youtube-banned

Age Verification Starts with YouTube Music Videos

The UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport celebrated that YouTube and Vevo will be forcing age restrictions on music videos.

On one hand the Government claim;

Introducing age rating for all music videos online was a manifesto commitment – making the pilot permanent and working to extend this internationally by sharing our experience of the pilot is part of delivering this.

Yet on the other hand they claim that this is industry driven and the Government has nothing to do with it;

Regardless this policy is driving a message that parents can rely on Government meddling to protect their children from the evils of the Internet rather than encouraging them to actually talk and educate children themselves.

Also, and more worryingly, it is conditioning people that it’s OK to have to hand over biometrics to receive services, to surrender anonymity to access content online and that Government censorship is acceptable.

We wouldn’t be suprised if there comes a time when the UK Government can tag content on YouTube to require adults to be logged in with a registered and verified account to view ‘extreme’ material such as a GreenPeace anti-fracking video or citizen recorded footage of Police brutality. The chilling effect is obvious.

And, for those who plan to host content themselves or on Vimeo the Government will make good on the plan to block websites that don’t conform to their age-gating plans.

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PacketFlagon – The HydraProxy

Today marks 1 year since the Immunicity arrest that saw someone get arrested for allowing people to send their HTTP(s) traffic where they wanted to without interference.

In that time it’d seem that the City of London Police haven’t really done much;

However the guys and gals over at Brass Horn Communications have been doing quite a bit culminating in todays “launch party” of HydraProxy.Party

Whilst not a real launch party* it is the official unveiling of the open sourced software derived from the original RoutingPacketsIsNotACrime.uk platform.

What is a ProxyShard / HydraProxy

The PacketFlagon platform is essentially one central server that feeds and receives information from lots of other servers around the Internet.

Anyone is free to download the BSD licensed software from GitHub, upload it to their webserver and then 30 seconds later are capable of creating, editing and serving the PAC files that help your browser circumnavigate Internet censorship.

The HydraProxy element comes in several parts, the first is that not only are there now tens of the PacketFlagon frontends available but the PAC files are also available on S3 and most impressively of all the platform maintains a number of what it terms “deadhand” nodes that constantly monitor the central server and the various frontends.

If the deadhand nodes reach consensus that a frontend has been blocked another domain is automatically registered, a new virtual machine is created and then bootstrapped to be a frontend node, all without human intervention!

Android App

There is also an Android app available on the Google Play store or by compiling the sourcecode yourself from GitHub.

The App provides an easy way to manage existing PAC files or to create new ones, we’re told that later versions will also include some intelligent circumnavigation methods in case the ISPs start to block the PacketFlagon API itself.

Is It Safe To Use?

Yes. Keep an eye on the Brass Horn Communications warrant canary just in case but we trust the team.

With that said it’s always a better bet to take your security and censorship circumnavigation into your own hands and look at how to properly use Tor or create SSH tunnels / your own SOCKS proxies.

* It’s understood that if you’re at DefCon in Las Vegas and can track down the @PacketFlagon team they might buy you a beer!