Re: Fighting the cybercensor.

["Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>]

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On Tue, 21 Jan 1997, Phillip M. Hallam-Baker wrote:

> 2) How can one prevent the proxies themselves being blocked? Some
> ideas that come to mind:
> 
> 2a) Only issue new sites gradually so that blocking requires
> continuous updates.

I'm not sure how effective this would be.  This depends mostly on security
through obscurity.  If the censors are very dedicated to making sure that all
sites containing offending content are blocked, then there might be a few
hours between the time when the mirror is set up and when it gets blocked.

I prefer to think of the solution to this problem as a denial of service attack
rather than just relying on obscurity.  If the goal is to make sure that a
large number of people have access to the mirrors, then the chances are it will
be blocked fairly quickly.  If many different diverse sites set up mirrors,
this would effectively cut off that country's access to the web.  This still
does rely on some obscurity, such as being able to change URLs on a site
frequently so the whole site has to be blocked instead of just the offending
URL.

A series of linguistic instructions on generating the URL could easily evade
any bot seeking out notices of new URLs.  This might be spelling out the URL,
telling the user to find the MD5 hash of a specified string (a cgi interface
for md5sum might be useful for this example), or any obscure method of encoding
an URL that should be easy for any person to understand, but impossible for a
program to parse.

> 2b) Use DHCP to change network addresses regularly.

If this change is regular enough, then it might force the censors to block the
whole network and not just the host.  Definitely a positive.



Mark
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