New system could make censorship of Internet sites virtually impossible

www.gizmag.com...

Chinese citizens could once again enjoy LOL Cats on YouTube - as well as content critical of the communist government - if a new system developed by researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) and the University of Waterloo (UW) in Canada were implemented. The researchers claim the system, called Telex, would thwart Internet censorship and make it virtually impossible for a censoring government to block individual sites by essentially turning the entire web into a proxy server.

What an interesting idea, wouldn't it be wonderful if it were possible? You know what they say, If its to good to be true, it probably is. Sorry, but I don't see how schools funded by government dollars would be able to pull something like this off. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is just the opposite of what it says. More then likely Obama's kill switch that we all will be more then willing to install on our systems.

Wouldn't we have to have to own ISP ?

If they control ICANN..and they do..and if they control the ISP's ..and they do. How will this solve?

I mean without hacking the IPS's ..or just using them without their knowing it.

Peace

In over my head but wondering.

Originally posted by spav5
Wouldn't we have to have to own ISP ?

If they control ICANN..and they do..and if they control the ISP's ..and they do. How will this solve?

I mean without hacking the IPS's ..or just using them without their knowing it.

Peace

In over my head but wondering.

Not really, it requires a secure connection to a website, anyone can put up a "secure" website to allow the initial connection to the proxy cloud

reply to post by NuroSlam
Okay. I'm old. An uber-dork, but whats to stop them from blocking data at the hubs. And I mean physically. Wouldn't that make all this programming useless?
Apologies, if I'm too stupid to see the reasoning behind it.

Originally posted by beezzer
reply to post by NuroSlam

 

Okay. I'm old. An uber-dork, but whats to stop them from blocking data at the hubs. And I mean physically. Wouldn't that make all this programming useless?
Apologies, if I'm too stupid to see the reasoning behind it.

edit on 13-8-2011 by beezzer because: (no reason given)

I guess a simple explanation of a proxy server is in order. Lets say your sitting at work and your company only allows access to basic websites those on port 80 and 8080 (the two most common). Now you have a streaming server at home that is serving up video but its on a port other then 80/8080 say 6999. Your companies firewall prevents you from accessing the video as the port is blocked. the way around that is to setup a proxy server. From work you connect to the the proxy server on port 80, the proxy server sends a request to port 6999 for data, the stream server sends the data to the proxy server. The proxy server then sends the data via port 80 back to the client.

From my reading of the article, the telex system is a private key proxy server/client system. since the key is only seen by the telex system, firewalls would not see the key as it would be hidden within the header information of the page itself.

Thats the short of how they say it works. Unless this is an opensource project I would rather pluck my eye out then install this on my system as it requires a telex client on every system wanting access to the service. Can you say back door?

reply to post by NuroSlam


Thank you for the easy to understand explanation. That was very very helpful indeed. However I can not help but wonder, if this can be done so easily what is to prevent a fix for such an action in the next Windows edition? It sure seems to me that any kind of programming that one can come up with, there is always another line of programming that can counter it, and quite frankly I would not expect anything less from a Corporation like Microsoft.

Originally posted by NuroSlam

Originally posted by beezzer
reply to post by NuroSlam

 

Okay. I'm old. An uber-dork, but whats to stop them from blocking data at the hubs. And I mean physically. Wouldn't that make all this programming useless?
Apologies, if I'm too stupid to see the reasoning behind it.

edit on 13-8-2011 by beezzer because: (no reason given)

I guess a simple explanation of a proxy server is in order. Lets say your sitting at work and your company only allows access to basic websites those on port 80 and 8080 (the two most common). Now you have a streaming server at home that is serving up video but its on a port other then 80/8080 say 6999. Your companies firewall prevents you from accessing the video as the port is blocked. the way around that is to setup a proxy server. From work you connect to the the proxy server on port 80, the proxy server sends a request to port 6999 for data, the stream server sends the data to the proxy server. The proxy server then sends the data via port 80 back to the client.

From my reading of the article, the telex system is a private key proxy server/client system. since the key is only seen by the telex system, firewalls would not see the key as it would be hidden within the header information of the page itself.

Thats the short of how they say it works. Unless this is an opensource project I would rather pluck my eye out then install this on my system as it requires a telex client on every system wanting access to the service. Can you say back door?

I get it. Thanks for the refresher.

Originally posted by MrWendal
reply to post by NuroSlam

 

Thank you for the easy to understand explanation. That was very very helpful indeed. However I can not help but wonder, if this can be done so easily what is to prevent a fix for such an action in the next Windows edition? It sure seems to me that any kind of programming that one can come up with, there is always another line of programming that can counter it, and quite frankly I would not expect anything less from a Corporation like Microsoft.

The only way to stop something like this is to A. prevent it from being installed on the client or server, or B. to close the port off at the kernel level, which would make the OS worthless in the Internet age. Closing port 80/8080 means no web browsing. The only secure system is one not connected to a network. Second, MS could not stop this from working on a whole slew of other OS's that are in use today. MAC, BSD, Linux etc. Again, I question the motives of this.
The nice thing about an opensource project is, if you have the skills you can see exactly what it does even before its installed by looking at the code.