Researchers Find Gaps In Iranian Filtering 156
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "With all the turmoil and internet censorship in Iran making it difficult to get an accurate picture of what's going, security researchers have found a way to locate gaps in Iran's filtering by analyzing traffic exiting Iran. The short version is that SSH, torrents and Flash are high priorities for blocking, while game protocols like WoW and Xbox traffic are being ignored, even though they also allow communication. Hopefully, this data will help people think of new ways to bypass filtering and speak freely, even though average Iranians have worse things to worry about than internet censorship, now that the reformists have been declared anti-Islamic by the Supreme Leader. Given the circumstances, that declaration has been called 'basically a death sentence' for those who continue protesting."
Reader CaroKann sends in a related story at the Washington Post about an analysis of the vote totals in the Iranian election (similar to, but different from the one we discussed earlier) in which the authors say the election results have a one in two-hundred chance of being legitimate.
Prot or protocol blocking? (Score:1, Interesting)
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Ports are not protocols. Or, to put it in geekspeak for you, Port != Protocol. Port is short for "Communications Port", and it is required to communicate with the OS from an external source. A protocol is a standardized method of communication. For example, TCP/IP are two protocols for networking - the Transport Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. They basically establish the pattern the ones and zeros will take when exiting your machine, so that another machine knows where the relavent data is
Internet filtering (Score:5, Insightful)
Information will get from anywhere to anywhere unless Iran completely disconnects itself from the rest of the 'net. There are as many ways to hide "communications" as there are protocols and servers out there, and no one can do a bloody thing about it. Even a "whitelist" style system would have holes in.
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The widescale filtering may do little to deter the geeks but it has had a profound effect on the average Iranian. [arbornetworks.com] By blocking simple messaging protocols they have achieved their goal for the major
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Now that the SL has declared the protestors anti-islamic, the police probably have the duty to KILL ON SIGHT anyone found protesting.
Which is really sad. That means it's literally do or die for any revolution.
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Now that the SL has declared the protestors anti-islamic, the police probably have the duty to KILL ON SIGHT anyone found protesting.
I don't believe it is the police doing the killing. The killing is being done by the Basij. They're the ones who shot Neda, a young girl, supposedly only 16.. Google "Neda" if you aven't already.
I'm seeing people on twitter suggesting that protesters carry a Koran.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Exactly! These people haven't learned anything from watching Star Trek: Voyager ? ;-)
... and publicly announcing this (Score:3, Insightful)
... and publicly announcing this will help these gaps to stay unfiltered?
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unfiltered: yes
unmonitored: no
Re:... and publicly announcing this (Score:5, Insightful)
"and publicly announcing this will help these gaps to stay unfiltered?"
It is in Iran's best interest to filter as little as possible. If you're a devout WoW player, they'd rather let you spend time on that, being oblivious and happy, than risk you being pissed off that you can't play. The most important thing for Iran's government to do is to try and make sure that no more people join the protests, and that those who have get discouraged by the hardship and return to their "comfortable" lives. They want people to return to "normal" even if it is just a sham because they can control the people that way. That requires people not paying attention to what the government is really doing, which requires giving people somewhere to "bury" their heads. The Internet is GREAT for that. I never found so many ways to waste my own time until I first opened that Mosaic browser one day...
What Iran's government has been doing with regard to filtering has been disturbingly effective. Yes, the protesters are getting together and communicating with each other, but there's no reliable sources of verifiable news. No reliable death count. No clear picture of what is happening. Citizen journalism is great, but it pales in comparison with what real news-gathering resources can do. So foreign governments are limited in their response, and that response is even more limited in the audience within Iran that can see it.
Don't discount the ability to keep information away from the militia men as well. The Iranian government is more dependent than ever on the blind faith of their security forces. They must be fed the party line, and be made to swallow it. You don't get that kind of obedience when those forces are allowed to think for themselves. So you deny them the ability to gather data to make up their own minds.
So yes, Iran is not blocking all possible methods of communication, but they're effective enough that they still may pull this off.
Information is power, and the information required to make your own decisions is the ultimate expression of that power.
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If you're a devout WoW player, they'd rather let you spend time on that, being oblivious and happy, than risk you being pissed off that you can't play.
No WoW has ever or will ever foment a revolution.
Prove me wrong, kids!
Good job (Score:3, Informative)
Now the censors know what they are missing.
Re:Good job (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, I'm sure they read slashdot. After all, they have nothing else to do.
