[liberationtech] Chokepoint Project News - DNShonest + World Bank

[info at chokepointproject.net]

*Chokepoint Project News *: 28/9/13

Hello all,

Please allow us to take a few moments of your time and show you what
we´ve been up to. Don´t worry, you have NOT been registered anywhere and
will NOT have to do anything to never hear from us again. (More about
that at the end of this text.)

We have been making steady progress behind the scenes and are very happy
to finally be able to show off some of our hard work:


*DNShonest*

We have integrated the DNShonest remote DNS probing tool
<http://www.slideshare.net/josswright/through-a-router-darkly-remote-investigation-of-chinese-internet-f> 
created by Joss Wright <http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=176> of the
Oxford Internet Institute into Chokepoint Project´s Structured Human
Rights Analytics platform.

This allows us to do a number of things :

1. See for each Domain Name Server if it lies about the domains we ask
it about.

2. See which Autonomous Systems contain DNS servers that lie about domains

3. See who owns the Autonomous Systems that contain lying DNS systems


This iteration is testing a small set of domain servers (200) in China
for replies given to a small set of domains (180). We are running the
probe every hour which results in a little less than 18000 queries. The
results are then tested for suspicious replies, which in turn are tested
for states of "lying", "probably lying" and "maybe lying". From these
results statistics are generated which are visualized on our public
dashboard.

Country page
:    https://beta.chokepointproject.net/country/CN?show=2013-09-21
<https://beta.chokepointproject.net/country/CN?show=2013-09-21>
Worldmap :          https://beta.chokepointproject.net/




Lying is a big claim, and in this case it explicitly means that a reply
given by a domain name server is not the reply it should give. We have
tried to avoid false positives as much as possible, and first
identifying suspicious replies, after which additional probes aid in
determining if something is a lie or not.

More information is available at https://beta.chokepointproject.net/about


*Worldbank* :

In this release we also show a visualization of a selection of Worlbank
data, this is intended primarily to provide some basic contextual
insight into the country for which data is presented. In the case of
China, the internet usage in 2011 (most recent Worldbank statistic) was
38.4% of the country. In the context of the DNShonest results this means
that 61.6% of the Chinese population is unaffected by these "lying" DNS
servers. Of course the internet usage will have increased somewhat over
the past 21 months, so this conclusion should not be seen as
representative of the current situation.




*What´s next?*

Well, a lot. First of all, we will start rolling this out to all
countries and increase both the number of servers tested and the numbers
of domains tested. Additionally, we can already see improvements to the
dashboard visualizations that should be made.


*Thanks*

Many thanks are in order for the Internet Protection Lab
<http://www.internetprotectionlab.net/en/> who provided some sorely
needed funding out of a donation made by the Dutch .nl registrar SIDN
<https://www.sidn.nl/en/homepage-sidn/>.


*If you like our work so far*, please consider throwing a little funding
our way. Any amount, no matter how large will help us build more, faster
and shinier tools (and pay the rent on our cardboard box sub-basement
walk-downs.) https://chokepointproject.net/donate/


*About this mail* :

Please note that this mail is NOT a newsletter (yet). You have NOT been
registered anywhere by us. You are receiving this mail because you
probably met one of our team somewhere in the world and handed out your
card. If you WANT to receive updates from us in the future, please
subscribe here <https://chokepointproject.net/newsletter/>. Do nothing
and you will never hear from us again. (Not through this medium at least)


*For more information* :

email info at chokepointproject.net
website https://chokepointproject.net/
follow us on twitter https://twitter.com/ChokePointP


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