Mariah will now become a red slave to Kaafar by bigkmagic98

Week 11: The Internet and social media restriction in Syria

The country Background

Syria is a country located on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea in southwestern Asia (Barkoudah 1998, p. 275). Its area includes territory in the Golan Heights that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. The capital is Damascus. In 1970.

Syria bans websites for political reasons and arrests people accessing them. Filtering and blocking were found to be pervasive in the political and Internet tools areas, and selective in the social and conflict/security areas by the OpenNet Initiative in 2009.

According to Thomson (2012), internet connectivity between Syria and the outside world shut down in late November 2011 and in early May 2013. According to Peterson (2014), Syria's Internet was cut off more than ten times in 2013, and again in March 2014. The Syrian government blamed terrorists for the cut off.

In addition to filtering a wide range of Web content, the Syrian government monitors Internet use very closely and has detained citizens "for expressing their opinions or reporting information online.". According to BBC News (2004), vague and broadly worded laws invite government abuse and have prompted Internet users to engage in self-censorship to avoid the state's ambiguous grounds for arrest.

Internet in Syria

When it comes to the use of social media, Syria is a fascinating case because access to the internet is difficult, but people manage to get around. Before addressing internet use, it is critical to explain how Syrians can access the internet and communicate with one another. In their short facts about Syria's internet penetration, Freedom House, a "independent watchdog group committed to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world," reports that 28 percent of the total population, or about 22 million people, has internet access (Anon 2015). 

According to the figures, a variety of websites, including social media websites, have been blocked. Satellite links are the only way for people living in these cities to connect to the internet. Despite the fact that satellite phones are limited, many people still use them to access the internet. The government and the Islamic State are the two major regulators of internet use in Syria. The Syrian government has proposed a total of 13 tactics to limit, monitor, or fully block internet usage in the region. The pages that contain information about political, social, and religious issues are the main targets for censorship (Chaabane et al. 2014).

Social media platform restrictions

Syria has a poor transmission speed, and nine out of ten internet connections in Syria operate via dial-up with less cable and fiber connection than in the United States. As many businesses and services in Syria, the telecommunications market is a government monopoly. Syrian telecom controls all telecommunications foundations, and this state-owned company is embedded within the Syrian Ministry of telecommunications and technology. The country has allowed many smaller private providers, but all rely on government-managed support and government regulation. It leaves ISPs completely under regime control to include wired and the much more limited wireless service. Syria only gives internet access to 20 percent of its population with a 56-kilobyte connection speed.

There are a million Syrians who have registered to create social media accounts. However, only a low number of users are active, which is 6 percent active Facebook users and 3 percent active Twitter users from the population. Most Syrians usually use social media to give information, connect to other Syrians, raise awareness inside and outside the country, but only a low number of Syrians use it to create a public sphere as well as be potential activists and youth leaders.

Syria has blocked around 240 sites which are email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo, along with hosting user-created sites on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others. So, by limiting internet usage to Syrians, authorities believe it will have a more significant efficient effect than the potential costs to arrest activists and block accounts and sites (Tkacheva et al. 2013, pp. 74-81).

Reference List

Anon 2015, Syria Internet Censorship, viewed 20 May, 2021, <https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2015/syria>

Barkoudah, Y., 1998. Country Profile: Syrian Arab Republic (SYRIA). Cahiers Options Méditerranéennes, pp.275-294.

Chaabane, A, Chen, T, Cunche, M, De Cristofaro, E, Friedman, A & Kaafar, M 2014, "Censorship in the Wild", Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 285-295, viewed 20 May, 2021, <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2663716.2663720>

Middle East | Syrian jailed for internet usage. (2004, June 21). viewed 20 May, 2021, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3824595.stm>

Peterson, A. (2019, April 24). Syria hit with a near nationwide Internet outage for seven plus hours. viewed 20 May, 2021, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/03/20/syria-hit-with-a-near-nationwide-internet-outage/>

Thomson, I. (2012, November 29). Syria cuts off internet and mobile communications. viewed 20 May, 2021, <https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/29/syria_internet_blackout/>

Tkacheva, O, Schwartz, LH, Libicki, MC, Taylor, JE, Martini, J & Baxter, C 2013, Internet freedom & political space, RAND Corporation, California.

By: Muhammad Ikram, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Suranga Seneviratne, Mohamed Ali Kaafar and Vern Paxson

Abstract:

Millions of users worldwide resort to mobile VPN clients to either circumvent censorship or to access geo-blocked content, and more generally for privacy and security purposes. In practice, however, users have little if any guarantees about the corresponding security and privacy settings, and perhaps no practical knowledge about the entities accessing their mobile traffic. In this paper we provide a first comprehensive analysis of 283 Android apps that use the Android VPN permission, which we extracted from a corpus of more than 1.4 million apps on the Google Play store. We perform a number of passive and active measurements designed to investigate a wide range of security and privacy features and to study the behavior of each VPN-based app. Our analysis includes investigation of possible malware presence, third-party library embedding, and traffic manipulation, as well as gauging user perception of the security and privacy of such apps. Our experiments reveal several instances of VPN apps that expose users to serious privacy and security vulnerabilities, such as use of insecure VPN tunneling protocols, as well as IPv6 and DNS traffic leakage. We also report on a number of apps actively performing TLS interception. Of particular concern are instances of apps that inject JavaScript programs for tracking, advertising, and for redirecting e-commerce traffic to external partners.

