Georgia Tech Looking into Web Censorship

GA Tech has a project going on called "Encore," and it looks to see who and or what is censoring web pages around the world. Do any [H]'ers have any experience with this code? Sound off at the discussion link below. Help fight the bad guys with a single line of code!

Encore collects information about how Web users experience censorship. It causes every visitor to your Web site to attempt to access small pieces of data from other, potentially-censored Web sites, and sends us information about whether or not each visitor could access those censored sites. These measurements happen automatically in the background after your page has loaded and do not impact your site's performance or user experience; most users won't ever notice them or realize they are helping to measure Web censorship.

If it ain't censored it will be down due to DDoS through encore lol.

What if the site they are testing happens to be on the terrorism watch-list?

You might end up being labelled as an Al Qaeda supporter without even knowing why.

If a single visit to the Tor site is enough to put you on the NSA "naughty list", then visiting dozens of "terrorist" websites is sure to put you at the top of that list.

sir-gold said:

What if the site they are testing happens to be on the terrorism watch-list?

You might end up being labelled as an Al Qaeda supporter without even knowing why.

If a single visit to the Tor site is enough to put you on the NSA "naughty list", then visiting dozens of "terrorist" websites is sure to put you at the top of that list.

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tinfoil in 2 posts. bravo!

As an alum of the Ramblin' Wreck (B.S. 2000, M.S 2005), I'm very interested in what my alma mater is doing with this stuff... not that I'll understand it.

rflcptr said:

tinfoil in 2 posts. bravo!

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I'm pretty sure that wearing a tinfoil hat would get you on the watch list too, since you might be hiding a bomb inside that hat (disguised as a non-working smartphone of course).

But seriously, if a site is on the censored list, then there is a very good chance that it was censored because someone, somewhere, considers that site dangerous enough to block it.

Depending on which country is doing the censoring, and the US's relationship with that country, the NSA may consider that site "dangerous" as well.

The same things that people used to consider "paranoid delusions" now make front-page news every time there is another Snowden leak.

All I did was combine 2 very-recent articles from HardOCP, and it got me the "tinfoil hat" award.
http://hardocp.com/news/2014/07/05/nsa_likely_targets_anybody_whos_torcurious/
http://hardocp.com/news/2014/07/07/georgia_tech_looking_into_web_censorship/

sir-gold said:

But seriously, if a site is on the censored list, then there is a very good chance that it was censored because someone, somewhere, considers that site dangerous enough to block it.

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you assume the benevolence of those in charge and that mistakes never happen. for example, the UK blocked amnesty.org.uk and eff.org. really, the government lies... a lot. yet there are still muppets who assume censorship is a good thing for the dubious reasons they present. once such systems are in place, they will be abused to hell and back.

temujin987 said:

you assume the benevolence of those in charge and that mistakes never happen. for example, the UK blocked amnesty.org.uk and eff.org. really, the government lies... a lot. yet there are still muppets who assume censorship is a good thing for the dubious reasons they present. once such systems are in place, they will be abused to hell and back.

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I was referring to site-specific censorship (such as blocking Twitter, or Al Jazeera) not poorly configured porn filters.

More likely someone will get in trouble at work for visiting porn site than anything else.

lol @ academia eggheads, always behind the times,

i'm pretty sure many sites already use similar code to store your browsing history, google has been doing this for many years now.