Atul Sharma atulquest93@gmail.com Facebook.com/atulquest99 Http://www.help2cse.

com

What is Internet Censorship ?

What Is Internet Censorship ?

Internet censorship is the control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations at the behest of government, regulators, or on personal initiative. Internet Censorship is basically imposed to restrict customers/users to access particular content generally known as Blacklisted content which may be a Website, or any other Web based resource.

Why Censorship ?

Why Censorship ?

For Anticipation of events such as Elections, Protests, and Riots.

This kind of Censorship is generally done at National level and Individual Network administrators has nothing to deal with. Its generally for a short period of time and removed when government thinks the situation is under control. Ex : During Arab Spring Internet access is censored for a short period of time.

In Accordance with rules and regulations of Organisation.

This is done locally by Individual network administrators in accordance with rules of organisation. Schools/ Collages / Business Organisations generally restrict their employees from accessing sites like Facebook etc.

Why Censorship ?

To block distribution of illegal, pirated and copyright protected goods.

This is again at national level to stop the sharing of copyright protected electronic goods such as [ EBooks, Movies, Music ]. Websites on large scale are blocked by National ISPs hosting pirated Music, Movies, Games & Softwares are blocked. Ex: Torrent sites [ PiratesBay.com ] FileHosting [ Megashare.com ] are blocked by Indian government in late 2012.

Special Cases.
In some cases few Websites are blocked due to harassment, and availability of obscene material. Websites are blocked as some one files a case for copying or cheating .[ Eg : Speakasia.com ]

Internet Censorship
Approaches to Censorship

Circumvention to Censorship

Censorship blocking Traffic

Approaches to Censorship.
Approaches to censorship involves methodologies to block particular/targeted traffic. It involves various methods to block/prevent user access to a particular content/Website/Resource on Internet. Level of blocking may differ. It may be by ISP (Internet Service Provider) or locally by network admin in the organisation.

Censorship Blocking Traffic.

When censorship is live it restricts the user from accessing the blocked content.

Circumvention to Censorship.
This particularly includes the method to bypass the censorship setup by the Network. Bypassing Censorship is illegal in many countries and depends totally on the local Governing authority.

Approaches to Censorship IP Address

Blocking

DNS Filtering

URL Filtering

Packet Filtering

Portal Censorship

Approaches to Censorship !

Approaches to Censorship !

IP Address Blocking.
It involves the blacklisting of IPs pointing to resources/websites over Internet. If blacklisted IP is of a Shared hosting server, all websites hosted on that server automatically.

DNS Filtering.
In DNS filtering blacklisted domain names will not get resolved to their respective IPs. In some cases, they get resolved to a particular locally hosted IP which gives a Custom message to requestor.

URL Filtering.
In URL filtering URL s are filtered live with the help of monitoring tools and URLs containing certain blacklisted keywords will get blocked.

Approaches to Censorship !

Network Disconnection.
This is the Worst case of censorship. All routers and networking equipment were closed forcefully to restrict access to Internet. This appears to have been the case on 27/28 January 2011 during the 2011 Egyptian protests.

Packet Filtering.
This method is somewhat similar to URL filtering. Individual packets are scanned for blocked content instead of scanning the URL of the requested page alone. Ex: URL: www.silkroute.com doesn't contain any blacklisted keyword but get blocked , as it hosts stuffs related to Hacking and Piracy. Their are still various ways reaming by which access to particular resouce on Internet can be restricted.

Circumvention to Censorship !

Circumvention to Censorship !

Cached Pages.
Some search engines keep cached pages, copies of previously indexed Web pages, and these pages are not always blocked. Cached pages may be identified with a small link labeled "cached" in a list of search results. Google allows the retrieval of cached pages by entering "cache:some-blocked-url" as a search request.

Mirror and Archive Sites.

Copies of web sites or pages may be available at mirror or archive sites such as www.archive.org and the alternate sites may not be blocked.

IP address and Domain Names.

Sometimes after blocking of particular IP or Domain. Site admin restore the site as different location eg : [ On different server with different domain name ] which is not blocked.

Circumvention to Censorship !

Alternate DNS servers.

Using DNS servers other than those supplied by default by an ISP may bypass DNS based blocking. OpenDNS and Google offer DNS services or see List of Publicly Available and Completely Free DNS Servers. [ Public DNS by Google DNS: 8.8.8.8 Alternate DNS: 8.8.4.4 ]

Proxy Servers
Using proxy servers is one of the simplest way to bypass URL based censorship. When the default proxy blocks resources changing the proxy helps to bypass censorship.

VPN (Virtual Private Networks)

VPN [ Virtual Private Networks ] are the most secure and most successful way to bypass censorship. It creates a tunnel over the network to send and receive the traffic. It uses encryption and compression technologies to Bypass censorship by transferring encoded data. It uses client and server mechanism