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Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
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Detect outgoing port blocking with nmap and portquiz.net

This post will describe how to detect if your network is blocking outgoing ports. In this test, we'll be using nmap and the fine website portquiz.net

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


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Detecting Censorship or ISP Network Tampering with OONI

This article will introduce a tool to detect censorship or network tampering using the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) android app, which is part of the Tor Project.

The OONI project's mission is to collect data on network providers to determine where the Internet is free and where it's being manipulated. For example, the OONI Explorer displays a world map of such data.

On the OONI explorer, you can drill-down on the world map into a specific country to get a list of websites that were detected as being blocked from within that country.

For example, when I looked at the history of OONI probe runs within the US, I saw a list of the usual suspects: gambling sites, pornography sites, torrenting sites, etc. More surprising (at least to me) was the number of pastebin sites that were banned. And, despicably, there was a network in the US blocking The Internet Archive

When I looked at the data from scans within another great "free country" = India, I saw a lot of cherry-picked censorship on facebook and news articles as it relates to the 2017 genocide of Rohingya Refugees in Burma and various muslim/hindu conflicts.

Anyone
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Bypassing Check Point firewall DPI Tor-blocking

This article will describe how to bypass censorship from within any network that uses firewalls using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) built by the Israeli software company Check Point Software Technologies Ltd, such as is being used by the Miami-Dade's Public Library System to censor on their public wifi.

I've been very fortunate to live in a country where freedom of speech is a well-protected human right and censorship is generally unaccepted. But, I've long been aware that many States prefer to assert their control over their citizens by controlling their available information. One of the shining achievements from the Tor Project is a system that allows these unfortunate souls to be able to bypass these censors and access the unfettered Internet. Indeed, the UN affirmed that a State's attempt to prevent or disrupt dissemination of information online is a violation of international human rights law, as defined by article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Of course, many States today continue to ban access to the Tor network. In response, Tor provided hidden entry-points called bridge relays that are harder to block. In response to Tor bridges, States purchased firewalls from companies like Check Point to analyze the
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