A Coward wrote: “No matter how much you hate it, the internet will be subject to the laws of Sovereign Nations that allow it to operate in their country.” A parallel satellite based internet system might solve the problem of sovereign nation interference. Unless of course, I misunderstand how the internet works.

When it comes to the ruckus for an alternative DNS and various forms of “darknets” (and trust me, they have been tried before, long before most of the kids on here even had a computer), they are used mostly to disguise or try to hide illegal activity.

The most obvious reasons are things like piracy and illicit discussions, such as political upheavals. Those people who choose to try to hide usually have something to hide. That in itself makes them suspicious, especially in countries who attempt to control access to the internet (and there are many of them).

Can you differentiate that an https session to a shopping site isn’t actually transferring something else for those that know the secret password?

Actually, it is incredibly easy to tell the difference. One of the amazing things about the internet is that everything looks different when you start to look at the flows and the movement, the sources and the destinations.

Can you figure out that a long list of files transferred over a few days using various routes actually includes hidden bits of information that the target can assemble in the end?

Again, if you are taking steps to hide your activity by using encryption or certain types of connection, your activity will look different from other users. If you are talking a secret code to pass small messages, that might work to a certain extent, but it would require a significant effort to setup and they receive.

Uses of the common dodges, like VPN or open gateways / relays would stand out like sore thumbs. Rather than blocking you, they might just monitor you instead.

Nobody is saying that there is 100% blocking from any country, but those who do choose to do blocking (such as some Muslim countries), are often very effective at making sites or materials generally unavailable. Remember, these are places where the only incoming internet connections are peered through government controlled facilities. If you connect to the outside world, they know what you connected to.

It is what it is. When there is discussions on TD about alternate DNS systems, it is for either piracy or the dissemination of sites like Wikileaks. It is rarely for anything noble.

If you are willing to invest the billions to do it, well, knock yourself out.

You see only in an open and free place people don’t use those things and they are relegated to illegal activities, but once privacy and rights start to crumble everyone will start to use it so the illegal stuff takes a second place.

Tor is distributed in internet cafe’s in China. Retroshare, GNUNet are great to communicate and share data, most programmers understand how DPI works analyzing traffic patterns and devised ways to counteract that.

We have come a long way since the days in Greece where people rolled a piece of cloth on a stick and wrote on it(maybe the first steganography attempt).

Every government that attempted to curtail the flow of information failed, not a single one succeeded in history.

Just some recent events:

– IPRED was created in Sweden, most people just started using VPN’s that are outside the jurisdiction of that government, but still is not the state of the art in stealth although good enough for the moment.

– Japan have some of the most strict laws in the world regarding imaginary goods, until recently search engines couldn’t even function there because of the law, not to mention privacy laws. Is so strict that you can’t show peoples face on TV you have to blur them and modify their voices and still companies bypass that using contracts and the public using Winny(encrypted anonymous filesharing program).

– In China internet cafe’s give people TOR so they can navigate what they want.

– In Italy there was this push to censor the media to control it better, which kickstarted a dozen projects to bypass that like Osiris-SP.

– In France you have dozens of projects aiming at securing peoples rights. With the most famous one that is growing fast being Jamendo.

It is a circle, all of this happened before, those in power forget why those rules are there and why they were put there.

In your case you care about copyrights, but you don’t seem to know the history of it. Once in the U.K. copyrights were abolished because of abuse of the monopolies granted to others that lead to a revolt that cost the heads of the noble and priests, only to be recreated in a watered down fashion years latter.

There is this inherent drive for freedom in society and that is what undermines the attempts to control it.

Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac all lived in different eras and they wrote exactly about the same subject(freedom), the libertines in the middle ages the beatnicks of the 60’s, the hippies of the 70’s, the punks of the 80’s, the EMO’s of the 90’s, they are all the same thing. When people in power cross that line that balances the fragile need for freedom and order things get ugly, because trust is broken and without trust there is no psyops capable of regaining the hearts and minds of people.

It is funny how something deemed cheesy nowadays is so important for stability.

“It isn’t about exposing things for better good, it’s about playing “caught you!”

Hense the name Wikileaks? Of course it’s a game of “caught you” that is what whistle blowing is! If they have to worry about getting caught and the penalties that follow, maybe they will change their behavior….

The same answer as always: There isn’t any 100% solutions, if you are really willing to work hard at it, there will always be a way to get some traffic through. It might takes months to get enough traffic to watch a youtube video, but if that is what you desire, there you go.

However, it would be clear, running software to do that sort of thing would make your activities high suspicious. Over time, authorities can figure out your traffic without even having to really decrypt it, only looking at patterns and sources.

Those countries who want to control the internet do so mostly be controlling the flow into the country. Just as the price of your computer comes down, so does the price of the tools they need to do things like deep packet inspections and pattern matching. Cat and mouse, and when they win, someone disappears for a long time.