A Journey to the Heart of Internet Censorship

Reporters Without Borders just released their latest report on China's Internet Censorship practices, outlining how exactly bureaucracy intersects with technology, perhaps the worst combination I could think of :

"The report also documents how the Beijing Internet Information Administrative Bureau has in practice asserted its daily editorial control over the leading news websites based in the nation’s Capital. It gives many examples of the actual instructions issued by officials in charge of this bureau. The last part of the report gives the results of a series of tests conducted with the mechanism of control through filtering keywords. These tests clearly show that, though there are still many disparities in the levels of censorship, the authorities have successfully coerced the online media into submission to censor themselves heavily on sensitive subjects."

Information is not free, but it just wants to be free and you cannot control the rules of curiosity and the basic right to know who's what and what's when -- even if you shut down the Internet access inside the country. China's Internet censorship is on the other hand a driving force for academic research across the globe. Even wondered what are the latest blocked keywords discovered filtered over time? Try the list of blacklisted keywords discovered by ConceptDoppler, as of 19 Sep 2007, part of the ConceptDoppler project - A Weather Tracker for Internet Censorship.

Related posts:
Twisted Reality
China - the biggest black spot on the Internet’s map
Chinese Internet Censorship efforts and the outbreak
Securing Political Investments Through Censorship
World's Internet Censorship Map
China's Interest of Censoring Mobile Communications
South Korea's View on China's Media Control and Censorship
China's Internet Censorship Report 2006
Media Censorship in China - FAQ
Google and Yahoo's Shareholders Against Censorship
It's all About the Vision and the Courage to Execute it
Gender Based Censorship in the News Media
Real Time Censored URL Check in China
Censoring Flickr in China

Does This Blog Speak for Itself?

Before January 2007, I could only say that I'm glad to have you as a reader of this blog, but with the Talkr-ization of my blog during that month, I can now freely say I'm also glad to have you as both, a reader and a listener taking into consideration the interest in the audio versions of my analyses. It's great to follow the progress of the service and the efforts the folks behind it put into improving its quality. I can only hope that they reach Ms. Dewey's speech engine, even go beyond it by allowing customization in the form of different voices to choose from.

Moreover, all the readers who are interested in reading this blog on a mobile device, can do so via a newly started service called MoFuse that I'm using as of recently :

"MoFuse is short for Mobile Fusion. MoFuse was founded in July of 2007 and released it's first private beta in late September of 2007. MoFuse allows content publishers to create RSS driven mobile sites and gives our users the ability to control almost every aspect of the design using some of our AJAX features."

Enjoy!

Fast-Flux Spam and Scams Increasing

As I pointed out in my last series of posts assessing pharmaceutical scams and phishing campaigns, both, botnet masters, pharma masters, and rock phishers, are starting to take advantage of fast-flux networks to make it harder to trace back and shut down their operations. Here's a related article on the topic :

"With fast-flux, spammers continually change the URL in the e-mail to counter filtering efforts. The constant change requires a corresponding defense that recognizes those changes as they occur, Red Condor officials said. Fast-flux botnets turn IP addresses against anti-spammers. Using a large number of servers, fast-flux DNS uses a compromised PC as a proxy, frustrating investigators. In its September intelligence report, MessageLabs counted fast-flux DNS techniques as one of the key reasons botnets are hard to shut down. The MySpace worm that compromised thousands of MySpace users' sites earlier this year utilized fast-flux techniques."

Let's showcase this emerging trend. Take for instance some recently spammed .cn domains such as considerjust.cn and pageagainst.cn advertising a Canadian Pharmacy scam. The domains have an allocated space of IPs to rotate on each and every request to them, something you can easily verify by pinging them and see how their IPs change on every new ping in coordination with the allocated IP table you can see in the screenshot. It gets even more interesting, especially in terms of locating the main fast-flux domain, in this case it's mainseven.com, a central point for a great deal of other pharma domains in its fast-flux. Here are graphs of fast-flux spam and scam networks :

mainseven.com

aaapills.org

comproper.com

lovelypills.com

fonteay.com

drugslovetown.com

abcmeds.org

As in every other competitive industry, pretty much all the market participants such as botnet masters, pharma masters, spammers and scammers, follow what the others are doing and by taking notice in which practices the others outperform them, figure out how to apply them within their practices at a later stage - competitive benchmarking within the underground ecosystem is already a fact.