So, China now has censoring capability that ALMOST matches that of Facefook?
China's censorship cyber-missiles shoot down pics flying through WhatsApp, chat apps
China has expanded its censorship tools to strip out images from chat messages in transit through its networks. The new powers were demonstrated on the country's most common messaging services – WeChat and Weibo – following the death of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo last week. The superpower's Great Firewall was also …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 19th July 2017 11:32 GMT handleoclast
Re: image degradation
Nice idea. Very nice. But...
Degrade images to get past hash matching. Fairly obvious, but with an app that changes bits randomly each time the image is sent/forwarded, it would evade hash matching. Google, however, has fairly intelligent image classifying algorithms, and China has a large search engine company which could well be heavily influenced by the gov't (if not now then certainly if hash evasion becomes common) and which probably has its own image classifying stuff.
As for the meta-staganographic idea of using image degradation to flag impending events, that would make the image very noisy and be fairly easily detectable. It would also mean that pictures of snowstorms, etc., would get blocked.
A snowstorm canary would work, though. Send pretty pictures of snowstorms regularly, so that when degraded images are used to signal impending events blocking noisy images shows the canary has been killed.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 20:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Moxie Marlinspike, what a noob
No surprise for WeChat and Weibo, as those are effectively state run, so they designed the protocol to scan and strip images.
The news is that despite its advanced security features, the Signal protocol doesn't pad and obfuscate traffic allowing attachment stripping.
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Wednesday 19th July 2017 13:48 GMT DropBear
Re: Moxie Marlinspike, what a noob
Yes. We just might. Randomly sized packets that keep getting sent at random intervals whether you're actually sending a message or not. Exactly for the reasons presented here. Communications that consist strictly of the required amount of data sent only at the user's request are revealing WAY too much and offer way to convenient of a chance to intervene to be called worthy of bothering with in the 21st century, regardless of how uncrackably they are encrypted.
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Tuesday 18th July 2017 21:07 GMT Sandtitz
Per article:
"It is notable, however, that the Chinese government was only able to shoot down specific images on the chat apps based in China – strongly suggesting that the government has access to the company's backend systems."
Well, duh. Was anyone really really thinking otherwise?
ElReg should've mentioned that Winnie the Pooh is also banned.
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Wednesday 19th July 2017 05:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Oppressive regimes and their comical love-hate relationship with the Internet
Love: online propaganda, pro-government shills (in China's case, the infamous 50 cent brigade)
Hate: censorship of 'sensitive' topics and material online (in China's case, even censoring the skeletons found in World of Warcraft).
It's not just unique to China though. Indonesia has banned Reddit and Vimeo. Singapore has banned a Christian website.
That's why a reliable VPN is important.
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Wednesday 19th July 2017 07:58 GMT Pascal Monett
See, western governments ?
Encryption protects. If encryption could be backdoored, nothing would change because totalitarian governments would just use the backdoor (to say nothing of hackers).
Because WhatsApp uses proper encryption, China censors can only do wholesale blocking. They cannot go into the message content and pick and choose.
Okay, you might say that the message is still blocked and that is true, but it is blocked based on meta criteria (size, are there attachments), not on content. That remains an important distinction because it still means that censors cannot actually blame any blocked message for being illegal since they don't know what's in it.
Proper encryption protects the people. Do it right, because someone will anyway.