Tag Archives: Censorship

Firewall the Inside of your OpenVPN or L2TP/IPSec Tunnel on Android

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The Scenario:

Let’s say you are at a coffee shop with public internet access, and you don’t want someone snooping on your traffic, so you VPN to your work. However, you also don’t want to tunnel personal stuff out of your work VPN (chat, facebook, youtube, your personal email maybe?), so the question becomes, how do you create 2 different firewalls – one that ONLY allows you to VPN and does not allow any other applications access, and one that then controls the traffic within the VPN channel so that you can utilize the connection for some apps but not others?

At this point, there are only 2 “methods” of running a Firewall on Android: having root and managing/accessing IPTables, or, the only alternative – creating a sub-VPN channel that you pipe the traffic over and filter (which does not require root). Unfortunately, the second type (without root) will not work for this, since we will need to utilize the VPN channel ourselves for our VPN, and to my knowledge, Android let’s you setup only 1 active VPN channel. So, you need 1.) a way to root and 2.) a good Firewall

Continue Reading →Firewall the Inside of your OpenVPN or L2TP/IPSec Tunnel on Android

Cloud Censorship – the real public cloud concern

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For anyone who has not been following what is going on with WikiLeaks, here is a good place to start:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-us-censorship-row

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks-first-amendment-only-strong

WikiLeaks is a “whistle blowing” website. A quick search about it brings you to:

Wikileaks was a website that published anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors.

This week WikiLeaks released some sensitive US documents:

The classified diplomatic cables released by online whistleblower WikiLeaks and reported on by news organizations in the United States and Europe provided often unflattering assessments of foreign leaders, including those of Germany and Italy.

The cables also contained revelations about long-simmering nuclear trouble spots, detailing U.S., Israeli and Arab fears of Iran’s growing nuclear program; U.S. concerns about Pakistan’s atomic arsenal; and U.S. discussions about a united Korean peninsula as a long-term solution to North Korean aggression.

There are also U.S. memos encouraging U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to collect detailed data about the UN secretary-general, his team and foreign diplomats ― going beyond what is considered the normal run of information-gathering expected in diplomatic circles.

None of the revelations is particularly explosive, but their publication could prove problematic for the officials concerned.

The short version of what happened is that WikiLeaks was the target of many DDoS attacks. Eventually, the website was shut down. They decided to change their hosting provider and use Amazon’s AWS (Public Cloud Service). After a few days, Amazon shut down their website claiming that it violated their terms of service. They brought the site in another location, and then their DNS provider decided to shut them down.

The reality is that WikiLeaks is exercising their right of freedom of speech. The problem is that they have some very sensitive information, and this makes political high profile figures nervous. However, when you move past the details of what happened, you come to the realization and real concern — Public Cloud Censorship.

This is the perfect example of why companies are afraid of using Public Clouds (outsourcing your infrastructure to someone else). As you can see from this example, your entire business can be shut down in a matter of minutes, just because someone has a different opinion than yours. This brings massive concern and rightfully so. I really think that the long term solution is private clouds. Take this great technology and deploy it within your own datacenter. When you look at this from the top, it looks a lot like web hosting — you can either outsource your web hosting to a company like DreamHost and BlueHost, or you can do it yourself. There are benefits to both, but at the end, it comes down to your concern for privacy and freedom.

Along with many other people, I personally think that Amazon had the chance to do something great, and as the Guardian and EFF pointed out: “Instead, Amazon ran away with its tail between its legs.”