Re:Good job (Score:4, Interesting)
maybe not Slashdot but security sites dedicated to finding flaws and gaps in their filtering most likely get looked at
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RS
I keep asking myself why we care about Iran? (Score:5, Insightful)
We pretty much know what Iran is all about. It is rather overt and obvious to most everyone. Any illusion about a democratically elected government can pretty much be put to rest. And now that they are invoking religious law (not that they haven't been all along) it is clear exactly where the source of power is. (Save the comments about the U.S. putting the Ayatolla into power, I already know.)
But I keep asking myself, why should we care at all? Will we care and demonstrate as much as the Iranians when the next freedom eroding thing happens in the US? Will we take to the streets in protest of ACTA? Will we collectively burn our required government healthcare cards? I seriously doubt it. The government controllers in the U.S. long ago learned the secret that other governments have yet to figure out. Keep the slaves comfortable, busy and distracted, and they won't put up a fight.
Why care about Iran? (Score:5, Insightful)
Petrodollars. Iran is threatening to sell oil in Euros. If people didn't have to buy dollars in order to pay for oil, the US government couldn't create as many as it wanted, which means that the military spending would have to stop.
It doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
Oil is sold on the open market, and currently, mostly in dollars, meaning that the source isn't as important as the ability to pay for it. Any major disruption in total world supply will have an effect on the ability to pay for it, because the market will bump the price up fast, including the oil from those nations you currently import the most from. They are not going to arbitrarily keep supplying at a much lower price "just because".
If/when (and I think inevitably) oil becomes priced in a lot more currencies than dollars, it will just cost more for US consumers. All these other nations aren't *that* stupid, they realize as the FRN gets inflated daily, it becomes worth less and less. Eventually they just won't think or accept that the dollar is worth what some blowhards in DC and wallstreet claim it is worth. The FRN is a debt instrument that currently is backed by more debt instruments, and not much else. Back when the petrodollar phenomenon took hold, it worked for the US because where we bought oil from turned around and used those petrodollars to buy US manufactured stuff. Plus, the US domestically produced most of the oil it needed anyway, something not true today.
Now let us contemplate the status of world trade and manufacturing from 50 years ago to today...hmm..
Starting to see the longer term ramifications of this? When those foreign nations could get real stuff for the swap, it was acceptable, now they are being told they need to just swap their real stuff-oil or various other commodities- for debt instruments backed by "the full faith and credit" of the biggest liars and conmen out there, who are already in hock to them to the tune of trillions.
They talk about peak oil, I think the larger picture is we have hit "peak trust" with the tangible producing world versus the US economic system, which apparently the main top official focus seems to be just creating paper and electronic "products" and that those, "trickled down" through keeping everyone in the US in perpetual debt via the credit "industry" combined with national government debt, will be enough to sustain everyone, that all these other folks will just keep swapping their real stuff for fancy IOUs in various flavors.
I think that isn't going to work for much longer. YMMV. My bet is on the tangibles and the tangibles producers winning the "what is worth more" global economic wars.
FRN? (Score:2)
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Thanks.
It doesn't matter where the US gets it's oil. (Score:3, Interesting)
You know where the US gets most of the oil from, right? Hint, it aint Iran or Iraq.
Totally irrelevant. This has bugger all to do with where the USA buys it's oil.
The rest of the world buys US dollars so that they can buy oil. This allows the US to print (borrow) dollars into existence and then spend them on whichever projects they want to without inflation sky rocketing. Military, healthcare, whatever is the pet project of the people in charge.
This is why Iraq and Iran are so important, particularly to the USA. Saudi is even more important in this regard and why they are America's bestest
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Why doesn't the rest of the world simply buy dollars back from the oil producing countries? I'm thinking this is an oversimplification of the issue.
In reality, when the dollar drops, the price of oil rises. So in practice the oil trade is already currency neutral, which makes sense since it's a commodity.
Re:I keep asking myself why we care about Iran? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I keep asking myself why we care about Iran? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I keep asking myself why we care about Iran? (Score:4, Interesting)
As much as I respect the Iranians who protest, what's going on in Iran is a big example of why the US may be hesitant to protest: protesting is SCARY. One of the most watched videos on Reddit recently is a gruesome video of an Iranian girl being shot to death for protesting. I think a lot of people in the US just want to be left alone by the government. Is protesting the government worth risking your neck or your job? What about your spouse and children? It's sad, but that seems to be the case.
