Category Archives: Censorship

Unnecessary Censorship - Kpop Edition

By: Sazerboo

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Unnecessary Censorship - Kpop Edition - Video

Obama speaks out against censorship and "I #39;m offended by that" culture.
It #39;s now very common to hear people say, #39;I #39;m rather offended by that. #39; As if that gives them certain rights. It #39;s actually nothing more... than a whine. #39;I find that offensive. #39; It has...

By: Red Falcon

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Obama speaks out against censorship and "I'm offended by that" culture. - Video

Funhaus: Necessary Censorship

By: b londers

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Funhaus: Necessary Censorship - Video

China has moved beyond censoring Internet content seen by its own citizens to using a new cyberweapon researchers have dubbed"the Great Cannon" to silence critics around the world, according to a report released Friday.

The first use of this capability was a weeks-long attack against Web sites that offer tools to help users evade Chinese censorship.By sending crippling amounts of Web traffic, the attacks attempted to knock offline the anti-censorship site GreatFire aswell as GitHub, a San Francisco-based Web service that is popular with programmers.

"This is very much an escalation," said Bill Marczak, one of the authors of the report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. While China long has used the Great Firewall - as its censorship system is called- to block users within the country from accessing news stories or other information it deems inappropriate, the recent attackreached beyond international borders and effectively blocked a wide range of content for Web users around the world.

China took control of millions of Web browsers and used them to send a flood of traffic to GreatFire, according to an earlier report from the non-profit, and later to GitHub.

But the type of assault used against the sites, known as a distributed denial of service attack or DDoS, represents only a small fraction of the possible uses of this tool, according to the Citizen Lab. The Great Cannon likely could also be used to deliver malicious code to any computer visiting a Web site based in China that does not use encryption to protect the privacyof its users.

China has become more brazen about attempting to block what its citizens see online under President Xi Jinping, who is tryingto promote domestic stability, according to Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow James A. Lewis. "Gettingcontrol over the Internet and information is a big priority for the Chinese - they're going after things they used to tolerate,and you're seeing a general clampdown," he said.

The recent attacks against GreatFire and GitHub appear to show that the country is willing to put ideological control over other goals such as the economic success of its tech sector, which could be damaged by censorship efforts, said Sarah McKune,another of the report authors.

The U.S. government has expressed concern about the recent attacks. "Malicious cyber actors who target critical infrastructure,U.S. companies, and U.S. consumers are a threat to the national security and the economy of the United States, and we areparticularly concerned about activity that is intended to restrict the ability of users around the world to access information,"State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach said in a statement.

"In this case, the attackers appeared to have leveraged Internet infrastructure located in China to overwhelm Web sites in the United States," Gerlach said. U.S. officials have asked China to investigate the incidents, he said.

The Chinese Embassy did not directly respond to questions about the Citizen Lab report or the attacks on GreatFire and GitHub.China supports the development of "Internet news communications" and "at the same time guarantees the citizens' freedom ofspeech," Embassy spokesman Zhu Haiquan said in a statement.

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China deploys new weapon for online censorship in form of Great Cannon

WASHINGTON - China has expanded its Internet censorship efforts beyond its borders with a new strategy that attacks websites across the globe, researchers said Friday.

The new strategy, dubbed "Great Cannon," seeks to shut down websites and services aimed at helping the Chinese circumvent the "Great Firewall," according to a report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

"While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the 'Great Cannon,'" the report said.

"The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses."

The report supports claims by the activist organisation GreatFire, which last month claimed China was seeking to shut down its websites that offer "mirrored" content from blocked websites like those of the New York Times and others.

The technique involves hijacking Internet traffic to the big Chinese search engine Baidu and using that in "denial of service" attacks which flood a website in an effort to knock it offline.

The report authors said the new tool represents "a significant escalation in state-level information control" by using "an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users."

The Great Cannon manipulates the traffic of "bystander" systems including "any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing (encryption)."

'Puzzling' openness

The Citizen Lab researchers said they found "compelling evidence that the Chinese government operates the GC (Great Cannon)," despite Beijing's denials of involvement in cyberattacks.

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'Great Cannon' widens China censorship: Researchers

Summary:China's ruling party is ramping up the censorship battle with a powerful new weapon which hijacks traffic outside of the country.

China has developed a new censorship weapon to accompany its Great Firewall in order to silence not only its citizens -- but critics around the globe.

According to a report released Friday by Citizen Lab, the 'Great Cannon' was first used against GitHub and Greatfire.org servers, both incidents of which were high-profile DDoS attacks designed to deny access to materials criticizing China's regime, censorship tools and copies of websites banned in the country.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto's Citizen LabCitizen Lab, the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and Princeton University suggest in the paper that these attacks were orchestrated by China's censorship barricade. However, while the attacks -- which used malicious Javascript to redirect Baidu connections to overwhelm the servers with traffic intended for China's largest search engine -- originated from the Great Firewall of China, the team say that the attack was carried out by an entirely separate tool.

This system, dubbed China's 'Great Cannon,' is reportedly a "distinct attack tool" with different capabilities to the Great Firewall. Rather than acting as an extension of the wall, Citizen Labs says the tool can "hijack traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle (MITM)."

"The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users. Specifically, the Cannon manipulates the traffic of "bystander" systems outside China, silently programming their browsers to create a massive DDoS attack," the researchers say.

The Great Firewall of China is an on-path system which monitors traffic between China and other countries. If requests for banned content are received -- such as access to Google, Facebook and Twitter -- the system terminates the request. However, the researchers say the Great Cannon works differently. The Great Cannon is in in-path system which is capable of both injecting and suppressing traffic.

