LazyGamer.net has reported that patches being rolled out for League Of Legends has been blocked due to incidental filenames.
If your patcher logs show many lines like this:
RADS::Common::HTTPConnection::GetFile: File not found
And that happens with files with a name similar to this:
VarusExpirationTimer.luaobj
XerathMageChainsExtended.luaobj
The cause is that your provider is blocking any URLs that contain any pornographic content. Apparently that includes cases like this. An other cause are Router protection settings, which may also block the word sex.
If you are experiencing this problem, you can try to get the whole LoL folder zipped from a friend every time you patch, or just call your ISP to lift the blockade.
Edit: This should only happen to people who switch or signup with new ISPs after a certain date (I’m assuming 1st Jan). The filter won’t be on by default to any existing customers, at least it won’t on BT, so most people will be unaffected. If the filter is on, all it takes is a call to your ISP and it’s off. (thanks to /u/mejti )
What is obviously quite scary about this revelation is that it means that this might not just be a simple URL or DNS based block but could be indicative of the far more intrusive Deep Packet Inspection technology rolled out by China and TalkTalk.
It’s not a long shot to fear that games will start breaking or gamers will get accused of cheating by software such as Steams VAC if ISPs start blocking data (e.g. chat messages or server instructions) that contain naughty words.
On the same day that the BBC reports that “Children can turn off Net Filters” a LibDem Lord has asked whether the choice of filtering should be taken out of parents (read everyone’s) hands and be made compulsory
I also welcome the recognition by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport of the need for adequate filtering to protect young people from online abuse. However, as was discussed in this House only recently with the Online Safety Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, should we not be making filtering compulsory? Is it enough simply to leave it up to parents to make the choice about appropriate safety features?Lord Clement-Jones
Within weeks of the filters that everyone predicted would herald a slippery slope to mandatory filtering with ever encroaching levels of censorship going online we’ve already started to slide.
Several years ago the UK Internet was tied up in an opt-in / opt-out battle about ISP proxies tracking your movements on-line to monetize advertising.
Now we have a new opt-in/opt-out battle but this time it is about ISP proxies tracking your movements on-line to prevent you seeing things you’re not allowed to see.
Could it be that the reasons the big ISPs rolled over so easily and implemented filters is that it provides them with a treasure trove of information about your browsing habits?
Notice how Phorm sit’s within the ISP network, masquerades as target domains and presents different content.
ISP filtering does similar things, they either spoof DNS responses to force you to goto their static block page or they manipulate routing within their network to route traffic destined for a remote host to a host within their network.
Technically there is nothing stopping them from doing other things with your traffic at this point. Are we to believe that having already silently tested Phorm on unsuspecting customers are they not capable of using this new found, Government instigated power to make some more money at the cost of your freedom and privacy?
TechDirt have reported that EasyDNS have been victorious in their pursuit of due process when it comes to seizure of Domains by the City of London Police.
As you may be aware, the City of London Police’s new intellectual property crime unit took it upon themselves to seize domains they believed were involved in copyright infringement and some registrars co-operated without even asking for a warrant or court order.
Thankfully EasyDNS had this to say;
Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don’t play along, this is a non-trivial question. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court oflaw, as opposed to “some guy on the internet” sending emails. While that’s plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn’t fly here.
We have an obligation to our customers and we are bound by our Registrar Accreditation Agreements not to make arbitrary changes to our customers settings without a valid FOA (Form of Authorization). To supersede that we need a legal basis. To get a legal basis something has to happen in court.
The request also suggests we look at the whois contact information for the domain (which looks perfectly valid) and go ahead and suspend the domain based on invalid whois data. Again, there’s a process for that, you have to go through the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint process and most of the time that doesn’t result in a takedown anyway.
What gets me about all of this is that the largest, most egregious perpetrators of online criminal activity right now are our own governments, spying on their own citizens, illegally wiretapping our own private communications and nobody cares, nobody will answer for it, it’s just an out-of-scope conversation that is expected to blend into the overall background malaise of our ever increasing serfdom.
If I can’t make various governments and law enforcement agencies get warrants or court orders before they crack my private communications then I can at least require a court order before I takedown my own customer.EasyDNS
The guys and gals over at Backlash are holding a fundraiser to ensure they can continue to provide legal advice and specialist solicitors to the people that are turning to them for help.
