Excerpt from the page: "domain name that doesn't have a dot at the end is not fully-qualified and is potentially ambiguous".
My high school put in a transparent squid-based filter for all HTTP content in my second year, and all traffic going to ports 80 and 443 went through it. They blocked all UDP traffic (even internal to the school, and all outbound TCP traffic except to ports 80, 443... and port 21, which the Yearbook people needed to upload files somewhere. Once I realized that the traffic on port 21 didn't go through an active sniffer, I just started running my SSH server at home on port 21, and bringing PuTTY around on my USB key.
In fact, that's happening in North Korea right now, too. North Koreans who fled have radio stations in South Korea and some of them also smuggle some radio units in NK.
I wonder though, do we have more or less freedom of speech over time? I tried to google those things, but I couldn't find the graph of freedomness over time.
(No, ancedotes don't count. Our perceptions can be skewed by media bias.)
I think this article was either on The Atlantic, The Economist or BBC, if you want to go digging.
And Freedom House's latest report talks about the recent decline (8th straight year): http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/freedom-house-sees-autho...
http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-...
You can help out by dedicating some spare resources to run as a relay + bridge, takes a minute to install and setup.
Share your bridge info to those who require it (not publically).
Example install + config:
NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Only exit nodes could possibly attract attention from authorities. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network. The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-ca...
[2] https://cloud.torproject.org/
[3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-...
It might take them a while to look up what a bridge is.
[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...
¹ https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...
https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...
There was a huge spike in Mid 2013, cause by a botnet that installed tor. Before there was almost not oscillation. After that there is quite a bit. I think there are many infected PCs at companies.
Hopefully uProxy, slated to be released this summer, will address these issues effectively by incorporating a trust model[3] into facilitating circumvention through such censorship walls. Meanwhile, more and more https[4] would be helpful.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/tor-operator-char... [2] http://cryptome.org/2014/01/spoiled-onions.pdf [3] https://www.asl19.org/en/know-more-about-uproxy-live-qa-with... [4] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-...
I think Tor's a bit of an overkill. This message sent over Hotspot Shield from Vietnam because of my Facebook addiction (blocked on and off here)
From what I understand the whole blocking twitter is due to the Turkish government not liking what is said about them on twitter. Now by their actions they have created more people saying things they will not like on many other platforms and with that, were will it end. Will they block of the entire internet or will they deal with the issues being raised about them in a constructive way beyond effectively gagging everybody as they are unable to put there hands over there ears.
Either way, this is a dangerous path they are taking and the fallout will be greater than the problem they perceive too be abating.
https://github.com/iShift/twister-webkit
Centralized Twitter is too easy to stop/block by countries.
After the Tunisian revolution, there were thoughts and plans by politicians to do censorship again. This was dismissed as politicians, officials and government finally recognized that censorship can be overcome no matter what they try. Religious complaining about "porn" and that stuff can ask their ISP for a traffic filter.
https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...
Also, this peak also happens at other countries, alth. they vary by size. https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re... This is singapore, I have looked at others(uk etc.) and they are same too.
Of course then you can just block that other service as well.