PodCasting which uses a simple mp3 player that turns into an FM radio and even one can make a web server with it and have more than 60 gig of video, audio, and text on it to share with friends and family, in a private network in one's vicinity.

One problem such approach can create is the issue of copyright. Some sites do not have a copyright statement so that anybody can take the material and publish elsewhere and not have any problems. But if one is not sure whether the site agrees or does not agree to reprint their material then one can ask them. But in general as far as I know in most countries if a content is not reprinted for money revenues and if it is just for information sharing, the copyright laws are not an issue, but it is still better to ask about this issue about the laws of the place we live in from people who know about the law in our residence. My own personal site http://www.ghandchi.com does not have the CopyRight symbol and the reprint of my writings anywhere are thus unhampered, but you can read these rights statements on articles of others, or other sites, carefully so that they do not become an issue later.

Let me sum up that in my opinion to counter filtering of the Internet all the 4 to 6 million Iranian users should take action. It is not the early days of the Internet anymore where the ones active on it were limited and the IRI did not care to have much to do with it either
[See Hooshyar Naraghi's article about the early days of the Internet http://www.cappuccinomag.com/internet/000611.shtml The success of the Internet at the same time brings the suppression by the IRI regime. A regime that for years had spent its time closing the newspapers, now is filtering weblogs every second.

The other work of the regime has been that, the same way as in the realm of newspapers and books, on one side it uses censorship and suppression, and on the other side it pushes the thinkers to self-censor themselves. Although I understand those sites in Iran that have lasted by using this method, but many of them, when the other sites are eliminated, will have their turn to be filtered, even they do all the self-censorship possible. In fact, when I wrote my first article about using the proxy servers to help the banned sites, my own site had not been filtered yet. Today even many scientific and documentary sites are not free of IRI filtering.

Again I repeat that I understand those who do self-censorship and my goal is not to belittle their efforts. But I want to say that the efforts of 4 to 6 million Internet users to counter Internet filtering and censorship that I suggested, will also help these sites themselves, after they are filtered, or that it will cause the regime not to be able to filter sites so easily. The regime cannot kill 4 to 6 million people. They cannot close 6 million newspapers. And Internet has made it possible to have 6 million sites in Iran.

Hoping for a day to live in an Iran with no censorship,

Sam Ghandchi, Editor/Publisher

IRANSCOPE
http://www.iranscope.com

Sept 20, 2005

Related Articles:
http://www.ghandchi.com/407-FilteredSite-plus.htm

http://www.ghandchi.com/271-Censorship.htm

http://www.ghandchi.com/119-Proxy.htm

-------------------

Theoretical Articles
http://www.ghandchi.com

All Articles
http://www.ghandchi.com/SelectedArticles.html
Last edited by IPC on Thu Mar 02, 2006 11:56 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Postby IPC » Fri Sep 23, 2005 10:23 am

Defying Censorship with Anonymizer Technology
http://www.ghandchi.com/271-Censorship.htm

Please read the article attached below which is about new technology advancements to make workarounds to Web-Blocking of IRI, Chinese and Vietnamese Communist governments, and other despotic states in the age of Internet.  These dictatorial governments block the users in countries like Iran, China, Vietnam, etc. from accessing political and other "unwanted" information.Â

Here is the list of some of the Banned Web Sites by IRI:
http://iranscope.ghandchi.com/0103-Banned_Websites.htm

Web blocking is *censorship* and must be stopped:
http://www.ghandchi.com/209-UN.htm

A year and a half ago I wrote about using proxy servers to defy this form of censorship:
http://www.ghandchi.com/119-Proxy.htm

But the new Anonymizer Technology discussed in the following article is an advancement of that technology and it is already accessible from Iran using the following URL:
http://www.jaamjam.com

Hoping for a Futurist, Federal, Democratic, and Secular Republic in Iran,

Sam Ghandchi, Publisher/Editor
IRANSCOPE Portal Iranian Site of Iran News and Iranian Culture
http://www.iranscope.com
Sept 30, 2003

OTHER ARTICLES
http://www.ghandchi.com

*********************

ATTACHMENT
http://www.sanmateocountytimes.com/Stor ... 03,00.html
Â
Web site takes on repressive government

Anonymizer helps Web viewers get around state censorship in Iran, China
By Francine Brevetti, BUSINESS WRITER

San Mateo Country Times

Sept 30, 2003

As developing countries increasingly acknowledge the importance of high technology to their economies, those with centralized economies nevertheless tend to restrict their populations' Internet access. This typifies the approaches of the governments of Burma, China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and, to some degree, Singapore.
China, for instance, arrested a Web surfer last week who expressed his anti-government sentiments in chat rooms.

