Censorship: web-manual rebellion "Error 404: page not found" The network as a multiplier of ideas and claims. And off the dictatorial regimes to silence the voice of protest. Tools that have to do and how to succeed. But opponents know how to circumvent the prohibitions of
Arturo di Corinto (Repubblica.it)
no one can deny that the Internet has played a role important in the insurrection that led to the first flight of Ben Ali and Mubarak and (maybe) after Gaddafi. The network is in fact the first offer as a platform to denounce the corruption and popular anger and then as an instrument of organization and coordination of protest actions which multiplies the force. But not everything started from there. Although the protests had been prepared by the underground workings of bloggers and activists who have often paid with imprisonment and torture their denunciation of the regime, had to wait for the bread riots in order to understand the extent to which he had dug the discontent.
Protests have erupted in Tunisia after a street vendor set himself on fire in protest contro le continue angherie della polizia. Solo dopo è partita una mobilitazione generale in cui quello che accadeva nelle strade veniva comunicato al mondo via Internet e poi rimbalzato da radio e tv indipendenti per essere ripreso e sparato su Twitter, Facebook, Youtube ed altri social media producendo un effetto di emulazione nei paesi vicini. Quando i regimi si sono accorti della potenza moltiplicatrice della rete, hanno provato a bloccarla, riuscendovi, anche se solo per poco.
La rete si ferma solo se si spegne . Ma come è possibile fermare la rete delle reti se il mito delle sue origini parla a communication device capable of withstanding a nuclear war? "The Net interprets censorship as a malfunction and routes around it." There is some truth in the words of John Gilmore, an expert cryptographer and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
, and is in the operating logic of the network using a technology, packet switching, packet switching, which treats the data as the carriages of a train that arrived at the interchange stopped divide, take different paths and then are reunited at their destination. But if the network is nothing to bypass. What happened on January 28 in Egypt and then in Libya on February 19 was just that: the disconnection della rete dai circuiti nazionali e internazionali.
Come ci sono riusciti? La risposta è semplice: per ordine del governo. Il traffico di Internet viene operato in tutti i paesi dai carrier di telecomunicazioni attraverso le proprie infrastrutture: linee telefoniche, fibre ottiche, cavi dedicati, ponti radio e connessioni wireless. Queste compagnie non solo sono soggette alle leggi e all'autorità dei paesi nei quali operano ma spesso sono di proprietà pubblica e operano in regime di monopolio o quasi monopolio, sicché se un governo gli chiede di spegnere la rete, lo fanno.
E' accaduto in Nepal nel 2005 in seguito all'indizione della legge marziale e nella ex Birmania nel 2007 durante la rivolta dello zafferano. I due countries have been completely isolated. All over the country just in time this complaint
was repeated many times in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Bahrain, Uganda, Yemen, Iran, in elections or political demonstrations, and in the Chinese province of Xinjiang after a series of ethnic conflicts. The "shutdown" of the network, however, is a measure so drastic that it is impossible to sustain for long. The economic damage it produces are disastrous. For this reason, African regimes had previously acted in blocking sites, preventing the use of social networks, making it impossible for cellular communications.
How do I lock internet . Techniques disconnection implemented by authoritarian regimes are many and include the blocking of IP addresses, the URL through a proxy server, tampering with the DNS (the system that lets us find the addresses of sites), actions that inhibit access to specific web pages , entire domains (. org.. com,. ly, etc.), or specific addresses. Other techniques involve the installation of filters within the user's computer, keyword blocking, which prevents access to sites that have certain words in the name or impede the search engines view them on the basis of blacklists of hot words. That's what still happens in the network when you type the words China Tibet or Falun Gong. These techniques were used during all the repressions North Africa.
But this happens more often than we think.
The OpenNet Initiative - a research project on censorship and control of the network involving the Universities of Toronto, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge - found that more than 36 countries at various levels filter political content, religious sites, pornography, gambling. And what is worse is that network users often do not know, because it does not engage in prohibited activities, and because the means of censorship more prosaic use techniques such denunciations, arrests and intimidation. All of these techniques, technological filters and actions of police, needless to say are known by the name of Peking Consensus.
The web that is cross-border . So why despite all the insurgents in the same network can communicate via the web? Because if the cellular telephone network or work, or you have a satellite phone, you can connect to a foreign server, even using a regular dialup modem to make the phone number of the operator opens the door on the Internet (as Telecomix . org). In the case of a special team of Egyptian revolt Google has made available a list of these numbers 2. The problem with the modem is the first part of the connection is analog, so if the government intercept telephone communications are trouble. But if a computer uses anonymizing software like Tor, the links to forbidden sites are encrypted and not recognize cyberpoliziotti
. In Tunisia, where the control and filter e-mails is legal since 1998, satellite connections prohibited for individuals, and camping in the cybercafe where lists of banned sites and PCs have spyware, techniques were used to block interference and Selective such as DNS poisoning and IP filtering, circumvented by Anonymous (famous for the attacks to defend Wikileaks), to achieve defacement of government websites (I changed the homepage), while in Egypt bank and broker who sympathized with the rebels have made a bridge for communication using the provider Noor which was not locked. Moreover, since the first in Tunisia and Libya after several filters were applied to computer technology many have used to communicate Speak2Tweet, a service that allows you to record and listen to voice messages sent over the telephone
. Even Twitter has had some problems, but its engineers have worked around the decentralization of the server. Many of the services we use are objectionable because centralized and thus begin to depopulate the publication distributed systems on users' computers. In Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, but also in other states depopulated software for Windows and Linux, simple to use, all Italian, which allows the creation of "web sites" outside of the web portal with forums and blogs that do not require any central server - the portal propagates in peer to peer (p2p) and is duplicated in full in the computer of each node connected
. Enterprise hacker and human rights activists have offered tools to insurgent to circumvent censorship and ensure privacy and anonymity to freely communicate and access, without getting caught, blocked or inaccessible content, hiding his identity. And this is the other part of the explanation. At this time, to know if a site is inaccessible as possible and report his complaint to the world you can still use a simple tool developed at Harvard University: it is called
. tract http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2011/02/23/news/web_rivolte-12769492/
