Jillian C. York » Haystack and Media Irresponsibility

I have been reading about this “Haystack” anti-censorship tool for a while, but have withheld comment up to now. The above linked article seems to justify my reticence.

This tool has been a media darling, hyped in many different publications, but try as I might I have never been able to find out any solid information about what it actually does. Just a lot of marketing hype.

It now looks like the system was well intentioned snake oil. I still have not seen it, so this is all hearsay. Unfortunately it can be very difficult for the average person to tell the difference. One thing to look for is transparency in security systems. No security system should rely on assuming the enemy will not work out how it operates. It absolutely must be secure even if the opponent knows everything.

Other good signs are the experience and reputation of the author, the length of time the tool has been in use, and published analysis by other independent security experts.

As it turns out, media hype has a very poor correlation with real security.

I am very excited to be organizing a couple of panels at this year’s “Computers Freedom and Privacy” (CFP) Conference in San Jose June 15-18.

Historically the conference has focused on personal privacy / freedom issues, technologies, and policies. That was certainly my focus as well when I started Anonymizer. Over time I have become aware of some other aspects to the privacy issue that I have not seen discussed. In addition to corporations impacting privacy of their customers, users, employees, etc. they also have issues and needs for privacy themselves.

Companies activities are monitored, analyzed, blocked, misinformed, and censored. While these have analogs in the personal privacy world, the details, impacts and scale, and solutions to the problems are often very different.

I am organizing a panel to discuss these issues at the conference and would love to hear from others who may have experienced these kinds of issues and would be willing and able to share them at this conference.

Google Runs Into Chinas Great Firewall – WSJ.com

This article reports on an outage experienced by Google users in China. At first Google thought it was due to a technical issue, but now think that it was an intentional outage caused by the Great Firewall of China. It seems likely that this was a retaliation to punish Google for its statements and actions.

From the Official Google Blog (follow link for the whole post):

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

I would expect to see China censor Google.cn very quickly (which would prevent the re-direct to Google.hk). It will be interesting to see if China will then take the next step of censoring Google.hk and possibly other Google properties around the world. It would be easy for Google to set up any or all of them to return results in chinese if the browser is detected to be configured in that language.

Tor partially blocked in China | The Tor Blog

That last article lead me to this post on the TOR blog from September 15, 2009 (I am a bit late to this party). China is now blocking about 80% of the public TOR nodes.

This mostly ends a rather baffling situation where for some reason the Chinese were failing to block TOR even though it was being used effectively for censorship circumvention, the list of nodes is publicly available, and they are no more difficult to block than any other server.