I guess too many people have forgotten KENT STATE, or don't know our history, or just don't care anymore? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Those who remember now seem doomed to apathy.
What if you saw her dead on the ground? (Score:2)
"I guess too many people have forgotten KENT STATE "
There are tears in my eyes as I write this; I cannot forget the look in Neda's eyes as life slipped from her 16 year old body. She wasn't protesting, she was simply standing there watching with her father when she was killed by a snipers bullet who shot her right in the heart. Sources say it was the Basij on a nearby rooftop.
But you make a good point: people have forgotten Kent state [wikipedia.org], or rather, the memory of it is not being passed to future generations.
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Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Indeed. And those who remember it with rose colored glasses are doomed to repeat it far more enthusiasticly than the original.
The US Constitution guarantees the right to peaceful protests. What happened at Kent State certainly began as such, but the problem started when protesters began vandalizing cars, breaking the windows of businesses that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the war, and throwing rocks at the firefighters who arrived to put out the fires started by the protesters.
The shootings
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Neda was shot in the heart in front of her father for protesting.
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Actually no, she wasn't protesting. She was quite far from where the active protests took place and she and his father did not participate.
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Re:I keep asking myself why we care about Iran? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually just look back at the 2000 presidential election, there was a lot of protesting against the results in Florida... across the country. The tea parties earlier this year were protests.
So yes... US citizens can and do protest. Thankfully we live in a country where that usually doesn't lead to bloodshed... but even that has happened on very rare occasion. Complete with pictures of people being shot and dying. [wikipedia.org]
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Re:I keep asking myself why we care about Iran? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, maybe because some of us care about other people, and their rights, no matter where they are in the world. Maybe not everyone's a cynic all the time.
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Keep the slaves comfortable, busy and distracted, and they won't put up a fight.
Oh you mean like we've done here in Europe since the times of ancient Rome when they invented the bread-and-games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses) doctrine? Well sometimes even that can only go so far, as shown by countless revolutions in the past. You can keep them fed and you can keep them entertained, but at some point, they will get bored of you and throw a revolution. Then said revolution counts as entertainment until the new (or old) government is well settled and finds some new sand
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On one side of the world, we have death and destruction caused by actions by the US government, on the other side of the world, Britney Spears shaves her head and shows her twat. Guess what people are talking about?
Re:I keep asking myself why we care about I?DRILL (Score:2)
We will care as long as we're too stupid to develop all of our own energy sources and remain frighteningly dependent on the rest of the world.
DRILL HERE - DRILL NOW!
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The government controllers in the U.S. long ago learned the secret that other governments have yet to figure out. Keep the slaves comfortable, busy and distracted, and they won't put up a fight.
You're saying if you keep people happy they won't complain, but you present it as though that's a bad thing.
What gives?
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Will we collectively burn our required government healthcare cards?
*smirk*
Just like we burn our required government schools, required government roads, required government FDA... Have you suffered severe cranial trauma recently? Might want to have that checked out.
USA never liked the iranian govt (Score:2, Funny)
First they tried with war. Now they are trying to bring down the government. The oposition is a puppet of USA. The elections were valid. The protests are initiated by CIA and the news coverage is unfair. And, besides, we don't really care what happens to Iran and whether the USA appointed president will finally manage to take over Iran and make it McDonalds country. Really, if we cared we'd visit CNN.com or something.
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First they tried with war. Now they are trying to bring down the government. The oposition is a puppet of USA. The elections were valid. The protests are initiated by CIA and the news coverage is unfair. And, besides, we don't really care what happens to Iran and whether the USA appointed president will finally manage to take over Iran and make it McDonalds country. Really, if we cared we'd visit CNN.com or something.
Mahmoud! You here! How are things?
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Do you really, honestly believe the CIA is competent enough to organize a nation-wide rebellion?
You're so naive (Score:2)
Yeah, the CIA could never organise an overthrow of Government in Iran [wikipedia.org].
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Please re-evaluate your web-centric thinking. You know that something like 95% of fark.com users never even click on the comments, much less ever post one? It's a big circle jerk. The focus seems to be on self-congratulation and providing trivial services rather than any actual
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:nomoreiranplease? (Score:4, Interesting)
While we're at it, you could check out the Project for the Old American Century site, (http://www.oldamericancentury.org/)
Which is currently devoting itself covering to the Iran mess to the extent that they have renamed themselves the "Project for the Old Persian Century" on their masthead. Half the Reddit politics links they pass on seem to be devoted to Iran today.
