[2.55 SPOILERS] FINAL FANTASY XIV: Unnecessary Censorship #5
Here #39;s the fifth and last in a series of videos I really enjoyed making! Hope you enjoy, and if you do please leave a thumbs up so I can keep this series going! They will be resuming when Heavenswa...
By: Zodical Candy
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[2.55 SPOILERS] FINAL FANTASY XIV: Unnecessary Censorship #5 - Video
A receptionist works behind the logo for Baidu.com, the Chinese search engine whose customers were hijacked by the first firing of the Great Cannon. Photograph: NG HAN GUAN/AP
The Great Cannon has entered the cyberwar lexicon alongside the Great Firewall of China after a new tool for censorship in the nation was named and described by researchers from the University of Toronto.
The first use of the Great Cannon came in late March, when the coding site GitHub was flooded by traffic leaving it intermittently unresponsive for multiple days. The attack, using a method called distributed denial of service or DDoS, appeared to be targeting two specific users of the site: the New York Times Chinese mirror, and anti-censorship organisation GreatFire.org.
Both users focus their efforts on allowing Chinese residents to bypass the countrys Great Firewall the system China uses to restrict access to parts of the internet.
The attack, which continued for almost two weeks, was observed by researchers led by the University of Torontos Bill Marczak. They concluded that it provides evidence of a new censorship tool above and beyond the Great Firewall.
While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the Great Cannon, the researchers write.
The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle.
Where the Great Firewall was a tool for largely passive censorship preventing access to material and providing the Chinese state with the ability to spy on its residents the Great Cannon provides the ability to effectively rewrite the internet on the fly.
When used offensively, that ability can turn a normal internet user into a vector of attack. In the case of the GitHub attacks, the Great Cannon intercepted traffic sent to Baidu infrastructure servers, web servers run by Chinas largest search engine that host commonly used analytics, social, or advertising scripts. Roughly 1.75% of the time it took that traffic and returned a malicious script, unwittingly enlisting the web surfer in the hacking campaign against GitHub. The scripts were not complex, doing little more than sending requests for content to GitHub; but the sheer quantity of users affected proved difficult for the site to handle.
The researchers conclude that the Great Cannon, like the Great Firewall before it, is likely to be operated by the Chinese government. Both systems appear to be hosted on the same servers, and appear to share source code for intercepting communications. As such, its operation points to a shift in Chinese censorship tactics, and has a highly visible impact, the research says. It is likely that this attack, with its potential for political backlash, would require the approval of high-level authorities within the Chinese government.
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'Great Cannon of China' turns internet users into weapon of cyberwar
Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan was one of more than 100 film-makers who published a letter accusing the Turkish government of oppression and censorship. Photograph: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images
Dozens of Turkish film-makers have withdrawn their work from this years Istanbul international film festival in protest over the removal of a documentary from the programme, as a growing censorship row prompted organisers to cancel all festival competitions halfway through the event.
The documentary, Bakur (North), the first set in the camps of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) in Turkey, had been scheduled to open on Sunday, but was cancelled only hours before the screening after festival organisers received a letter from the Turkish ministry of culture claiming that the film did not have the required registration certificate.
But the organisers decision to comply with the ministrys orders prompted immediate outrage. On Monday, more than 100 film-makers, including the most recent laureate of the Palme dOr in Cannes, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, published an open letter in the Turkish media, accusing the government of oppression and censorship.
We, the undersigned film-makers, oppose the imposition [of this regulation] as a tool of censorship, the letter said, claiming there was a political agenda behind the decision to ban Bakur. The festival programme was announced weeks ago, and other local films that did not have the registration certificate were screened without problems.
In total, 23 Turkish film-makers withdrew their films from the festival, and the festival organisers announced on Monday that all competitions and the closing ceremony had been cancelled.
Ertugrul Mavioglu, journalist and co-director of Bakur together with documentary film-maker ayan Demirel, said he was impressed by the reactions triggered by the de facto ban of his film from the festival.
This is the first time that there is such massive solidarity against censorship, and of course I see this as a positive, he said, adding that he was disappointed by the stance of the festival organisers. They should have cancelled the whole festival immediately instead of complying with the ministrys bogus request, he said.
According to the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), the organiser of the festival, Bakur was removed from the programme because the film-makers had failed to obtain the necessary commercial screening licence for their film. Azize Tan, director of the festival, said that the organisers had previously conducted negotiations with the ministry to change the licence regulation, in place since 2004 and applicable only to locally produced films.
But to Mavioglu, the governments last-minute reminder of the licence rule was a thinly veiled attempt to cover up the outright ban of a film that Ankara might find uncomfortable.
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Film-makers withdraw films from Istanbul festival in censorship protest
The Censorship M.O.
I #39;m personally offended by this, therefore no one is allowed to enjoy it.
By: Vernaculis
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The Censorship M.O. - Video
FCC CHAIRMAN TOM WHEELER. NO NET NEUTRALITY = INTERNET CENSORSHIP.
Massive Double Speak here. Tom Wheeler recently said that if we don #39;t make up a bunch of new regulations that the ISP #39;s are going to suddenly have total power over the internet and will be...
By: grindall61
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FCC CHAIRMAN TOM WHEELER. NO NET NEUTRALITY = INTERNET CENSORSHIP. - Video