This is a screenshot of the Tor proxy users, showing people from these countries using the Mises Tor server to bypass Internet censorship in their countries. These numbers are for one 24-hour period. These numbers are for the censorship proxy only.
Tor, created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, makes it possible for people to browse the web without IP detection and hence without fear from overlords in government. This helps spread information, which might be the most important defense against despotism that the world has today.
Servers must volunteer to be helpful in this regard. Mises.org is such a volunteer – as part of a a commitment to the cause of free speech and free flow of information.
The anonymizing proxy routes the traffic of many thousands of users every day. You can see us in the total rankings (look for MisesDotOrg2) here.
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I heard it said many years ago that “The internet regards censorship as damage and routes around it.” All it takes is time.
Just as the governments have tried every measure in their power to hobble the free market and failed, there is very little that the government can do in the end to stop the truth from spreading. It may take time, but eventually it starts to spread rapidly (and there’s nothing the state can do to stop it).
Sorry if I was a bit preachy there guys.
just for the record i am visiting mises.org daily without tor. the censorship is not far advanced in germany
1) You guys at Mises are great.
2) I know very little of this kind of thing. Is it possible that the CIA or FBI or a spam giant could get to the Tor leadership and secretly undermine the anonymity?
Fallon,
TOR is just a protocol. It’s fairly decentralized. The only way to get rid of TOR would be to get all ISPs to actively filter it out. Given that most broadband ISPs in the US are effectively state-owned, this wouldn’t be very difficult…
Although in that case we could simply just create another protocol and begin to use that, though it means we’d have to start all over with creating a base. Ultimately the only way to completely censor the internet is to ban the internet altogether.
How do we get this to use it? I fear the censorship coming to America itself, and would love to be able to surf the web annonymously.
I would like to more about tor, because censorship in the UK is very much a fact of everyday life on the web. NewLabour has a priority of being continually on the offensive concerning the control of public opinion. We need every possible option here.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
In the words of Mr. Burns:
“Eeeeexcellent.”
A protocol is usually associated with a port number. Filtering starts with IP address space and then port number.
If the censors block access to a range of IP addresses, then it takes a router that can see outside that space to route traffic from one address block to the other.
If they block the port, then all that has to happen is the port number for the protocol to be changed to another number and the info flows again.
There are 65535 possible port numbers to choose from discounting the first 1024 that are reserved. HTTP port 80 is the primary port number for webpages. 443 is the HTTPS port for secure web page.
Hackers will, when blocked, setup alternate routes. Sometimes their activity is criminal, but at other times it is a godsend. Just remember that John Hancock was a criminal in the eyes of the British government and you will kind of get the idea.
Some filters only block the DNS lookup of the name. Such as http://www.google.com. What the DNS server does is convert the name to an IP address.
For that kind of filtering the workaround is to use the ip address instead of the name. Mises.org is 174.132.65.90
If you type this into your browser like this:
174.132.65.90:80
You will bring up the mises HTTP web page and your machine will not query the DNS and so will bypass any blocking of the domain name itself.
If you know the address and port of a proxy that can reach outside of your censored area, the form is the same Ipaddress:portnumber or you can enter these into your computer’s Internet settings for proxy server.
I hope that helps some of you who are unfamiliar with the workings of the Internet and censorship.
One more thing. If you suspect that your transmissions are being watched, then you should use a secure proxy. This means all of your traffic between your machine and the proxy is encrypted, just like it is when you log in to your HTTPS bank account. You would also do well to change your MAC address on your network card and even your modem if possible to keep your location difficult to ascertain, and do this often. Unfortunately most broadband modems are not configurable by the end user, so a laptop with WiFi would be safer under extreme conditions of censorship and oppression.
Thanks Seattle and Deefburger. I am simultaneously encouraged and made more wary
Awesome!
Very cool!
Thanks Deefburger.
Some filters only block the DNS lookup of the name. Such as http://www.google.com. What the DNS server does is convert the name to an IP address.
Tor, used properly, routes DNS queries through the tor network, too. (There are even special addresses, with names ending in “.onion”, that only exist inside the tor network; nobody can even tell where they’re hosted, etc.)
I recommend that you, the user, are careful with using tor. Tor is less reliable for security of the information that pass through and it’s not all anonymous if don’t really understand what goes on the wire.
As for Mises.org I advise you to filter some address. Tor has been used for illegal and nasty activities because of its power. You can just start to monitor what hosts and IPs are accessed through your node. It may be counter-intuitive but it may give more certainty that your bandwidth is not being used for immoral things.
There is a factual error in this post. From WikiPedia (and agreeing with what I’ve heard in the past):
“Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004 and the EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005.”
Also, an interesting snippet from the Tor project web site:
“A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.”
Funny someone asked if the FBI or CIA could bypass the anonymity. Well if I know my tor history right the CIA had something to do with the development of it,and uses tor itself to keep CIA web Los anonymous as well.
Just make sure you don’t get mad if you try to use Tor to connect to port 6667 (IRC), as many IRC networks block Tor.
Still, the Tor protocol is very important.
I would like to explicitly point out what has already been suggested: TOR is not secure.
It is a way of bypassing automated firewalls and such, but source and destination are still contained in the packets, just under “layers” that are added and stripped off by the “onion” routing software.
Someone actively sniffing packets can determine where you are and where you’re going, so as already stated if you want security use a “secure” proxy that encrypts traffic. At least that way the NSA won’t know what you’re seeing for several minutes until they decrypt it.
Net censorship in Germany, Japan, Italy, or Poland? You just get too carried away.
As a resident of the country, whose government, in particular the President, gathered from July 2010 to take control of all internet traffic, I must say that the use of PROXY for me the only way to receive and give information in a less free mode. In general, this control is just ass. Lukashenko took "a pencil" each "click" on the Internet
I would like to explicitly point out what has already been suggested: TOR is not secure.
It is if it’s used properly.
It is a way of bypassing automated firewalls and such, but source and destination are still contained in the packets, just under “layers” that are added and stripped off by the “onion” routing software.
The “layers” are encrypted, so only the intermediate pair of nodes can read it; that’s why a minimal tor hop uses three nodes — the entry node knows where it came from and the middle node, but not where it’s going, the middle node knows the entry and exit nodes but not where it came from or where it’s going, and the exit node knows the middle node and destination (and the content, if it’s not encrypted), but not the source or entry node. All three have to be compromised to hurt you (and if you’re paranoid, you can increase the number of “middle” nodes). Packet sniffing won’t help. And the NSA probably can’t decrypt it, either (at least, not in a reasonable timeframe).
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