Dramatic Increase in Number of Tor Clients from Iran: Interview with Tor Project and the EFF

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 2

Anonymous proxies are in the news this week as Iranians are using proxies outside of Iran to communicate information about ongoing protests to others within the country. I've received several queries this week from non-technical colleagues about proxy servers. Is it legal to run a proxy server? Does running a proxy server violate my agreement with my broadband provider? I decided to track down some experts and get some perspective on different proxy servers and the laws surrounding them. In this entry, I speak with Andrew Lewman, the Executive Directory of the Tor Project about Tor and I also get some legal guidance from Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In this interview I ask Andrew to briefly introduce Tor and talk about some interesting useage statistics that show adoption of this anti-surveillance technology from within Iran. He answers a question about whether Tor is "unstoppable" and comments on the legality of running a Tor node. For the full interview, listen here.

The Tor Project

First, what is Tor? From The Tor Project:

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

When you run a Tor node, you are adding another node to a grid of computers that are used to establish random encrypted paths between each node to satisfy any given request. Law enforcement, military agencies, intelligence networks, journalists, and dissidents frequently use Tor to bypass restrictions and avoid surveillance. Andrew Lewman, Tor's Executive Director, wanted to be very clear that the Tor Project itself does not take positions on conflicts, and does not involve itself in resisting oppressive regimes. In response to a question about traffic from Iran, Andrew Lewman produced the following data:

New client connections from within Iran have increased nearly 10x over the past 5 days. Overall, Tor client usage seems to have increased 3x over the past 5 days. There are a lot of rough numbers in these statements, and they are very conservative. However, the source data we're reviewing continues to show these results.

For more information, see Andrew's blog post from last night: "Measuring Tor and Iran". Here's a graph from Andrew Lewman of Tor client count over the past few days, it appears that Tor is becoming an increasingly popular way for people in Iran to use the network to avoid surveillance.

But is it legal? The Legality of Running a Proxy Server

Peter Eckersley, Staff Technologist at the EFF, took some time to answer some very simple questions about EULAs, Tor, and the legality of running a proxy server.

Q: Various broadband providers state in EULAs that a customer must secure the equipment used to provide access to the Internet. What is the position of the EFF with regard to the legality of these EULAs? Are people breaking the law by providing an open access router?

Peter Eckersley: It's impossible to comment on broadband EULAs in general; each of them has different specific language and ISPs deploy them in different ways. We aren't aware of any case in which a broadband subscriber was sued for running an open wireless router, a proxy, or similar technology for sharing their connection with others.

Q: The last update to the Tor FAQ from the EFF on the Tor site was from 2005. Have there been any developments with the EFF in relation to Tor? Since 2005 is there more clarity as to the legality of running an Exit Node in a Tor network?

Peter Eckersley: The EFF Tor FAQ still reflects our opinions about the legality of Tor. It hasn't changed since 2005 because there haven't been any published cases or other events that have changed our views.

Q: What advice would the EFF have for anyone new to setting up a proxy server this week (as many have done to support protestors in Iran)? Is it legal? What issues do people need to be aware of?

Peter Eckersley: EFF's advice at this point is that people should consider setting up Tor bridge nodes or Tor routers instead of proxy servers. Several thousand new proxy servers have appeared in the past week, but we fear than unencrypted proxies leave Iranians vulnerable to surveillance and continued censorship by the Iranian government. SSL ecrypted proxies are better in this respect, but they are harder to set up than Tor routers, and there are some reports that the Iranian government has succeeded in blocking access to at least some encrypted proxies.

Fixed Typo @ 3:23 PM Central Saturday: One of my questions for the EFF had a rather important typo - I had typed Iraq instead of Iran. Fixed.

Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 8

Interview with Sarah Milstein

In this 10 minute interview with Sarah Milstein, co-author the Twitter Book, she discusses how Twitter is being used by Iranian protesters and how Twitter has accidentally created a system not easily overwhelmed or controlled by authorities. She also talks about the continued evolution of Twitter over the past few months. I ask her to contrast the reaction to Twitter during the Swine Flu with the reaction to Twitter during the recent events in Iran, and it is clear from her answers that as Twitter becomes more familiar to the general public the significance and meaning of the platform are constantly evolving. Milstein comments on whether Twitter is becoming more "serious", and responds to the continued stream of stories by journalists who feel the need to pass judgment on this still-emerging communications platform. Milstein also discusses this week's 140 characters conference in New York.

On the Iranian protests, Milstein is very deliberate to say that the powerful aspect of Twitter during the Iranian protests is that Iranians within the country were able to use it to communicate with one another and with those outside of the country. Toward the end of the interview, I ask Milstein to comment on inadvertent transparency in the context of a previous post by Brady Forest. The Iranian protests story this week was as much about facilitating communications as it was about making sure that protesters were not communicating unintended information to the Iranian government.

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Interesting Questions Raised by Iranian Twitter Activism

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 14

Development (4:10 PM CST): The State Department has been in contact with Twitter to make sure that the service remained available for protestors in Iran. (reuters)

Last Friday, Twitter started to digest the Iranian election results, and the tool became a powerful vehicle for protest and coordination for student protestors within Iran and interested parties outside the country. American Twitterers used the power of the medium to push our own media machine to increase coverage of the story via #CNNFail and #iranelection, and several dedicated observers did some important work to create proxies allowing the Iranian opposition to circumvent network restrictions. While it is amazing to see individuals using technologies such as Twitter to sidestep repressive government censorship, Twitter has also made it easier for observers, a world away, to become active participants in an unfamiliar political system at times taking vigilante action against the server infrastructure of a nation-state.

Figure: Graph of #iranelection from Twist.

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Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 27

Don't miss James Turner's Interview with Google Engineering's Othar Hansson and RV Guha

On Tuesday, Google introduced a feature called Rich Snippets which provides users with a convenient summary of a search result at a glance. They have been experimenting with microformats and RDFa, and are officially introducing the feature and allowing more sites to participate. While the Google announcement makes it clear that this technology is being phased in over time making no guarantee that your site's RDFa or microformats will be parsed, Google has given us a glimpse of the future of indexing. Read this article to find out about the underlying technology and how you can prepare you own content to work with this emerging technology.

What is RDFa?

While Google's announcement today focuses on microformats they will soon release support for RDFa. From the W3C RDFa in XHTML Specification:

The current Web is primarily made up of an enormous number of documents that have been created using HTML. These documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience: an event on a web page can be directly imported into a user's desktop calendar; a license on a document can be detected so that users can be informed of their rights automatically; a photo's creator, camera setting information, resolution, location and topic can be published as easily as the original photo itself, enabling structured search and sharing.

Let's take a quick look at a review from Amazon, and see how it would be marked up with RDFa to provide more information for Rich Snippets. First, here's a review from the Amazon site:

Next, let's take a look at a (very simplified) example of markup that might be used to generate this review:

<div>
  <div>
    79 of 98 people found the following review helpful:
  </div>
  <div>
    <span>5.0 out of 5 stars</span>
    <span><b>American Biographer: Jon Meacham</b>/span>
  </div>
  <div><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2G8PQ9HNUY6NA/">
            <span>Marian the Librarian</span></a> (NY, NY)  - 
  </div>
  <div>
    <b>This review is from: 
      <a href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Lion-Andrew-Jackson-White/dp/1400063256/">
      American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Hardcover)</a></b>
  </div>
  <div class="review">
    American Lion is a wonderfully crafted biography about an incredibly interesting 
    and oft-overlooked American who helped shaped this country...
  </div>
</div>

Next, let's add the RDFa markup to this review that would allow Google to integrate this review into Google's Rich Snippets. To markup this XHTML with RDFa, you use the http://data-vocabulary.org namespace and a set of attributes. To see a list of attributes that work with Google's indexing technology, see this RDF for data-vocabulary.org:

