Abstract
Technology giant Apple has policies on the type of content that can appear in its iTunes Store, which means start-up companies have to play by its rules or risk limiting their reach. Here, an Apple store in the Chinese city of Hangzhou is prepared for its opening in early 2015
Credit: Reuters/Chance Chan
Can users take back the internet to evade heavy control from state censors and corporations?
Technology has allowed users to circumvent internet censorship for many years, but it has often been a complicated process for regular users. Now, a new generation is emerging, with a focus on decentralisation, open sourcing and easy-to-use encryption.
Among them is GreatFire’s FreeBrowser mobile application, which currently has more than nine million users and is already providing significant access to content that the Chinese government has blocked or deleted. It looks no different from a typical mobile web browser but it gets to uncensored internet content by directing Chinese users through complex paths on the internet, which are difficult to block. No complex systems or virtual private networks (VPNs) are needed.
GreatFire uses its website to monitor sites being blocked in China, and runs FreeWeibo, which hosts content deleted by censors from Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site (similar to Twitter). The two sites have nearly 16 million users, but progress is still hard and they said that new technological threats are always emerging.
The group describes its approach as “collateral freedom” – think the opposite of collateral damage – and takes advantage of the fact that more than half of the web’s traffic is delivered via content delivery networks. CDNs are made up of dispersed servers that allow content from multiple owners to be distributed across the internet. “In order for the authorities to block content they disapprove of, they would have to block access to all CDNs. But they will not do this because there would be significant economic fallout from cutting China off from half of the world’s internet,” said GreatFire’s founder.
The New York-based technology start-up Minds gives users free access to content by creating a social network that feels familiar to anyone who has used Facebook, Twitter or any of the other leading social platforms. The difference is that it has an open-source codebase and an encrypted private messenger, which means that the rules by which it shows content will be governed by its community and its private messages will be almost impossible to intercept.
It sprang to notoriety in the spring when its launch was “backed” by some of the activist groups called Anonymous.
“The encryption is foundational but we’re having success because you don’t have to install complicated stuff – it’s just like signing up for other social networks,” Minds founder Bill Ottman told Index. One of the company’s goals is to bring open-source and encrypted technology to the masses, he said.
Instead of holding complete control over its codebase and user data, Minds makes it freely available worldwide, allowing developers to work on the code. This improves the core product and ensures transparency: the algorithms that display content aren’t centrally controlled and the community can determine how they work (rather than their being tuned to maximise advertising revenue or potentially block content). “Our ‘boost’ functionality is an ad network that doesn’t spy on people,” Ottman said.
Minds is commercially and technically federating with other major open-source players and is backing a movement called the “internet migration”.
“The ‘internet migration’ is all about migrating the internet to open-source encrypted platforms. Every time you create an account on an encrypted service, choose to use Firefox (open source) instead of Chrome (privately held by Google), these are the micro moves that help to shift the power structure of the internet,” Ottman said. Users are slowly “taking back” the internet as they recognised the need for open-source, transparent tools and encrypted communication.
This autumn, Minds will host encrypted video chat on its platform using peer-to-peer technology, which does not require a central server. It also hopes to eventually create an offshore centre with distributed data, so users can decide where and how their data is held.
Ottman admits that storage is an issue for the company because it uses Amazon Web Services (as do most major websites). While Mind’s policy is never to hand over private data, access could still be secured by a government if it compels Amazon to surrender it. Still, with the data encrypted, it would be very difficult for anyone to crack.
Bill Levy, technical director of GCHQ, the UK’s surveillance centre, recently spoke at a BT Tower Talk on digital security in London about the type of encryption that Minds uses. He said: “The best estimate for the number of bits of work to decrypt just one [encrypted] session is 280 [1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176] and with the best processor we have today requiring 10 nanojoules per instruction, that works out at 3.4 terawatt hours per 50 minutes, which is the entire power generating capacity of the UK … Even if an intelligence agency wants to break encryption, it is a great deal more work than anybody realises because the laws of physics still apply.”
Minds faces another threat from giant internet corporations because it distributes its mobile apps through Google Play and Apple’s iTunes Store. Both have rules about the type of content that can appear and, while no content is filtered on the PC version of the Minds, Ottman said the company was forced to look at what content was promoted on the mobile versions or risk losing the ability to be installed on mobile devices. This bothered him and he hoped to find a way around it. And he said: “Our ultimate policy is: if it’s legal, it’s OK.”
A different route to free access to internet content is offered by Outernet, a satellite-communications company. By making content available to users globally via satellite, it bypasses the internet as a delivery mechanism altogether. Every inhabitable part of the globe is covered by satellite reception, yet around half of the world’s population cannot gain access to the internet because of lack of infrastructure.
“What I want to solve is information access – so we send the content down just like TV or radio,” Syed Karim, founder and chief executive of Outernet, told Index. His goal was a media company that could reach every person on the planet with ease.
As satellite signals are very difficult to block, this delivery mechanism can get content into regimes that try to control the internet. Just as China faces great difficulty in preventing GreatFire’s FreeBrowser getting content from CDNs, blocking satellite signals could create major impacts for any country that tried to do it, because other satellite communications (including in neighbouring countries) could be blocked.
Karim recognises the irony in Outernet’s use of the same satellite to deliver its content over China as the Chinese state uses to deliver censored television. He hopes one day the company will have its own satellites, which would remove any threats of being censored by satellite operators.
Outernet aims to create a “library in the sky” of content selected by a global group of community editors and publishers. Users would download the content at up to 100 gigabytes per day, to store on a hard drive and then browse via their PC or mobile device.
The company is offering two devices compatible with its system (one mobile and one fixed), which will download, store and locally serve data. It is also making the plans for creating a receiver publicly available. “As long as you offer a public spec, you don’t even have to depend on hardware which may be illegal or difficult to get. So people can build their own receiver, even if they can’t buy it,” Karim said.
If the “internet migration” catches on, it will bring a new chapter in the struggle for democratic control of the internet, which has maintained what independence it has by being a system that self-corrects when its users mobilise en masse.
© Jason DaPonte