Normally, I do Slashdot instead of Fark or Reddit because the mod system here actually seems to reduce the turkey level - in particular, Reddit has a bunch of 'Atheists' (who may just be posturing as part of a mass trolling) who have vowed to make all the other sections 'officially Atheists Only', and 'ruthlessly suppress all religious speech' (that's their phrases, not mine). there are probably at least 50 accounts involved, something I've never seen anything close to here. In fact, finding something like that on Slashdot would probably mean a GNAA post and 10 "me too"s, all remorselessly modded up to +5 and kept there for days, by literally dozens of throw away accounts. If someone wants to try that hard here, they'll just be setting a new mark for pathetic losers everywhere. In that sense, Slashdot's mod system works well.
But what I'm seeing there today is that on an important news issue, there are enough thousands of people responding that trolls like that are completely drowned out, or have enough sense to stay out of the way. The information level has gone high, there's a lot of thoughtful, reasoned posting, and it's obvious that some people will be taking what they are learning in the discussion into account when it comes time to vote or contribute to political causes. On this issue, both Fark and Reddit are having real impact. maybe some of that's happening here too, but it's less obvious.
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This is a very important world and tech development.
See, my point exactly. It's important for self-important douchebags - it's actually not very important for the people on the ground in Iran. Heat is not the same as light. Fashionable ca
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"The" story of the year? To whom? Tech has played a critical role in this event? Well, why hasn't the government been overthrown yet? It's certainly not due to lack of IT support. Did they have computers in the 1979 overthrow? "
Short answer: No. Nobody did.
That's not entirely accurate, but you had to have shelled out multiples of 10K checks to get a PDP 11 or similar. Waterloo had one 11/45 (sold to them by my co-worker, Ted Thorpe) that Dave Conroy wrote what is now "gcc" on because he wanted C for the RS
Re:nomoreiranplease? (Score:4, Insightful)
As for why the tag nomoreiran Its pretty simple.
Rob ("Taco") and cronies (e.g. kdawson, whom I view as being irredeemably as slanted as Rush Limbaugh, just in opposite directions) have become more collectivist and pointedly anti-conservative at the expense of libertarianism (mainly by being unthinkingly knee-jerk anti-Bush, instead of well reasoned critics). Thus any political action that does not actively help their flavor of collectivism/statism or something that casts a negative light on their political favorites (i.e. Obama, liberals, socialists, etc) will receive less attention, editorially speaking. Its their own personal bias, as reflected in editorial choices of what to cover and what to try to ignore. I cannot blame them much -- the slashdot userbase has become filled with unreasoning collectivist (non-technical) poseurs, so Taco and company are just following their audience (and the money). Sadly, this means that the epithet SlashKosisn't all that far from the mark anymore.
Its not a troll or flamebait to say so (take a moment to read the actual definitions before you politically mod this post). Its just my observation. One needs a heavy set of "bogus-ness/BS" filters to get any real data out of most articles here anymore, and in general I tend to avoid most "YRO" category articles because they are simply editorials with no pretense of actually presenting any logic examination (and a proper debunking) of opposing views. I do value the book reviews and some of the limited Tech news that manages to make it past the slant here. And some of the humor here is still pretty good.
Still, it would be nice to see more information/articles on Slashdot about how tech is being used to fight what is probably one of the most evil regimes on the planet - and the religious and state mechanisms it uses to maintain its tyranny. Those "resistance" methods might come in hand in other places as well, like China, Britain and the USA, sooner than we think.
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What a wonderful troll. So, according to you, only those who are against the evils "Obama, liberals, socialists" - that is, the proud U.S. Republicans and conservatives - support the Iranian democratic revolution, and promote it on the Net?
It's also interesting how you lump together "technical" and "libertarian", and then go on together and say that "collectivist" means "non-technical".
If that post don't deserve Troll and/or Flamebait, then I don't know what does.
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If you actually bothered to read it, you'd see my post was about the left (liberals. Obama) being as bad as the right (Bush, conservatives) at demonizing their opponent and being unthinkingly negative instead of trying to look at facts (And there are, as I pointed out, plenty of factual and reasonable ways to criticize Bush, which many here seem to igno
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Please take off tag NOMOREIRANPLEASE (Score:5, Insightful)
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setup tor bridges (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't this unauthorised access? (Score:1, Interesting)
Isn't this worse than what the US want McKinnon arrested for under terrorism charges?