<div xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org " typeof="v:review">
  <div>
    79 of 98 people found the following review helpful:
  </div>
  <div>
    <span><span property="v:rating">5.0 out of 5 stars</span>
    <span><b>American Biographer: Jon Meacham</b>/span>
  </div>
  <div><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2G8PQ9HNUY6NA/">
            <span property="v:reviewer"
                 about="http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2G8PQ9HNUY6NA/">Marian the Librarian</span></a> (NY, NY)  - 
	   <span property="v:dtreviewed">1st April 2009</span>
  </div>
  <div>
    <b>This review is from: 
      <a property="v:itemreviewed" 
           about="http://www.amazon.com/American-Lion-Andrew-Jackson-White/dp/1400063256/"
           href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Lion-Andrew-Jackson-White/dp/1400063256/">
      American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Hardcover)</a></b>
  </div>
  <div class="review" property="v:description">
    American Lion is a wonderfully crafted biography about an incredibly interesting 
    and oft-overlooked American who helped shaped this country...
  </div>
</div>

This initial release covers people and reviews, but Google will be slowly rolling out support for other RDFa vocabularies and microformats as they become available. For more information, see "Marking up content with RDFa"

on the Google Webmaster/Site Owners Help site.

Analysis

While the Semantic Web has been around for years, it has yet to live up to the audacious promises that heralded its introduction to the world. What is the Semantic Web? Here's the definition from Wikipedia in case you need a refresher:

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for "monkey", reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web.

In short, the Semantic Web is about more "meaningful" content. We've perfected the art of scanning text and creating massive distributed indexes that produce highly relevant search results, but when you type in "Swine Flu" you are really still dealing with an inefficient indexing approach that doesn't know about the meaning of the text being parsed and indexed. Moving toward the Semantic Web will allow our searching technologies to become more intelligent and will set the stage for the next revolution in which computing systems can become more aware of the "meaningfulness of data".

We've already seen a shift toward "semantic search": Google has already been augmenting search results with Google Maps, limited catalog searches, and more recent entries into the search market such as Amazon's A9 and the yet to be released Wolfram Alpha differentiate themselves by the structured data and content that can be extracted from a search result. We have yet to a see a compelling reason for web masters to place RDFa or microformats into a site to enable this semantic data to be mined until today, until Google provided a social incentive for site designers. This shift toward semantic markup promises to disrupt existing SEO approaches which are built atop the platform Google provides.

With Google in the game, it now becomes an imperative, sites that want to be listed in search results with Rich Snippets will need to think about RDFa and microformats. Tools that have been designed to present person and review data will now output RDFa and microformat markup compatible with Google by default. Blogging systems like Moveable Type or Wordpress, ecommerce tools like Magento, content management tools like Alfresco and Drupal will, very quickly, adopt the formats supported by Google, and in five years time, we won't be able to imagine a web that wasn't being supported by semantic markup. We think reminisce about the days when search results were produced by ad-hoc text processing technologies unsupported by meaningful data. The search result you are used to today will seem quaint in comparison to the rich data-centric experience of the emerging Semantic Web.

"The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. " - Tim Berners-Lee

UPDATE (3:52PM): We've had some response about failing to mention Yahoo's SearchMonkey which also supports RDFa and Microformats. Google is certainly not the first search engine to support RDFa and Microformats, but it certainly has the most influence on the search market. With 72% of the search market, Google has the influence to make people pay attention to RDFa and Microformats.

NiN's Rob Sheridan on iPhone Application Rejection

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 11

In this interview with Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan), Nine Inch Nails' Artistic Director, Rob discusses the experience of getting the rejection letter from Apple, and what effect it has on the band's plans to build community applications on the iPhone platform. You'll hear Sheridan express an uneasiness that Apple can act as judge and jury without providing any transparency into the approval process. Rob spoke with me from Florida where Nine Inch Nails is getting ready for a tour with Jane's Addiction that kicks off on May 9th in Tampa, FL.