Backlash is an umbrella organisation providing academic, legal and campaigning resources defending freedom of sexual expression. We support the rights of adults to participate in all consensual sexual activities and to watch, read and create any fictional interpretation of such in any mediaFrom the Backlash Website
The evening will consist of film, talks and round table discussions by specialists including our solicitors, external campaigners and academics, then music and drinks until closing time!
Click the link above or here to visit their website for more details.
Whilst not directly linked to the technical issues of ISP Filtering they are certainly caught up in the morale furore that MPs & the media keep inciting around sex, sexuality and the Internet.
Oliver Wright at the Independent has just broken the news that Liberal Democrat President Tim Farron is going to propose legislation that enshrines the “digital rights of the citizen” which would include stopping “any requirement for opt-ins, opt-outs, filters, lists or controls on legal material”.
DigitalRightsOfTheCitizen.co.uk has been registered and we’re about to start a campaign to get people to write to their MP to help define the Digital Rights we as citizens deserve.
In the meantime give Mr Farron a shout on Twitter to say thank you!
This article is for use on a Linux/Mac computer (desktop / laptop etc). A Windows guide will be available at a later date.
If you don’t currently run Linux on your desktop I would strongly suggest it. Try Fedora or Ubuntu. If you don’t want to run Linux permanently but do want to try this method then a Live Boot CD of Fedora or Ubuntu (or any other Linux OS of your choice) would be an ideal method.
Servers in datacenters are extremely unlikely to experience filtering so by tunnelling your connection through to a server you can browse the Internet without worrying if your connection is being restricted or surveilled.
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Signing up with Digital Ocean
Navigate to www.DigitalOcean.com and click the Signup button at the top of the page. Enter an email address and a password. You may want to use an anonymous email provider such as Hushmail.com to protect your privacy and a strong password you’ve not used anywhere else. Important: The email address must be real as your server password will be emailed to you.
Once logged in you’ll have access to the initial control panel;
Click get started which will take you to the billing page, you can either use a credit card (you may want to use an anonymous Visa / Mastercard, search online for keywords such as prepaid, anonymous etc) or PayPal.
Once your payment is processed and cleared (check billing for tracking your pre-paid balance if using PayPal) or refresh the droplets page to see the below;
Click Create Droplet!
Choose a friendly name for the server (aka Droplet), this name is not important feel free to use how-to.survivetheclaireperryinter.net if you want to. Leave the Size option alone (or if a larger size is selected change to to 512Mb/20Gb/1Tb as this is only $5 / £3 a month). For lower latency and a reduced chance of NSA eavesdropping choose an Amsterdam datacenter (not necessary but recommended).
Scroll down for more settings. For the purposes of this tutorial choose CentOS and then the latest CentOS version (currently 6.4) then click Create Droplet.
After a few seconds of watching the following screen your server will be created and you should have received an email with your root password.
Behold your new server, make note of the IP address at the top near the word active. In this case the IP address is 95.85.54.190Check your inbox and you should have an email with the IP address, the user name (root) and your password. It’s very important you don’t write a blog post and publish your username and password because bad things will happen to your server
Now we’re ready to create a proxy.
Testing the Proxy / Tunnel
Assuming you are logged into your Linux computer load up a terminal.Type the following;
Replace the IP address with your own. You’ll be informed that the authenticity of the host can’t be established which is true because you don’t know what the RSA key fingerprint is. You can choose to accept it and continue or be paranoid and bail. If you chose to continue you will be prompted for you password that was sent by email.
Load up another terminal (or a tab) and type the following;
You should see the following output indicating that your ISP is Digital Ocean.
You could immediately configure your browser etc to use these settings but you should try and be a bit more thorough.
Configuring the Proxy / Tunnel for long term use
Exit all of the terminals opened in the previous step which will close all tunnels and SSH sessions and we’ll get started on making this a little more secure.
