Sunday, February 19, 2006
Anonymous 101
The internet world, like a library, contains millions of downloadable pages of text, image, and voice that is widely viewed as educational. Some areas of the internet, like pornography, are not.
Iranian internet authorities, monitoring the millions of users from within their borders, takes the greatest pains to block user access to websites like Anonymizer, or The Cloak, and view the world of the internet in terms of Keywords, and not as a whole.
The keywords here are:
Ass
Teen
Woman
Girl
Soft
Hard
(etc..)
With these keywords belted under their waist, and the support of companies like SmartFilter, they reach into the internet using the cooperation of their ICPs and ISPs and effectively block almost all resources, including cancer and health, that use some of those keywords in their websites.
The unsettling part is that although some users may get a hold of an anonymous proxy service provider, they can never be sure that all the services provide completely anonymous surfing. This is true, especially in Iran. While inside, my email was listed onto a newsletter that would be sent every once in a while with a list of two or more free anonymous providers. Each day, people would access these sites, and then, it would be blocked. But, again, how can one be sure that when you send your surf inquiries you are REALLY safe?
Anonymous servers that are accessible in the IRI are anonymous, between the anonymous server and the server the user is trying to access, but they are not always anonymous between the anonymous server and the user's server.
That's where the user may be under an unintentional but hazardous circumstance; And, in all likelihood, this will continue to be the case.
*I tested a few of them while there, and the variation in them was astonishing: One of the sites that was not filtered was www.missworld.com...This is making more sense by the minute.
Iranian internet authorities, monitoring the millions of users from within their borders, takes the greatest pains to block user access to websites like Anonymizer, or The Cloak, and view the world of the internet in terms of Keywords, and not as a whole.
The keywords here are:
Ass
Teen
Woman
Girl
Soft
Hard
(etc..)
With these keywords belted under their waist, and the support of companies like SmartFilter, they reach into the internet using the cooperation of their ICPs and ISPs and effectively block almost all resources, including cancer and health, that use some of those keywords in their websites.
The unsettling part is that although some users may get a hold of an anonymous proxy service provider, they can never be sure that all the services provide completely anonymous surfing. This is true, especially in Iran. While inside, my email was listed onto a newsletter that would be sent every once in a while with a list of two or more free anonymous providers. Each day, people would access these sites, and then, it would be blocked. But, again, how can one be sure that when you send your surf inquiries you are REALLY safe?
Anonymous servers that are accessible in the IRI are anonymous, between the anonymous server and the server the user is trying to access, but they are not always anonymous between the anonymous server and the user's server.
That's where the user may be under an unintentional but hazardous circumstance; And, in all likelihood, this will continue to be the case.
*I tested a few of them while there, and the variation in them was astonishing: One of the sites that was not filtered was www.missworld.com...This is making more sense by the minute.
