The Internet Police are coming, The Internet Police are coming!

[kiba]

@Juan

Unless your ISP is doing the censoring…

That never stopped Piratebay. Heck, everytime they tried blocking it or taking it down, it only got more popular.

[Eduard_Gabriel_Munte]

Then everybody will start using Freenet instead. That is, until they ban cryptography altogether. And then we’ll use steganography to conceal cryptography. Only totalitarianism will have a chance to stop it.

@Freenet website

What is Freenet?

Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.

Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are “routed-through” other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.

@Wikipedia

Encrypted Payloads

Detecting a probable steganographic payload is often only part of the problem, as the payload may have been encrypted first. Encrypting the payload is not always done solely to make recovery of the payload more difficult. Many encryption techniques have the desirable property of making the payload appear much more like well-distributed noise, which can make detection efforts more difficult, and save the steganographic encoding technique the trouble of having to distribute the signal energy evenly (but see above concerning errors emulating the native noise of the carrier).

[…]

Conclusions and Further Action

Obtaining a warrant or taking other action based solely on steganalytic evidence is a very dicey proposition unless a payload has been completely recovered and decrypted, because otherwise all the analyst has is a statistic indicating that a file may have been modified, and that modification may have been the result of steganographic encoding. Because this is likely to frequently be the case, steganalytic suspicions will often have to be backed up with other investigative techniques.

As you can see, there isn’t much the government can do. Heh, you could say technology obsoleted government in addition to economy :).

[wombatron]

@Eduard - Gabriel Munteanu

Then everybody will start using Freenet instead. That is, until they ban cryptography altogether. And then we’ll use steganography to conceal cryptography. Only totalitarianism will have a chance to stop it.

@Freenet website

What is Freenet?

Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.

Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are “routed-through” other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.

@Wikipedia

Encrypted Payloads

Detecting a probable steganographic payload is often only part of the problem, as the payload may have been encrypted first. Encrypting the payload is not always done solely to make recovery of the payload more difficult. Many encryption techniques have the desirable property of making the payload appear much more like well-distributed noise, which can make detection efforts more difficult, and save the steganographic encoding technique the trouble of having to distribute the signal energy evenly (but see above concerning errors emulating the native noise of the carrier).

[…]

Conclusions and Further Action

Obtaining a warrant or taking other action based solely on steganalytic evidence is a very dicey proposition unless a payload has been completely recovered and decrypted, because otherwise all the analyst has is a statistic indicating that a file may have been modified, and that modification may have been the result of steganographic encoding. Because this is likely to frequently be the case, steganalytic suspicions will often have to be backed up with other investigative techniques.

As you can see, there isn’t much the government can do. Heh, you could say technology obsoleted government in addition to economy :).

Crypto-anarchism for the win!

[user33]

the best solution to the problem you describe is to banish his website, infect his computer and prosecute him criminally. Of course this would force you to take another look at the deviant gay community and all kinds of other predatorial websites; gambling, loansharking, etc. Who are you really trying to protect your own game you run on your mark?

[user33]

the internet is already censored by lord gates and hinass buffet, libraries, schools, the fed all use the software where you can putup anything you want as long as you keep in under one page. They have even banded the boy scouts because of their wicked response to allowing sexual predators as scout leaders. Schools are sued and lose if thry bar the sexual predator from teaching our children, but what the hell, they’re only put looking for a mate, you know how some people are about marrying virgins

[laminustacitus]

As far as people who try to censor through gatekeeping, there’s usually aways around to get around them (e.g. proxies) and they fight an uphill battle in their attempt to control infromation. In the end, the internet is far too massive for even a government to be able to inhibit free speech of it; plus free speech always finds a way to get, look at the ancien regime in France even they couldn’t prevents Voltaire and the philosphes from gaining an audience.