Detailed analysis of Syria's network censorship with logs from Blue Coat's surveillance boxes

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Interesting that there are more requests for porn than Facebook.

Why is Conduit blocked? They do developer tools for writing phone apps. Seems like they are blocking the wrong name when they’re trying to block an open proxy.

Hello,

I found the blocking of Conduit interesting, too. On the Windows side, many anti-malware companies classify their software as a potentially unwanted application, so, it could be retaliatory for installing a toolbar into some government minister’s copy of Internet Explorer. Another possibility might be that the Syrian government has some intelligence that the software or network infrastructure belonging to this company with offices in Israel and the United States is being used for more than the targeted display of advertisements (or whatever the toolbar is supposed to do).

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I can testify it’s a bitch when it gets onto the computers at work. It’s nearly impossible for a layman to remove.

Also, how is Facebook on both lists at once?

Hello,

I’m not particularly familiar with BlueCoat’s products, but I would imagine their product offers more sensitive blocking of web pages than just simply looking at the domain. It’s probably looking at the URL, parsing the textual in the HTML and so forth in order to determine what to block. That way, a search on Google (#1 allowed, #6 blocked) for “restaurants in Damascus” gets allowed, while another for “how do I become an insurgent” gets denied, and so forth.

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