Isn't this the same as the hacking the Chinese are accused of doing to the US computer systems?
If so, why is this OK when the others aren't?
Re:Isn't this unauthorised access? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here, let me set that straw man on fire for you:
No and no. Both of those situations involve someone gaining access to computer systems, where the owners of those systems don't want that someone to have access.
With the Iran situation, there are people trying to gain access to computer systems, where a third party doesn't want them to have access. To the contrary, the owners of Twitter, YouTube, and other services have been extremely supportive of the efforts of Iranians to spread the word of how the government has imported plainclothes thugs from other countries to come in and brutalize innocent people in the streets.
Start running proxies on the WoW ports... (Score:4, Funny)
and when they shut down WoW, we will have a true revolution.
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Iran Filtering not that weak you think! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Iran Filtering not that weak you think! (Score:5, Informative)
Make sure your DNS accesses are tunneled as well.
Some things are better left unsaid (Score:2)
On the contrary, now that it's public information this "security gap" has probably already been dealt with by the authorities.
Moreiranplease (Score:1, Insightful)
You know what? This should be a tag on every story if we really mean it.
WoW gold farmers allowed? (Score:2)
best way to censor the internet (Score:1, Funny)
post a news article on /. such that it draws traffic into your network
voila! instant censorship
all hale the supreme leader CowboyNeal!
Petition disclosure of filtering software sold!! (Score:4, Interesting)
According to this: http://opennet.net/research/profiles/iran
Nokia/siemens sold filtering software to iran, quite the nefarious thing to do, perhaps even bypassing some boycott agreements and US export regulations, if containing any US code. now's the time to make them disclose what sofware they sold, and everything they know about the filtering system. a lot of lives are at stake, now's the time.
if any nokia/siemens employees are reading this, pass this on!
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Safenet also sells censoring software to the iranian government.
US elections year 2000 (Score:2)
The YouTube Revolution (Score:3, Interesting)
It's axiomatic that if you know about YouTube and can post to YouTube that you can also view YouTube. And if you're viewing YouTube then you seeing a rest of the world that is a whole lot more fun than the hell hole you're stuck in at the moment. Of course the young college students fueling the protests would like their lives to be a bit more free than what they've been forced to live under -- especially the women!
So just how is that Sharia Law working out for you?
Say what you want about the decadent west, but nobody is about to show up at my door and beat me senseless for posting this.
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"Say what you want about the decadent west, but nobody is about to show up at my door and beat me senseless for posting this. "
Not without your address anyway :-)
IP dancing (Score:2)
IP over WOW dance movements....
The old fashioned techniques are alive and well (Score:3, Informative)
The "Islamic Republic" has lasted longer than the Shah, and has clearly shown that religious oligarchies are every bit as corrupt, barbaric, and secretive as secular ones.
I hope the people of Iran are able to free themselves of dictatorship soon.
Re:The 1 in 200 bit is garbage (Score:5, Informative)
Besides: n/o but I'd rather believe a study made by two PhD students instead of some slashdotter.
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mod parent up, grandparent has obviously not understud anything about the linked article, the claims are simply false.
the most striking thing about the election manipulations are imho that they have been done very very badly. the government obviously did not give a crap whether anyone would find out, they put some uneducated guys at a table and told them they want at least 60% of the votes and published the results after one hour of work. it would have been very simple to take into considerations many of th
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This is a nation wide tiananmen square.
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If I knew the elections were fair and square, or indeed even if I didn't give a shit either way, I'd have to be pretty damned arrogant to be so ruthless.
I have nothing but sympathy for the victims in both cases, and I highly disapprove of violent repression that is COMMON to both.
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And, for what it's worth, this slashdotter is a PhD student in machine learning (responding to the GP's comment about 2 PhD students vs a slashdotter).
Getting offtopic now but: I didn't intend to be offensive. You wouldn't want someone with a to believe someone with a statistics degree to claim Turing is an idiot right? :-)
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Turing made substantial contribution to statistics in the course of his work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-Turing [wikipedia.org].
The wikipedia article is kind of dry but the problem is at its simplest: after visiting an alien planet for X days and observing n species at times t1, t2,..., tn, to estimate the number of unseen species. You can make it more difficult by adding a regression-model, i.e. assuming that species are easier to find in proportion to their mass or another characteristic.
