Getting Around Web Censors With Flickr 81
An anonymous reader writes "Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr." For visual learners: this earlier story at GigaOM explains the system with a diagram.
Re:bottleneck? (Score:4, Interesting)
A system like this could presumably work through any site that hosts user-generated content. A repressive government would have to ban every service that doesn't allow them to tie each message to a real person. So they would have to block all of the Internet originating in the western world. Even for a place like China that would be pretty untenable.
Great for publishers who want nobody to read (Score:5, Interesting)
If Alice wants to publish the anti-government document document and she wants thousands+ to read it then just how would she go about getting the masses to read this using the hide-in-image option? eh?
There are already so many ways Alice can give a secret message to Bob and most of them do not involve computer technology.
This just seems dumb if Alice wants to publish something and she wants the masses to read it. China and Norway do not torture people for reading the wrong thing on the Internet, they torture people who publish something they don't like (such as information about NATOs false-flag terror operations).
Tor (torproject.org) still works in China as long as you use bridges and Tor works just fine with or without bridges in Norway. Publishers who want readership beyond their four hundred close friends are likely better off publishing their text using the Tor technology and those who have censored Internet access are also likely better off using Tor.
Re:Possession == crime (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternatively, imagine a one-time pad for use with a ciphertext that's slow-mosey'd into form by being all of the numbers, in order, in an otherwise-innocent business or weather article, or a span of them? Admittedly, this assumes the ability to insert arbitrary numbers into what's normally the realm of journalism or meteorology and to have the pages be available on an uncensored host, and have the appearances of these articles be agreed upon and prepared long enough in advance (potentially years), but it's not impossible if your reasons for sending a message is important enough.
This does all hinge on the ability to see the ciphertext in the first place. Alternatively, you could just end up shipped to a famine zone for $[THOUGHTCRIME] to sort everything out.
Re:Why is this being blurted out? (Score:2, Interesting)
China is not currently blocking Flickr - I am in south east China and have Flickr open in a another tab - it is blocked occasionally but the delays involved in connecting to accounts are not that significant - evidence of this is the large number of Chinese Flickr users and the availability of Chinese Flickr streams. Facebook is blocked - but any number of proxies can assist there.