Censorship Is No Longer Interpreted as Damage (And What We Can Do About It)

Michal "rysiek" Wozniak Monday, July 27, 2020: 1200. In 2020, the Internet no longer interprets censorship as damage. Countrywide targeted web blocks are in effect everywhere from the Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. TLS SNI-based blocking is deployed in pla...

Michal "rysiek" Wozniak

Monday, July 27, 2020: 1200. In 2020, the Internet no longer interprets censorship as damage. Countrywide targeted web blocks are in effect everywhere from the Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. TLS SNI-based blocking is deployed in places like Kazakhstan. And the only "solutions" seemingly on the table lead to further centralization via gatekeepers like CloudFlare.

Many Internet censorship circumvention tools are available to users, but it's unreasonable to expect whole populations to switch to the Tor Browser or Psiphon in order to access a blocked site. At the same time, effective strategies that website admins can implement on their own seem few and far between. In this talk, based on years of experience running a high-profile site censored in several countries, Michal will go through some of these strategies.

He'll start with moving to static content and enabling some decent caching on your own edge, through using Web Archive as a live backup, and focus on some funky p2p technologies (like IPFS or dat://) which, when deployed, could make censoring a website way, way harder.

Browser vendors will not be let off the hook. Internet gatekeepers will receive dishonorable mentions. Blockchain will only be discussed sarcastically.