It's easy to imagine apply
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You're the one who declared a result "Garbage" in your initial header. That's your choice of inflammatory and demeaning verbiage from the very beginning, not anyone else's. To say that that choice was just (part of) the mathematics is more flamebait and you have been modded correctly. I also simply don't care if you actually are in a PHD program or not, you are way-out-of-line wrong to act this way. Since the net result is that you are giving moral support to one of the most repressive regimes since at leas
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Wow, thanks for getting me modded troll when in fact it was your knowledge of the subject matter that was deficient, and everything I said was just simple probability mathematics.
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It's garbage in other ways.
the model they are using is some sort of benford's law like thing. But this assumes that the distribution should be random to begin with. not likely. Moreover the kind of manipulations of concern, like shifting votes, have the same signature as legal manipulations such as bus loads of church folks showing up.
Re:The 1 in 200 bit is garbage (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think the manipulations at hand here are subtleties like "shifting votes". Seems more like "pulling numbers out of their collective ass" is what happened.
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Dude, that's completely wrong. First:
That's not remotely similar to their calculation. It's not a question combinatorics but a question of probability distributions. The last digits generated
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I am not claiming that it is likely that the election is fair. I am claiming that the "1 in 200" statistic is pulled out of a hat, much like the ballot numbers.
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Responding to "The prior probability of mr.A cheating has no consequence - we're just looking at the distribution of the numbers."
The claim of the article was that the probability of Mr. A not cheating was 1 in 200. That was the claim I was disputing, not the fact that the ballot numbers were wonky. I thought my point was clear, given the subject I chose for my comment.
When claiming some quantifiable likelihood that there was fraud, the prior on fraud is most definitely relevant. At the same time, the prior
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If your statement is true then Bayesian statistics is always completely meaningless without informative priors, yet most of Bayesian analysis is done without informative priors and works quite well thank you very much.
The obviou
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The claim was "in which the authors say the election results have a one in two-hundred chance of being legitimate."
Your claim was "if this election were legitimate, there is a one in two-hundred chance of things turning out this way."
These are two completely different statements. The key is that one is conditioned on the fact that the election is legitimate. This is easy to find out, and is probably what was intended. The sentence provided, however, made an estimate on the odds of legitimacy, conditioning o
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I find that likely as well.
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Especially given my prior on journalists adding garbage to the end of articles, lol
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"If you know something about a binomial random variable (which is what we just sampled from), you know that this is (100 choose 48)*.5^(100) = .0735!
Wow...and that was with only 100 random coin flips. A 1 in 20 chance that, by their metrics, this was a fair set of coin flips (see where the logical incongruity happens?)"
You fail at illustrating the proper point. What a bastardization of using statistics. The third sentence is ridiculous, that's not the point that the data indicates.
On a positive note, you'
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At the end of the article, they say
The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.
The last sentence does not follow from the first. They are saying that P(these numbers | fraud) = P(fraud | these numbers). This is not the case! If they want to be correct, they need to take into account the prior, like I have said a few times.
Don't accuse me of bastardizing statistics when first: I am not and second: I am pointing out a bastardization of statistics. Try to actual know something about the subject matter, and combine that with some reading comprehension sk
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48 heads and 52 tails!
.0735!
Seems pretty reasonable. The question is, now, how likely is it that I flipped exactly 48 heads and 52 tails?
If you know something about a binomial random variable (which is what we just sampled from), you know that this is (100 choose 48)*.5^(100) =
Wow...and that was with only 100 random coin flips. A 1 in 20 chance that, by their metrics, this was a fair set of coin flips (see where the logical incongruity happens?)
You've used quite the wrong metric, asking "what are the odds of this EXACT outcome in a fair contest". The right question is "what are the odds of at least this this much deviation from the expected outcome in a fair contest". In the case of your coin toss your questions would be "how likely is it that in 100 flips, I will get 52 OR MORE of either heads or tails" (note that if you were asking only about tails, you'd just get 1/2 the number, but considering the odds of 50 or more tails is only 50/50% it'
Re: (Score:2)
Gee just setup sshd to run on the wow port. What port number or numbers are those?
I don't know if that would be sufficient; they are likely filtering based on the structure of the data within the packets, and not just on port numbers.
That said, I like the idea of a "WoW tunnel", where the data from the Iranian protester's computer gets encrypted/obfuscated, then sent to his WoW client as a line of text for his WoW to speak, at which point the text gets heard by a non-Iranian WoW character standing next to h