This past May, the Iranian government blocked access to a reported 15,000 Web sites. An unknown number are foreign news sites that would give Iranians access to news unmanipulated by the government in Tehran.

"People are hungry for news not controlled by the government" said Ken Berman, manager of the Internet anti-censorship program for the International Broadcasting Bureau. The IBB provides the administrative and technical support for U.S.-sponsored international broadcast services other than military ones. The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe may be among its best known services.

To keep Iranians in touch with Western Web sites, the IBB contracted with San Diego Internet security company Anonymizer to circumvent Tehran's censorship, as it has done previously for users within the People's Republic of China. The value of the contract would not be disclosed.

"Anytime the VOA Web site is blocked, it's a good bet other sites are as well, (for example) the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC and a whole host of other Western news sources. We went through a similar situation in China with Internet users trying the VOA or Radio Free Asia sites," Berman said.

When Tehran cracked down on surfing, numerous listeners reported to the IBB they couldn't access the VOA Web site anymore or that of Radio Farda, according to Berman. Radio Farda, also supported by the IBB, provides Iran with local news and stories that would not be carried through international commercial channels.

But since the adoption of Anonymizer's technology, the IBB has received positive feedback that attests to the satisfaction of Iranian listeners, said Berman.

This is how it works, according to Lance Cottrell, founder and chief executive officer of Anonymizer: The company e-mails in bulk to Iranians the name of a URL where they can find the VOA or Radio Farda without government intervention. Berman said Radio Farda also announces the URL on the air.

When an Iranian surfer goes to this Web site, called a proxy, it redirects them to the VOA or Radio Farda Web sites. There the surfer can also input any other URL that he wants.

Although the user accesses the proxy, the government cannot track what sites he is now surfing by virtue of the Anonymizer technology.

With the proxy URL being publicly announced, the Iranian government will surely catch up with it and block it eventually. But the URL is changed daily.

"We change it faster than they can block it," Anonymizer's Cottrell said.

Cottrell recalled that Iran's theocracy had been censoring print and broadcast before it became aware of the Internet's power to transmit criticism of the government or Islam.

Cottrell said that when he founded the company 1997 he was inspired to protect free speech online from tracking and monitoring.

Today, he insisted, the Internet worldwide is "absolutely more censored" than it was five years ago, especially among Third World countries.

"More and more countries are waking up to the importance of the Internet," he said -- to the detriment of free speech in the case of certain governments.

China is particularly a concern since it is attempting to circumvent the technology that Anonymizer provides.

"China is taking our box and reverse engineering it," he said. "First they just started blocking (Web sites), but now they are more subtle. Now they are redirecting (users). You try to go to the New York Times (Web site) but wind up at China Daily. And then they know you were trying to go to the New York Times."

Cottrell also despairs the many American companies whose technology, whether routers and servers or filtering software, sell their products to China, which uses them to subvert user access to the Internet.

Even as China keeps its iron fist on access, the government has proclaimed its future lies with high-tech and broadband communications. The IBB's Berman said the Chinese government is "spending billions putting fiber up and down the coast. Every new construction project has broadband throughout the office."

The Chinese government is contemplating a domain name registration system in Chinese characters rather than in the Roman alphabet.

Vietnam too has thrown its weight behind high technology to ensure economic growth, even while it, too, censors residents' Web access.

The Global Internet Freedom Act was introduced into Congress this summer. It would provide the IBB with funds to counter other governments' efforts to block and jam sites and the persecution of those who use the Internet.

Francine Brevetti can be reached at (510) 208-6416 and fbrevetti@angnewspapers.com .
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Postby IPC » Tue Feb 21, 2006 10:57 am

Dear Members:

Also take a look at this thread:

Filter Breakers to Bypass IRI Filters
http://www.iranpoliticsclub.net/club/viewtopic.php?t=51
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