Re: Tools for Rendering Censorship Firewalls Ineffective

At 05:24 PM 9/30/96 +0200, Gary Howland <gary@systemics.com> wrote:
>I would guess that most sites censoring http by IP would be doing so by
>only censoring the http port.  If the http servers were to be run on
>other ports too (perhaps well known ports like DNS), then this would
>make life a little harder for the bad guys.  

That's trivial - most web server software is happy to use ports
other than 80 if you tell it to, and it's not uncommon to see
web servers running on ports 8000 or 8080, especially if they're
run by regular users rather than root (which you need for port 80
on many Unix systems.)  Does anybody know if the German ISPs were
blocking XS4ALL's IP address just on port 80, on all ports, or on all but 25?

Using important well-known ports like DNS is inviting real trouble.
Borrowing from other protocols such as Quote-Of-The-Day or supdup
probably won't bother many people, though ports under 1024 may still
require root's cooperation and may be looked at skeptically by firewalls.


>I have some encrypted HTTP relay software if anyone is interested in
>setting up a server.

That could be interesting - do you have it on a web/ftp site?

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	
# You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

Bill Stewart wrote:

> That's trivial - most web server software is happy to use ports
> other than 80 if you tell it to, and it's not uncommon to see
> web servers running on ports 8000 or 8080, especially if they're
> run by regular users rather than root (which you need for port 80
> on many Unix systems.)  Does anybody know if the German ISPs were
> blocking XS4ALL's IP address just on port 80, on all ports, or on all but 25?

First they only blocked the IP-number of the web-server. After a while
they blocked 2 complete C-networks because xs4all changed the IP-number
of the webserver every half an hour.

At this moment they don't block anymore after we removed the radikal 154
temporary from xs4all. After they stopped blocking xs4all we've put the
issue back online of course :) We are now aiting what they will do next.
Either stop this censorship or block all +60 mirrors.

henk (SPG)