How to
Neutralize IRI Filtering
Parts 1 and 2 Sam Ghandchi
Iranscope@hotmail.com
March 10, 2007
How to Neutralize IRI Filtering - Part
1
Three years
ago in March 2002, I wrote an article about using proxy servers
to read the Internet content that are filtered. 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 which was also published by Iran va Jahan
at the time. I also published a listing of the filtered web sites
that I had received at that time.
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 is filtered, that
I wrote about in an article in May this year.
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 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. 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.
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.
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.
How to Neutralize IRI Filtering - Part
2
More than a
year ago I wrote the first part of this article which was a sequel
to what I had written in the previous years making some suggestions
on how to neutralize Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI)' s filtering
of Internet web sites. I further discussed the topic in an interview.
At the time,
the scope of IRI filtering was not as extensive as it is today,
when by IRI's own admission, it is filtering over 10 million web
sites.
IRI is working
round the clock to filter the latest public proxy sites as soon
as they are announced, thus blocking the main alternate route of
Iranian web users to freely access the Internet.
My discussion here will be limited to technical solutions that one
can use to counter IRI's blocking of the sites and I will limit
myself to solutions that I have not discussed previously. I will
not repeat my suggestion of setting up private proxies outside Iran
for friends living inside Iran, or solutions such as programs like
TOR
TOR
that one can
install on a PC for accessing filtered sites, or using the option
of free email of AOL [http://www.aol.com] and then the free download
of America Online software to freely access filtered Internet sites
from within AOL, or my suggestions of creating Podcasting networks
and the like for distributing voice and video content. Also VPN
solutions are not only too complex but are too expensive for any
content provider to offer for thousands of visitors and Citrix
Citrix
tunneling although
robust and easy to use but are still too expensive to offer for
thousands of users.
Moreover, my
main proposal in the first part of this article where I suggested
an add-on to the browser, whether as a plug-in or as an added service
by the browser-makers, to provide proxy access with randomized IP
address, has still not been fully built by any vendor. Nonetheless
something close to the first approach has been developed by SecureAC
Secure
Accelerator
although their
business focus is less on what we can say Iranian users could use
today, but they seem to have the technology to provide it. And something
close to the second approach has been done by a browser maker called
Maxthon
Maxthon
which has had
a lot of success among the Internet users in China. Thus I will
not discuss any of these solutions in this article.
***
I think a new
way to combat filtering is by starting and joining more and more
port-agile Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. Such networks can help to
create an alternative infrastructure to access the Internet by popularizing
a new file-sharing scheme for the Internet users. And those who
would like to develop IP tunneling for P2P can IIRC can see what
is out there for those networks because most of the P2P protocols
are open source. And they can plan to provide encrypted solutions
for the point of entry to the network as needed.
Here I should
emphasize that proposed new file sharing infrastructure for content
distribution and access is a very beneficial investment for any
Internet user, and not just for the purpose of viewing filtered
Internet sites, and I believe this will be more and more the direction
all Internet users will have to move, regardless of any benefit
this approach may provide to bypass filtering or not.
In fact, using
such a file sharing structure is needed because people more and
more watch TV and listen to radio on the Internet and they move
on to use programs and data that require huge disk space and high
powered server PCs to process and all that can be only be cheaply
accessible by P2P network users.
Just in May
this year, Warner Brothers
Warner
Brothers
announced a
P2P service as their solution for delivering DVD quality TV content
to their customers. Please visit BitTorrent's
BitTorrent
own site and
check out some of the video clips that they are rendering and see
how high quality network delivery the offerings are.
To use P2P networks
for content distribution, current solutions are not limited to the
above. There are many solutions including "eDonkey," and
"Gnutella" to name a few among the major players in that
space.
These solutions
work with various platforms and the Windows users, who are the bulk
of the Iranian Internet user, report excellent experience using
P2P solutions.
Please view
my interview with VOA:
Sam
Ghandchi Interview with VOA
How to Neutralize IRI Filtering
Please review
this thread:
Filter
Breakers to Bypass IRI Filters
Hoping for a
day to live in an Iran with no censorship,
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