Read more: full text in PDF

Via: Wired

Shock Doctrine II

Paradigm Shift 4ZZZ fm 102.1 Fridays at Noon – May 8, 2020

Today on the Paradigm Shift it’s part two of our series on “the shock doctrine” and the covid-19 crisis – how might this crisis be used by government and business to further their agendas, and how can we resist it? Talking this week about workers’ rights with Michael Clifford (QCU Secretary), privacy with Dali Kaafar and creeping…

View On WordPress

Biometric security: your next password could be your face, eyes or even the way you walk

WHAT if you could stroll through a building’s lobby to be identified and gain access?

And what if your bank would let you gaze at your smartphone to unlock a payment?

Both are possible using advanced biometric authentication technology that is now being tested and even rolled out to an increasing number of smartphones, tablet computers, laptops, and smartwatches.

And new research shows the transition from passwords, or “something you know,” to fingerprint, face, and eyeball scans, or “something you are,” could be complete within two years for phones, with other devices to follow in 2020.

But, as Apple readies to launch its first face-scanner this month, do security experts consider this technology more secure or just more convenient?

 Biometric security has been creeping into everyday technology for years, slowly replacing passwords and lengthy PIN codes.

Apple introduced its fingerprint scanner to phones in 2013, for example, while Microsoft unveiled facial recognition for its Surface computers in 2015.

The technology is evolving, however, and becoming both more common and more advanced.

Dissatisfied with the security of a fingerprint lock, Samsung introduced an iris scanner with its Galaxy S8 smartphone that photographs the coloured parts of your eyes and identifies up to 200 features in each eyeball to authenticate your identity.

Galaxy S8 and Note 8 users can use this technology to unlock their phone and even to authenticate bank transfers or credit card payments.

Apple will also upgrade the biometric security in its top smartphone within a fortnight, introducing Face ID to the iPhone X as a replacement for its fingerprint scanner.

The facial recognition system uses a host of front-facing sensors, including a flood illuminator, dot projector, and infra-red camera, to project over 30,000 invisible points on to the user’s face and create a 3D model of their appearance.

It’s similar technology to that used in the Xbox Kinect, though Apple also uses a neural engine in the phone’s processor to determine whether the person looking at the phone is someone new or whether the user has just grown a beard, added spectacles, or changed hairstyles.

 Apple worldwide marketing vice-president Phil Schiller says there is “no perfect system, not even biometric-wise” for locking phones, but the new face-scanning technology would be significantly more secure.

“The data for (the iPhone’s fingerprint scanner) Touch ID has been one in 50,000, meaning that the chance that a random person could use their fingerprint to unlock your iPhone has been one in 50,000 and it’s been great,” he says.

“What are the similar statistics for Face ID? One in a million.”

The spread of biometric security features is also expected to accelerate over the next three years.

Acuity Market Intelligence predicts all smartphones will feature some form of biometric technology by 2019 and, by 2020, it will also feature in all laptops, tablets, and smartwatches.

Facial recognition could spread to online services too, with Facebook revealing it was testing the technology to confirm user’s identities.

Biometric technology could involve more than just face or fingerprint scans in future, though.

Internet giant Google has experimented with mapping speech patterns to identify users, and the CSIRO has developed technology that identifies people by the way they walk.

The prototype technology, which requires users to wear a device backed with motion sensors, was tested on 20 subjects earlier this year with an accuracy of 95 per cent.

 CSIRO Data 61 networks research group leader Professor Dali Kaafar says the unique authentication system is “convenient because as we walk around each day our gait can be sampled continuously” and it’s also “more secure than passwords because the way we talk is difficult to mimic”.

“Since (it) keeps authenticating the user continuously, it collects a significant amount of information about our movements, making it difficult to imitate or hack unlike guessing passwords or PIN codes,” he says.

 Ref : http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/biometric-security-your-next-password-could-be-your-face-eyes-or-even-the-way-you-walk/news-story/ceb12bf2eaad7feed078ee00461d80e5

Android VPNs aren’t as safe as you think they are

VPNs or Virtual Private Networks are a great way to access content in region-restricted areas or to ensure your data is secure when using public WiFi networks, but how safe are they? There are a ton of different Android VPN services available on the Google Play Store, some for free and others with premium options.

A new report published by the University of New South Wales and the University of Berkley has concluded that of the 283 VPN apps tested on the Google Play Store, very few of them offer the level of security that they claim to offer their users.

A wide variety of security and privacy features were tested across the 283 apps, and researchers discovered that 18% of those apps failed to properly encrypt the users’ traffic. What’s worse, is that 38% of the apps tested actually injected malware or malvertising into the experience. This software is directly designed to find out your information. In fact, the report says that over 80% of the apps in the Play Store request access to sensitive information like user accounts and text messages.

The good news here is that when professor Dali Kaafar reached out to developers with the team’s findings, several of them took action to fix vulnerabilities that were discovered in their apps. Some apps were also removed from the Play Store as a result of this report. If you’d like to read the full thing, check it out here.

Source: http://ift.tt/2jg15Bj