3 ms·

The mechanism of blocking is the Internet firewall with deep packet inspection and protocol sniffing, together with lots of human intervention and tracking.

EGreg 9y ago
What if a common enough encrypted protocol is used to carry all communication, such as https TLS protocols?
- barkingcat 9y ago
  It's not a technology problem. Be aware that human operators are hired specifically for correlating internet traffic with these kinds of evasions. In the end, unless it's a robot talking to another robot, all internet traffic in China can be resolved to people. And people can be arrested or jailed or killed. Of course, if you want to "go tech" you can go underground, but being illegal has disadvantages in a state like china
  - EGreg 9y ago
    As I see it, a large set of computers all running a webserver over TLS can form a cryptographic global consensus (blockchain) for permissionless chat and other stuff. Sure, someone has to be running these serveds. But once they are ubiquitous enough, the government wouldn't be able to stop the chats by arresting / remocing any percentage of machines short of 90% or so. What kind of traffic correlations would then be taking place? That someone is making requests with one of these servers? It's always hard to arrest a meaningful number of users once the network itself is resilient, uses a common protocol that resists deep inspection, and has no major points of failure.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- kccqzy 9y ago
  It’s not just about protocols it’s also about the pattern of the data: the sizes and timing and other statistical characteristics of your packets. Tunneled traffic looks very different from normal web browsing even if you can’t read the content.
stephengillie 9y ago
VPNs stick out like a red flag in Wireshark. Instead of a variety of small packets going to ports 53, 80, 443, and the occasional 22 or 3389, coming from random 5-digit ports - all you see are big packets over port 500.

EGreg 9y ago

What if a common enough encrypted protocol is used to carry all communication, such as https TLS protocols?

barkingcat 9y ago
It's not a technology problem. Be aware that human operators are hired specifically for correlating internet traffic with these kinds of evasions. In the end, unless it's a robot talking to another robot, all internet traffic in China can be resolved to people. And people can be arrested or jailed or killed. Of course, if you want to "go tech" you can go underground, but being illegal has disadvantages in a state like china
- EGreg 9y ago
  As I see it, a large set of computers all running a webserver over TLS can form a cryptographic global consensus (blockchain) for permissionless chat and other stuff. Sure, someone has to be running these serveds. But once they are ubiquitous enough, the government wouldn't be able to stop the chats by arresting / remocing any percentage of machines short of 90% or so. What kind of traffic correlations would then be taking place? That someone is making requests with one of these servers? It's always hard to arrest a meaningful number of users once the network itself is resilient, uses a common protocol that resists deep inspection, and has no major points of failure.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
kccqzy 9y ago
It’s not just about protocols it’s also about the pattern of the data: the sizes and timing and other statistical characteristics of your packets. Tunneled traffic looks very different from normal web browsing even if you can’t read the content.

stephengillie 9y ago

VPNs stick out like a red flag in Wireshark. Instead of a variety of small packets going to ports 53, 80, 443, and the occasional 22 or 3389, coming from random 5-digit ports - all you see are big packets over port 500.