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Just because Pakistan is ham-handedly Streisanding Khan doesn't mean other countries (like China) don't have this down to a science.
by nwiswell 4y ago
Just because Pakistan is ham-handedly Streisanding Khan doesn't mean other countries (like China) don't have this down to a science.
- tialaramex 4y agoIs your contention that China is somehow able to censor individual Youtube videos? No, China simply doesn't allow the entire platform. Whether it is a video about how to fix your bicycle, about Hong Kong protests, or a song praising President Xi, you can't see it on Youtube from a Chinese residential connection, everything is blocked.
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoI don't think blocking individual videos would be very difficult.
- bhedgeoser 4y agoWhat about the 781 vloggers reacting to that video?
- ninth_ant 4y agoThey manage ok to censor that type of activity on their approved platforms, and block platforms that don’t comply. Their dystopian control is rather successful so far.
- School-Cotton 4y agoHow do you propose they do that without breaking TLS?
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoWell they don't have to break TLS if they can man in the middle everything and force browsers to use a CA they control.
- School-Cotton 4y agoThat’s hypothetically possible but there’s no evidence that China does that. Nor is there any reason to believe that starting to do so would be “not very difficult”.
- dec0dedab0de 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall I thought it was common knowledge that China has been doing exactly that for decades. I mean, I guess it's possible I've fallen for anti-China propaganda, but I really don't think so. The only hypothetical part on my part is how easy it would be to block a specific video. I know that blocking a single URL, or keyword matching on the title are common features in off the shelf proxy servers. Add some coding from a competent screen scraper, and you should be able to identify every way a specific video is being sent. I wouldn't be surprised if this functionality was already built in to some products.
- brian_cloutier 4y ago"force browsers to use a CA they control" is an essential ingredient. The article you linked mentions they have performed some CA trickery but does not mention anything about them having done it "for decades" and does not indicate that it is a widespread phenomenon. More explicitly: blocking individual YouTube videos requires control of the routers all traffic flows through AND control over the encryption of that traffic. If they cannot read the encrypted traffic then they do not know when a banned video is being watched. To date they have not exercised that level of control, they have not implemented a way of banning individual videos and it would be difficult for them to implement.
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoUsing a CA they control is only essential if they don't want to be caught. However, I would assume most webrowsers in China are using CINIC certs. At that point it would be trivial. Just return a different DNS entry, and have your CA verify it. Sure, pinning might alert some people that something is going on, but what are they going to do about it? I could have done it 10 years ago with WCCP and a bluecoat. But yes, I was wrong about them openly breaking SSL for decades. Doesn't mean it would be difficult.
- ipiz0618 4y agoYet they somehow manage to publish a huge amount of propaganda. They don't simply block the entire platform. They allow a few actors to access it.
- phantomathkg 4y agoIf we put on the authoritarian hat, it should be easy for us to tell how easy it is to implement default blocking for all and whitelist a few source IP to everything. No?
- aliswe 4y agoStreisanding Khan is to me an extremely bad way of putting this.