User:Weinshel/Notes on censorship circumvention

Article sandbox User:Weinshel/Internet censorship circumvention/

Article: Internet censorship circumvention

This page is mostly informal notes and thoughts.

Article structure

Right now the article is mostly structured by circumvention method, but doesn't go into much depth explaining either the technical details of the solutions or discussing what types of censorship it circumvents.

One option would be to organize by blocking method, and then discuss possible workarounds. The Internet censorship#Technical censorship article, does a good job of this. In fact, it is what I was originally envisioning doing something like this article—it offers a short description of each blocking method, and then in a few words mentions how it could be circumvented. However, many (most?) of the circumvention methods (Tor, VPN, etc.) are effective against multiple censorship methods.

There also should be discussion of blocking of circumvention tools, such as VPN or Tor detection and blocking, and then the subsequent steps for obfuscation that circumvention tools have attempted. The paper "Network Traffic Obfuscation and Automated Internet Censorship"https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04044v2 discusses this well at a more technical level.

outline for organizing by blocking method (I don't think I want to do this anymore though)

• url filtering
  • ip address access
  • alternate domains
  • third party copies (caches, archives, web to email)
• ip blocking
  • third party copies (caches, archives, web to email)
• dns blocking
  • alternate dns network

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new thoughts on structure--organize by circumvention method

• more high-level (non-technical background)
• alternative names (need a better name for this)
  • alternate domain names
  • alternate IP addresses (avoids IP blocking/BGP hijacking)
  • alternate DNS servers
• mirrors and caches
• alternate copies
  • web to email services (do these things still exist? article doesn't have a citation here)
    • cannot find any examples of this
  • RSS aggregators
  • sneakernet
• tunneling - VPN & Tor
  • subsection on traffic obfuscation, i.e. Tor does more tricks to make it not look like Tor