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Censorship The Internet Communications Media Network Privacy

Venezuela Is Blocking Access To the Tor Network (theverge.com) 186

An Access Now report finds that Venezuela has blocked all access to the Tor network. "The latest block includes both direct connections to the network and connections over bridge relays, which had escaped many previous Tor blocks," reports The Verge. From the report: According to network metrics, Tor access in Venezuela had recently spiked in response to recent web blocks placed on local news outlets. Unlike previous blocks, the latest restrictions could not be circumvented by using a censorship-resistant DNS server like those provided by Google and CloudFlare. For many Venezuelans, Tor seems to have been the only way left to access the restricted content. "This is the latest escalation in Venezuela's internet censorship efforts, as it blocks higher-profile sites with more sophisticated methods," said Andres Azpurua of Venezuela Inteligente, in a statement provided through Access. "This is one of their boldest internet censorship actions yet."
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Venezuela Is Blocking Access To the Tor Network

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  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @05:11PM (#56850282)

    Isn't Tor supposed to be still uncrackable? And if not, can't the resistance use the Telegram app, which so far has held up against the Iranian religious police?

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Isn't Tor supposed to be still uncrackable? And if not, can't the resistance use the Telegram app, which so far has held up against the Iranian religious police?

      Uncrackable != unblockable, just > /dev/null the traffic. Of course to be effective you have to ban all general traffic redirects like proxies, VPNs, TOR etc. but if you're a censoring nation you'll claim that's a good thing protecting the people from all the nasty stuff on the outside. Same way quasi-fascists think implementing a real name policy everywhere is good for open debate.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        According to the Swedish press, internet blocking has reached epic proportions in the US.

        Venezuela sounds like a utopia compared to what is going on in your country.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          According to the Swedish press, internet blocking has reached epic proportions in the US.

          Venezuela sounds like a utopia compared to what is going on in your country.

          That's right. Come on USA Progressives, you need to catch up to the paradise that is Venezuela. Just follow Max-Scene Waters order to murder government conservatives and you'll be well on your way.

    • by loonycyborg ( 1262242 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @05:44PM (#56850412)
      TFA is light on technical detail. Even Chinese firewall is ineffective against tor's latest steganographic transports. But even basic tor is hard to block, at least outgoing traffic.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Can confirm, Tor is accessible in China if you bounce through a Microsoft or Amazon cloud based proxy. The problem they have is that they can't very well block access to the Microsoft or Amazon clouds because they are used for so many legitimate services, so all someone needs to do is set up a proxy running in them that accepts HTTPS connections to tunnel Tor through.

        Some VPN providers use the same technique to bypass VPN blocks in China too. PrivateInternetAccess works most of the time there.

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Any nation can block its internet in creative ways.
      eg China and its control over VPN, Tor, the EU and dreams of Article 13 and Article 11.
      The US can do that too with "but it also puts a lot of power in the government's hands." (July 10, 2012)
      https://www.cnet.com/news/obam... [cnet.com]

      '
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Blocking it and cracking it a two very different things.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Now that the population has no guns to fight back, a socialist retaining power, and propaganda allowed to flourish and not subjected to ridicule...let the executions begin.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Regardless of the political leanings, the next phase from this kind of censorship is often indeed a war against another country, a war against civilians, a civil war, or just a regular mass murder.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @05:29PM (#56850352)

    China is providing all the network hardware to Venezuela for deep packet inspection (among other things) in exchange for no-bid infrastructure projects. That's how they're getting this done.
    These "projects" are just the government handing them money for work that never gets done. It's an escape path for the elite once the shit really hits the fan but until then their primary focus is exfiltrating enough resources from Venezuela to maintain their lifestyle.
    They shipped these devices to Venezuela about 10 years ago and it's taken the inept government this long to put them in.
    It's rumored that they "funded" these infrastructure projects to the tune of $100m but exact numbers are impossible to get as the constituent assembly has ruled that all government contracts are state secrets.

    • China is providing all the network hardware to Venezuela for deep packet inspection (among other things).

      Sources, please?

  • ....we thought the Internet (sic) interpreted censorship as damage, and routed around it? My, how times have changed.
    • people who say that are the same crowd how think bitcoin's going to take down the international banking system. You don't fix oppression by working around it. You treat the root cause, which is poverty that allows desperate people to be organized into violent mobs.
  • Run a Tor Node (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @05:44PM (#56850418) Homepage Journal

    This is why I run a tor relay node. Everytime I hear about something like this, it reminds me that tor is used by people in countries like this to bypass censorship.

    OK, I really run it because of the EFF's tor challenge where I got a free T-shirt, but that's the reason I've kept it running after the challenge was over.

  • Venezuela vs US (Score:2, Interesting)

    by manu0601 ( 2221348 )

    While I am not fond of Internet blocking, my understanding is that Venezuela must try to fend fierce psyops attacks from the CIA, that this is one of the tools available.

    Remember when Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat [msnbc.com]? If the CIA does its job correctly, it must be trying to destroy Venezuela state since that time.

  • If you're not doing anything wrong you shouldn't have anything to hide. I wonder what the government is trying to hide?
  • As of today (June 28, 2018 1630 gmt-4) TOR is working for me in TAILS 3.6 on a Vbox VM

    Yes, not the most secure configuration, but I am busy with a few things rigth now, no BW to Torrent 3.8, and not rich to have multiple machines.

    Every Time I torrent the latest version of TAILS, I take the time to fire up the VM, and connect to TOR, just to practice.

    TOR and TAILS, not being the most user-friendly things to set up, give me grief each time I change version. Maybe that'spart of the problem that the other guys

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