First things first is to change the root password from the one that was emailed to you. Load up a terminal and ssh in;
Once logged in change the password with the passwd command. Ensure you use a different password to anything else you have.The root user is the most powerful user on a Linux server and can delete anything and everything so you really don’t want to be using it for everyday tasks. For creating the tunnel we want to use a non-privileged user. To do this simply type the following (feel free to replace the name tunnel with your name or anything, it’s just a username and isn’t important);
useradd tunnel
Now change the password for this user by passing the username to the passwd command used earlier, make sure you use a strong password and one that isn’t that same as any of your others;
passwd tunnel
Load up a new tab on your local machine and try logging in as your new user;
For this example I’m going to use Firefox but feel free to try it out with others. In the address bar type about:config, you’ll be presented with the following screen;
Assuming you are going to be careful click the button.
In the Search bar at the top type proxy, then look for the strings network.proxy.socks and network.proxy.socks_port, type in the values from the command above (127.0.0.1 and 8080). If your ISP filters DNS then you may want to toggle network.proxy.socks_remote_dns too (don’t forget to change your name servers!).
Finally change network.proxy.type to 1.
To test, simply load up a new Firefox tab and attempt to access a blocked page.
So there you have it, an easy way to get past any Web filtering and as an added bonus since your traffic is encrypted between your computer and your server in Amsterdam neither your ISP nor the UK Government can monitor it.
Traffic egressing the server can still be tracked and recorded. With the right combination of warrants and traffic capture at the Digital Ocean datacenter coupled with your home ISP logs illegal activity can still be traced back to you! Only use this to method to bypass filters,
Upcoming articles include creating a dedicated Raspberry PI proxy for use with multiple devices (phones, tablets, Windows PCs etc) and setup guides for other server providers. Make sure you follow @STCPI on Twitter for updates!
Initial research indicates that even attempting to use 3rd Party DNS servers on some ISPs elicits a spoofed response which indicates that these ISPs are intercepting and monitoring ALL DNS queries you make. This presents a variety of concerns such as the accuracy of SPF, DNS-SEC or TXT responses but that’s a topic for another time.
Circumnavigation:
If you discover that you are getting faked responses and are unable to reach the correct webserver follow the steps below.
Get the A Record
Navigate to a website such as http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools
Look for the DNS Lookup tool
In the text box enter the URL you are trying to reach (e.g. www.google.com)
Select A from the record type
Submit the request and make a note of the IP address returned.
Edit the Hosts file
Windows
Start notepad.exe as an Administrator
Open C:\Widnows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
Add the URL and the IP address in the format shown below; 173.194.34.67 www.google.com
Save the file ensuring that a file suffix isn’t appended
Linux / Mac
Open /etc/hosts as the superuser with your editor of choice (vim!)
Add the URL and the IP address in the format shown below; 173.194.34.67 www.google.com
Save the file ensuring that a file suffix isn’t appended
Testing
Load up a cmd prompt (Ctrl + R, type cmd, press return)
Type nslookup www.google.com
Ensure you receive the IP address you entered in the hosts file
If the ISP is using BGP filtering methods, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) or a transparent proxy then this still may not work as they’ll detect traffic going to the blocked IP subnet and act accordingly.
Keep an eye on our How to Evade Blocks page and follow @STCPI on Twitter for more methods to discover and evade Internet censorship.
2 days after TorrentFreak posted about Web filtering in the UK Sky has caved and admitted to yet another over blocking mistake and has recategorized torrentfreak.com so it is now reachable.
In the opening of their article the BBC clearly state that overblocking is affecting lots of other legitimate websites;
filters are intended to allow parents to ensure children cannot view adult content.
But the automatic blocking of all file-sharing sites meant that news site TorrentFreak and other legitimate sites were also blocked.
BBC
Whilst this is a victory for TorrentFreak.com there are still plenty of other site owners that may not know if they have been blocked and are losing revenue or being blocked from providing the help they are trying to provide.
Read the full story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25638872
TorrentFreak.com the self described home of breaking news about File-sharing, copyright and privacy is the latest website to fall victim to UK Internet filter overblocking.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron wants all Internet providers to block porn by default, to protect the children. This filtering requirement is controversial for a number of reasons, not least due to ISPs’ filters targeting a wide range of other content too. Sky’s newly launched Broadband Shield, for example, blocks numerous legitimate file-sharing related sites including uTorrent and BitTorrent.com, download portals for Linux distributions, and even TorrentFreak.TorrentFreak.com
If you are able to reach the page you can read the full write up here, if you can’t reach the page maybe it’s time to start looking at ways to evade the filters?
