New Software May End Internet Censorship Once And For All – Google is launching a new anti-blocking technology created as a result of the actions of the Iranian government during the 2022 protests there, in the hope that it will increase access for internet users living under the regimes of authority worldwide.
Jigsaw, a part of Google that acts as an Internet freedom think tank, and makes related products, now offers anti-censorship tools including Outline, which provides access free, open, and encrypted online with a VPN. Outline uses a protocol that makes it difficult to detect, so users can browse the web without being seen by authorities who might want to restrict access to the internet.
New Software May End Internet Censorship Once And For All
But during last year’s pro-democracy protests across Iran, the government used sophisticated tactics, not only blocking all internet access but also targeting VPNs like Outline.
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Jigsaw is now releasing the Outline code in the form of a software developer kit (SDK) so that other applications can build anti-censorship directly into their products, the company told MIT Technology Review exclusively. This will create a smooth and easy user experience. For example, users of an app that uses this code—like a news site, for example—don’t need to connect to the Internet through a VPN. And at the same time, Google hopes to put users one step ahead of censors.
On September 19, 2022, the Iranian government began shutting down internet services in Tehran during protests against the killing of Mahsa Amini days earlier. Iran’s government, which has long been known for its high-tech surveillance and tendency to limit internet use, began shutting down the internet regularly from 4 p.m. until midnight.
As Iranians began looking for alternatives to WhatsApp, Instagram, and the rest of the internet, many turned to VPNs, such as Outline, that can route traffic to a type-sensitive location. of the tunnel. The number of daily users of Outline’s VPN on Android increased by 1,500 percent in Iran in the fall of 2022, according to Jigsaw’s lead engineer for internet freedom, Vinicius Fortuna.
But at the same time, the Iranian government sometimes blocked access to Outline and VPN-dependent applications. Then the Jigsaw team had to respond by quickly publishing a new open source code that could avoid blocking and restore internet access.
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This was a challenge for Jigsaw, and also for applications dependent on Outline, which then had to re-register their products to accept the changes. Martin Zhu, director of engineering for one app, nthLink, which helps users avoid the ban, said the process could take several weeks—while users are kept in the dark.
Although the idea had been floating around for several years, Outline’s new SDK is a direct response to threats from Iran, according to Fortuna.
Fortuna also says that with the SDK, Jigsaw is extracting parts of Outline’s technology “that we think are useful to other people” and building a library. This enables a kind of plug-and-play operation so that others can take parts of the library to create censorship resistance in their products as they see fit.
Importantly, in times of crisis, the SDK will make it easier for developers from different companies to work on the same code and enable them to manage updates more efficiently, allowing for faster responses. about the development tactics of censorship.
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Several groups are already planning to use the new technology. Balatarin, a Reddit-like site in Persian, plans to use the SDK to build a VPN functionality directly on its mobile device. Balatarin is subject to censorship from the Iranian government; its website has been blocked in the country since its first months. NthLink will also use the SDK to make its app more developed during the shutdown.
Balatarin says that this new technology can help more users to access its services, especially those who are not very tech savvy. Running a VPN requires a high level of technology, and it takes more power and battery power than a normal internet connection—that’s why a solution like SDK is good, says Mehdi Yahyanejad , the founder of Balatarin: “When the tool works. when it is used it will be very easy. And it would help users.”
This flexibility is also important because the Iranian government has created a limited version of the internet and provides access at low rates for businesses and households. (It has also forced mobile operators to provide direct access to the Internet and user information.) Iranian users who want to avoid surveillance or access blocked websites must endure switching to back and forth between the intranet and the wider network. , often at a higher price. The SDK will allow other developers to build VPN connections directly into apps for free, making it easier and cheaper for users to access the wider web.
In fact, while the SDK may be a game-changer for companies like Balatarin, building an “effective, stable, and robust” anti-malware technology Blocking Blocking Blocking will require more attention in the coming years as more actors interfere with users’ traffic, says Roya Ensafi, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan.
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Ensafi, whose research group is partnering with Jigsaw on projects to measure censorship, says he is “confident” about the SDK, which he calls “a step in the right direction” for a field that often struggles to keep up. and the unstable, expensive, and ongoing problem of censorship.
In the meantime, Jigsaw says, it is working on integration with other partners around the world and is focused on collaborating on content and media applications. I have spent the last two years of my life trying to stand on a platform where people can share information. Our team is frustrated by the current state of the Internet, where data lives in silos and user activities are locked into a single platform. We’re trying to build an alternative where basic concepts like social user graphs and content feeds can follow from platform to platform, and any developer can build new applications that using all available user data.
And while that journey is going well overall, we’ve hit some eye-opening obstacles when it comes to managing content on our platform. Internet entrepreneurship occurs in every area, including areas that most people don’t realize exist. Our website is crawled by our hosting providers, by platforms like Twitter, by search engines like Google, and we’re even crawled by the Chrome browser itself.
My goal today is to walk you through all the aspects of censorship that exist on the web. Most people don’t realize how many different actors are involved in keeping a website accessible to the public, and they don’t realize how many of these actors can decide for themselves when a website is down. should be there.
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Our first step in debugging came up empty. Cloudflare was properly configured, community members on multiple continents confirmed the outage, the server was up and responsive, and all services were reporting healthy locally. But more importantly, the outage wasn’t some kind of 504 or ‘server busy’ message. The browser was acting as if no one had registered the site at all.
We contacted Namecheap and found out that they forcibly deleted our website because we were accused of fraud. Upon further investigation, we realized that one of our partners had filed a harassment complaint that resulted in our removal.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, we’ve been working with Uniswap to host a real version of their application on our website. Uniswap’s anti-piracy team found our player and considered it a common piracy scam, so they asked Namecheap to remove our website.
We have spoken to both Namecheap and Uniswap, worked through the error, and restored our website. Our first blocking method was very user-centric, but it seems to be an honest mistake. We created better abuse reports, wrote better Twitter threads, and went back to business as usual. We thought that now that we had good communication with our domain registrar, censorship would never happen again.
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Things were fine for about a month, then we got another report that our site was down. This time, instead of completely going away we were getting the usual ‘server not found’ message, and it was only happening in our US-East region. We tried to connect to our US-East servers and found that they were not available.
It turned out that our US hosting provider – IONOS – had frozen our servers and account for abuse. The complaint was again about phishing, and this time the offending website appeared to be a website that scammed users for… Surprisingly, IONOS did not it’s funny. Unlike Namecheap, they didn’t restore our servers after we blocked the bad guys and shut down the pirate site.
We settled on relocating the US-East to the EU area. This had a latency penalty, but
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