This week we started trying to use TOR to examine Twitter from other countries, but we ran into a few problems. The only country with an exit node we can find is Egypt, and it only has one node. As we would expect, that node has so much traffic that it’s impossible for us to get any requests through.
To remedy the situation, we have set up planetlab accounts and are investigating the nodes in Jordan and Egypt. However, these countries are not the most interesting – their censorship is relatively relaxed when compared with places like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, both of which do not have planetlab nodes.
As we posted earlier, we have found companies in both of these countries which offer hosting of computing. We are currently investigating ways to utilize these companies to generate web requests from their respective countries. Some ideas that we have had (and the discussion that followed):
1) We have working code for a proxy server. If we can sftp the executable to one of the hosting companies and run it there, we can just configure our browsers to use that proxy server and generate requests that way. This seems to be the most viable option.
2) We could use the service to host a site for our “startup company”. This site would just be a front – merely a login page where if anyone besides us tries to log in it tells them the site is under construction. For us, it could link to a .php page where we make some calls to one of the php based twitter API’s. We are currently investigating whether or not it’s possible to do via php, but the proxy seems like an easier solution.
3) We could also host a javascript page that does much the same thing, but for this to work we’d have to have people in Saudi or UAE visiting the page for it to make a difference – since javascript is server side we can’t just visit the page ourselves.
4) From the rented computing space, we could just use the wget tool and compare the output to what we get when using it from a computer in the US, however we’re currently unsure how Twitter’s pages are structured – if they’re built using javascript then using wget is kind of a moot point.
One of Rima’s accounts actually got suspended for violating the terms of service at Twitter! We’re currently investigating the reason why. To her knowledge, all she did was the following:
1) Created asaeed216 twitter account using her standard Firefox browser
2) Searched #egypt and the other # we identified and started following interesting people
3) Fired up Tor browser from a Virtual machine and logged to the same account using {US} exit node then {EG} exit node. She was never able to connect to Twitter when she had the exit node as {EG} but did access Twitter on Tor {US}
A graduate seminar: current topics in computer security