Chinese Censor-Beating Software Resembles Malware, But Isn't

coondoggie writes "Software designed to beat Chinese censorship may behave in ways that seem suspect, but it is all part of the application's strategy to fool the Great Firewall of China, according to one programmer of the software. 'There are many built-in tricks that do all kinds of things to confuse the firewall,' says David Tian, a scientist for NASA who works spare-time on UltraSurf, the free software designed to promote unrestricted Internet access for citizens of China persecuted for being members of Falun Gang, the religious group the Chinese government is trying to suppress."

Re:Confuse it? How?

[girlintraining]

It sends out search based noise and obfuscation by making randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN..

*face palm* Googling "how do I blow up government buildings" is going to attract the attention of shub internet no matter how many bogus queries you put before or after it. Most filtering schemes are based on content -- they don't care to do statistical analysis. You're just not that important. All they need to hang you is proof you visited a certain website or looked for certain terms. For example, if I typ[$)%(T^NO CARRIER

Re:Falun Gong

[FooAtWFU]

Tsk, tsk. This is an important cultural and religious phenomenon that you really should be aware of. Know then that John 6:49 goes something like this. Jesus is getting off the "dividing the loaves and fishes" episode and was evacuating across the lake; the crowd followed him anyway and now they're asking him for a miraculous sign so they can believe in him. They suggest the old manna-in-the-desert trick as an example. Many of them may be operating off of the popular "revolutionary messiah" premise, believing that there will soon be a military overthrow of the existing oppressive world order. They don't quite get what they expected:

"Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."

Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"

Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever."

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, "Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe."

... From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

Some interpretations dismiss this as a purely symbolic exercise, but the language isn't really the language of symbolism, and furthermore the actual working metaphors for "to eat (someone's) flesh" and "to drink (someone's) blood" mean "to persecute (someone)" and "to oppress (them)". The traditional interpretation for a long time - today, the Catholic and Orthodox stories - integrate this with the subsequent "Last Supper" rite in which blessed bread / wine are said to become his (Jesus's) actual body and blood (though the actual appearance and taste, of course, is unchanged, perhaps recognizing that, in fact, cannibalism is something that people find icky in oractice.)

The whole flesh-as-bread premise probably works a lot better with people who have a diet of mostly-bread, and actually experience handling bread dough, for whatever that's worth.

Re:Falun Gang

[rchh]

I am currently in China and the Internet censoring is not as bad as I had thought. I can open most websites, including BBC and New York Times. Most online proxies work. I can read any article from wikipedia- including that of Falun Gong ,Tibet and Human Rights.The most notable failures are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch websites. Maybe I can read most websites because they are in English?

Re:Falun Gong

[Toonol]

Isn't it a requirement of Catholicism? From the light reading I've done, it really seems that according to strict Catholic teachings, you have to have all your nutty rituals strictly in order when you die, or you burn forever.

That's one way in which Protestants have seemed to make more sense to me. It's just an up or down "Accept Jesus y/n" type choice. No chanting, no strange priesthood.

God, sometimes it just boggles my mind that we still have religion. I'll be playing a fantasy game, or reading a novel, with priests and churches and angels and demons, and it hits me that 90% of America fervently believes stuff that seems cheesy in a video game.

Wolves in sheep's clothing

[Shoten]

Steve Topletz and Jonathan Logan gave a fascinating talk at the BlackHat Briefings this past July, where among other things they discussed how one Chinese tactic in dealing with privacy groups is to set up their own organizations...a darker kind of astroturfing, if you will...that compete against legitimate privacy-focused groups. They also detailed their analysis of UltraSurf, which revealed some fairly horrifying things. For one, it's not just the code itself that historically has been trojan-esque in nature, but the behavior as well. Once they fired it up, it started probing a multitude of networks, all belonging to either Western governments, the financial sector, or the military. Also, it demonstrated that it was listening in within SSL sessions, as demonstrated by its behavior when browsing within SSL would return an error page (even a custom one, that wouldn't be of the normal size expected for a 404 response, for example). So, I'm not too likely to believe a guy just because he works for NASA; NASA is not an organization that was founded to provide bona fides for security researchers, so it really doesn't add any mantle of credibility for this topic.