How China and Others Are Altering Web Traffic
April 14th, 2011Here’s commentary from, U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators:
…When you’re connected to .mil’s PSYOP ISP, you may get a ‘special’ version of the Internet. For example, when you type in cnn.com or google.com, what you see may be quite different from what the rest of the world sees. The military could be running proxies that make sites appear any way PSYOP planners want them to appear. They could load content from the actual sites, but, on the fly, add PSYOP payloads to what is sent to the target population.
So, while regular visitors to cnn.com see the usual cnn.com page, those who connect to .mil’s PSYOP ISP might see extra stories that have been created specifically for the mission at hand. Or, other stories might not appear at all.
Maybe search results for various topics are packed with totally bogus results.
How about a special version of YouTube with videos and users completely fabricated by .mil and not at all visible by people on the regular Internet?
A proxy server is like one of those food processors you see on TV infomercials at 4am. It slices. It dices. It minces. A carrot goes in one side as a carrot, but it could come out the other side a dozen different ways.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Google leveled new charges against China this week, claiming that the country has interfered with some citizens’ access to the Internet giant’s Gmail service, disguising the interference as technical glitches.
Security experts say that China is most likely using invisible intermediary servers, or “transparent proxies,” to intercept and relay network messages while rapidly modifying the contents of those communications. This makes it possible to block e-mail messages while making it appear as if Gmail is malfunctioning.
Companies regularly use transparent proxies to filter employees’ Web access. Some ISPs have also used the technique to replace regular Web advertisements with those of their own. But it’s becoming increasingly common for governments to use transparent proxies to censor and track dissidents and protestors. All traffic from a certain network is forced through the proxy, allowing communications to be monitored and modified on the fly. Intercepting and relaying traffic is known as a “man in the middle” attack.