What is a headlining, often controversial industrial rock band to do when nameless censors at Apple decide that content downloaded by an iPhone application contains "objectionable content"? Yesterday, the world found out, as Trent Reznor (@trent_reznor) tweeted:

When a band like NiN encounters arbitrary censorship, they raise the issue in the public forum. In this case Trent Reznor tweeted and blogged about the issue expressing his dissatisfaction with the decision and drawing attention to the fact that the "objectionable content" in question is a song named "The Downward Spiral" currently available via the iTunes store. While comparing Apple's obscenity standards to Walmart's war against profanity, Reznor pointed to similar inconsistencies in a previous round of censorship:

I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any 'indecent' material for sale--but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film 'Scarface' completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?

While Apple's rejection of an application based on arbitrary and inconsistent standards, is nothing new, the attention being paid to this particular rejection is significant and could prompt Apple to add more structure and transparency to the iPhone application approval process. On Monday, Aidan Malley of AppleInsider reported that Apple may be prepared to allow explicit content with the introduction of more capable parental controls in the iPhone 3.0 OS update.

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, here is a walkthrough of the NIN:access application from Trent Reznor and Rob Sheridan which was posted by the ninofficial YouTube user:

W. David Stephenson on the Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 0

Stephenson’s Introduction

I'm David Stephenson from Stephenson Strategies in Boston. I'm an eGov and Enterprise 2.0 strategist and theorist.

(NOTE: Although "Democratizing Data" will not be an O'Reilly title, Stephenson continues to develop this content for future publishing.)

Tim O'Brien: Tell me what that means what do you do for your client? I'm assuming your client would be government.

David Stephenson: My particular emphasis is on empowering the general public to really become no longer just passive recipients of government services, but instead active co-creators and I've done this particularly in the past in the field of homeland security and emergency communications. Now that has led me into the broader field. Vivek Kundra and I have done a lot of talking about it and we've been working on a book together. It’s unclear at this point whether he will be able to continue with that book, called "democratizing data". [The book] talks about making organizations, whether government agencies or businesses to be data centric using metadata. And then being able to supply that to all of your workforce, to do public feeds, the data to help build faith in government through transparency and even the most astonishing thing when he did it in District of Columbia with their Apps for Democracy contest where you actually take those data feeds and do mash ups and create real services.

Stephenson on Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO)

TO: You mentioned Vivek Kundra. He was just appointed as the Federal CIO. He's going to be working within the OMB (Office of Management and Budget). Could you tell me a little bit about the work you've done with him?

DS: Well, I was brought in one with very limited aspect, after they had already established a very admirable record in terms of transparency and innovation, that was basically to do a blueprint for how to transform the existing programs to make the District the model of governmental transparency in the world, basically. And that is the kind of guy Vivek Kundra is. He just doesn't settle for second best. He really wants to try to make sure that everything they're doing is state of the art and pushing the envelope.

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Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 24

The following article contains several audio excerpts and transcripts from Vivek Kundra's first conference call as the newly appointed Federal CIO. After weeks of speculation it was formally announced today that President Obama has appointed Kundra, who had previously been serving as the CTO for Washington D.C.. In his previous position, Kundra pushed the boundaries of Information Technology and set the standard for transparency and accountability adopting Google Apps as a collaboration platform, video taping vendor interactions, and instituting a rigorous regime of metrics and accountability for government contracts.

In the following audio excerpts you'll hear about Kundra's plans to help push Federal IT towards more transparency and accountability. You'll also get a sense that Kundra, through his interaction with the CIO council is going to start unifying the federal government's approach to procurement and planning. In one of Kundra's answers, he suggests that President Obama will be announcing another appointment for a CTO position. This conference call was recorded on Thursday morning, shortly after the Whitehouse published a press release naming Kundra as the newly appointed Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO).

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