The Tor Project's New Tool Aims To Map Out Internet Censorship (Forbes) [LWN.net]

The OONI-probe (Open Observatory of Network Interference) is an early attempt to "collect data about local meddling with the computer’s network connections, whether it be censorship, surveillance or selective bandwidth slowdowns." Forbes takes a look at this new effort by Tor developers Arturo Filasto and Jacob Appelbaum. "Tor’s OONI project, funded in part with a grant from Radio Free Asia, isn’t the first to monitor and measure Internet censorship around the world–other projects like the Open Net Initiative, the Berkman Center’s HerdictWeb and Google’s Transparency Report all aim to spot censorship and Internet slowdowns. But unlike those projects, OONI uses only open-source software and plans to make the raw data gathered by its tools public and accessible to any researcher. “This came from a bit of disappointment over the fact that all the existing tools out there for monitoring censorship were either not using open methodologies or not making their data available,” says Filasto, a 21-year old computer science student at Rome’s Sapienza university. “Our goal with OONI is to build that open framework, so that researchers can independently prove that the methodology is valid and repeat the tests.”" (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 1, 2012 22:09 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (10 responses)

Yes, web filters are weird. My meatloaf recipe has been blocked for "hacking" at a few sites. Just curious...how many of those on a school or office network with filtering can see this page?

http://zgp.org/~dmarti/recipes/meatloaf/

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 4:36 UTC (Wed) by jiu (guest, #57673) [Link]

office network - can't see it, reason: Sites that provide information about or promote illegal or questionable access to or use of computer or communication equipment, software, or databases.

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 6:25 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Web filters aren't weird, the whole concept is simply hopelessly broken and your recipe page is a perfect demonstration. Probably the IP address of your server got blacklisted by someone who once saw something he thought objectionable on some page on the server.

Some, like OpenDNS crowdsource the filtering proposals, and a couple of years ago I noticed by accident that "Groklaw" was proposed for filtering (at the time I had started using OpenDNS and was curiously digging their site to see how its optional filtering feature worked). Digging further, I saw it was just one of dozens of filtering proposals by a guy who apparently had nothing better to do than propose web sites for filtering, mostly on very flimsy grounds. Naturally I lodged my objection (logged in OpenDNS users can sort of vote on these proposals), but it might be that if nobody had objected, Groklaw would have disappeared from view from those who see the OpenDNS-filtered net (Users in control of their network settings can of course turn the filter off, but many companies use OpenDNS as their web filter, that is what it makes money from).

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 13:06 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

At corporations they are more about 'save the user from themselves' more then anything.

The security of the web and web browsers is so painfully inadequate at this time that people can get malware stuffed into the most innocuous site and that can cause major headaches for IT departments.

I know were I work a local popular restaurant had it's website blocked because somebody had installed malicious malware on their server and didn't respond or fix it when they were notified.

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 6:48 UTC (Wed) by kevinm (guest, #69913) [Link]

Works fine for me.

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 11:11 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

Works for me on a pretty heavily restricted network.

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 13:57 UTC (Wed) by utoddl (guest, #1232) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, yes, it works, but I'd probably cut the salt in half and double the garlic and onions.

Oh. Never mind.

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 3, 2012 19:24 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (guest, #2813) [Link]

Concur with the recipe change. (university network works fine)

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 14:25 UTC (Wed) by nsheed (subscriber, #5151) [Link]

Blocked for me, reason given as "Hacking" (if memory serves we're behind a Bluecoat proxy)

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 21:49 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (1 responses)

Works fine (but I'm at home, where the local ISP my town home's HOA uses doesn't [appear to] block sites).

I'm curious, has zgp.org been known to host content that others (people or organizations) might find objectionable? Yours looks like a user's home account and often corporate firewalls block whole domains because it's "easier" (my experience).

P.S. That zgp.org home page shows a screenshot of with a class A CIDR address - kinda futile since it's not visible to the Internet. I now see that it's just yours (and a few others') home page site (family?).

Conversely, everyone now knows that the organization in which that screenshot was taken uses Macs and has a person named "Frances Newberg" working in Human Resources. ;-)

Web filters vs. meatloaf

Posted May 2, 2012 23:57 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

There is material about white hat hacking on that site, sure. Probably more hacking than recipes overall. I do have some mailing list archives on that site on which people have discussed, let's see, freeing Dmitry, the DMCA, p2p systems, ssh, and security-related topics.