[QUOTE][B]AS THE Iraqi government censors large swathes of the internet following devastating attacks and victories by the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), thousands of people are turning to the deep, anonymous web[/B].
Locals are adopting the browser Tor, the most popular anonymising tool online, to get around government obstruction, the [URL="http://www.dailydot.com/politics/iraq-internet-censorship-tor/"]Daily Dot[/URL] reported.
Over the last five days, Tor usage in Iraq has exploded upwards tenfold to nearly 10,000 active users at any given time.
[t]http://resources0.news.com.au/images/2014/06/19/1226960/560312-28b4d4ae-f781-11e3-ba3b-878da0800edb.jpg[/t]
Iraq’s online censorship has been sharply criticised by internet activists like Mustafa Al-Bassam, a former blackhat hacker, who says the Iraqi government is taking advantage of the situation.
Al-Bassam, who was previously involved in the hacktivist group LulzSec, built and launched an Arabic-language website to help Iraqis beat censorship with Tor.
“This is an ludicrous excuse for collateral censorship for a government that claims to be democratic, especially after the death of hundreds of thousands of people required to reach this state of government and remove the previous dictatorship that denied Iraqis their basic freedoms,“ Al-Bassam told [URL="http://www.dailydot.com/politics/iraq-internet-censorship-tor/"]the Daily Dot[/URL].
Tor, which has been downloaded 120 million times in the last year, served key roles in global unrest in countries like Turkey, where as many as 10,000 users per day adopted the tool to beat digital censorship.
Following in the footsteps of many governments before it, the Iraqi Ministry of Communications has blocked access to Tor’s main website. In response, activists have built a large list of mirrors that Iraqis can easily access from within the country to download Tor and browse the internet unobstructed.[/QUOTE]
[URL="http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/all-of-iraq-is-in-the-deep-web/story-fnjwmwrh-1226960562497"]http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/all-of-iraq-is-in-the-deep-web/story-fnjwmwrh-1226960562497[/URL]
Oh wow. Talk about Authoritarians trying to keep a leash on the population instead of using the service as an information hub to tell them to avoid certain areas.
[QUOTE=Paul McCartney;45155772]Oh wow. Talk about Authoritarians trying to keep a leash on the population instead of using the service as an information hub to tell them to avoid certain areas.[/QUOTE]
To be fair it is a lot easier to just stop the usage of a certain platform that might be being used for bad things than it is to try and use it for good.
Pointless though as ISIS clearly use couriers and USB sticks and not the internet for actual planning..
[URL="https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/"]The EFF set up a nice site where you can read up on running a node to support the network.[/URL]
Most people here probably shouldn't run an exit node due to the fact that traffic routed through them to the Internet appears to come from that location which can lead to legal issues (and also exposes your home network if you have one).
Running a relay-only node helps to increase anonymity for people using it and increases throughput for Tor only applications though, at the very least.
(This includes .onion web pages and some communication programs that use the network as back-end.)
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