In the attacks on GitHub and Greatfire.org, the new tool intercepted traffic sent to Baidu servers which hosted analytics, social and advertising scripts. If the Great Cannon saw requests for particular Javascript files, it could take two actions: pass the request on to Baidu servers or drop the request and instead send a malicious script back. The report states:

The idea that China's cybercapabilities may allow it to divert traffic from surfers outside of the country for its own ends is concerning. Furthermore, the researchers also say the tool only acts on a small percentage of the traffic it has the capabilities to manipulate, and the Great Cannon's functionality likely spans beyond such uses.

According to the team, a few simple tweaks in the Great Cannon's configuration -- switching to operating on traffic from a specific IP address rather than to a specific address -- would allow malware payloads to be delivered to targeted users who are communicating with Chinese servers without cryptographic protections set in place.

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China's 'Great Cannon': Taking censorship across country borders

China is deploying a tool that can be used to launch huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to enforce censorship. Researchers have dubbed it the Great Cannon.

The first time the tool was seen in action was during the massive DDoS attacks that hit software development platform GitHub last month. The attack sent large amounts of traffic to the site, targeting Chinese anti-censorship projects hosted there. It was the largest attack the site has endured in its history.

That attack was first thought to have been orchestrated using Chinas Great Firewall, a sophisticated ring of networking equipment and filtering software used by the government to exert strict control over Internet access in the country. The firewall is used to block sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as several media outlets.

However, while the Great Cannon infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, it is a separate, offensive system, with different capabilities and design, said researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto on Friday.

The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but rather a distinct tool that hijacks traffic to individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content by sitting between the Web server and end usera method known as a man-in-the-middle attack. The system is used to manipulate the traffic of systems outside of China, silently programming browsers to create a massive DDoS attack, the researchers said.

The attack method deployed against Github injected malicious Javascript into browsers connecting to the Chinese search engine Baidu. When the Great Cannon sees a request for certain Javascript files on one of Baidus infrastructure servers that host commonly used analytics, social, or advertising scripts, it appears to take one of two actions. It either passes the request to Baidus servers, which has happened over 98 percent of the time, or it drops the request before it reaches Baidu and instead sends a malicious script back to the requesting user, which has happened about 1.75 percent of the time, the report said.

In the latter case, the requesting user would be an individual outside China browsing a website making use of a Baidu infrastructure server, such as sites with ads served by Baidus ad network. In the DDos attack against GitHub, the malicious script was used to enlist the requesting user as an unwitting participant, the report said.

These findings are in line with an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that described the attack method used last week. According to the EFF, the attack was obviously orchestrated by people who had access to backbone routers in China and was only possible because the Baidu analytics script that is included on sites does not use encryption by default. A wider use of HTTPS could have prevented the attack, it found.

The Berkeley and Toronto researchers confirmed the suspicions about the origin of the attack, saying they believe there is compelling evidence that the Chinese government operates the cannon. They tested two international Internet links into China belonging to two different Chinese ISPs, and found that in both cases the Great Cannon was co-located with the Great Firewall. This strongly suggests a government actor, they said.

While DDoS attacks are quite crude, the Great Cannon can also be used in more sophisticated ways. A technically simple configuration change, switching the system to operating on traffic from a specific IP address rather than to a specific address, would allow Beijing to deliver malware to any computer outside of China that communicates with any Chinese server not employing cryptographic protections, they said.

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China's 'Great Cannon' DDoS tool enforces Internet censorship

There's a new tool in China's arsenal of Internet censorship tools: In addition to the well-known "Great Firewall" blocking those in the country from visiting certain sites, there is now a "Great Cannon" that deluges foreign websites with traffic in order to take them offline. The technique is detailed in a new report from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which also coins the term. It essentially works by hijacking traffic to a popular website, in this case Chinese search giant Baidu, and redirecting it toward a target this time it was GreatFire.org, a site hosted outside China that monitors censorship in the country and provides access to blocked material.

"Conducting such a widespread attack clearly demonstrates the weaponization of the Chinese Internet to co-opt arbitrary computers across the web and outside of China to achieve China's policy ends," reads the report. Such systems could also be configured to redirect and modify traffic coming from a target individual, instead of any crossing a border or going to a certain website. But Western authorities may have an awkward time condemning the Great Cannon, the researchers note, because the U.S. and U.K. have built very similar systems with very similar intentions, as indicated by documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The best defense against any adversary of this type, foreign or domestic, is good encryption, the report concludes. If the data can't be read by hackers or spies in the first place, it can't be tampered with.

First published April 10 2015, 11:55 AM

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China's 'Great Cannon' Censors Foreign Websites by Force

21 hours ago by Rob Lever China has expanded its Internet censorship efforts beyond its borders with a new strategy that attacks websites across the globe, researchers say

China has expanded its Internet censorship efforts beyond its borders with a new strategy that attacks websites across the globe, researchers said Friday.

The new strategy, dubbed "Great Cannon," seeks to shut down websites and services aimed at helping the Chinese circumvent the "Great Firewall," according to a report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

"While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the 'Great Cannon,'" the report said.

"The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses."

The report supports claims by the activist organization GreatFire, which last month claimed China was seeking to shut down its websites that offer "mirrored" content from blocked websites like those of the New York Times and others.

The technique involves hijacking Internet traffic to the big Chinese search engine Baidu and using that in "denial of service" attacks which flood a website in an effort to knock it offline.

The report authors said the new tool represents "a significant escalation in state-level information control" by using "an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users."

The Great Cannon manipulates the traffic of "bystander" systems including "any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing (encryption)."

'Puzzling' openness

See the article here:
'Great Cannon' is widening China censorship, say researchers (Update)

Kill La Kill Episode 9 - Censorship Comparison
If I can, I might do these for KLK #39;s episodes......since there are some "naughty" scenes coming up.

By: ToonamiOPED2

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Kill La Kill Episode 9 - Censorship Comparison - Video