On Fri, Sep 08, 2006, Uri Even-Chen wrote about "Freedom of speech online": > What I want you to know, is that recently I had some feeling that not > all my E-mail messages are sent and received properly. Today I found > out a proof that somebody is not only reading my mail, but also > censors it. Some of the messages sent to me I don't receive. Maybe > even most of them. I tried to send messages to myself to 2 different > addresses. One I received instantly, and the other I didn't receive > at all. I tried it again, same result. Somebody, probably related to > the Israeli government, is censoring me. I don't have freedom of > speech any more. And that's only because I criticised the Israeli > government.
Uri, the situation you're describing is possible technically, but highly unlikely. What is more likely that you're seeing the byproducts of the world's email infrastructure's increasing complexity - and often *stupidty* - as a result of the battle against spam. The delivery of your mail more and more relies on your IP address being "ok"ed by a bunch of "blacklists", your choice of words being "ok"ed by a bunch of "algorithms", your domain name being oked by a bunch of authentication techniques, and so on. Let me give you a simple example that I saw just yesterday. I sent a mail from my Technion account to someone in another reputable Israeli organization. Should have been straightforward, right? Well, a minute later, my email bounced. It turns out that a mail server on the way to the destination's mail server decided to "verify" that the domain on my mail, "math.technion.ac.il", is in the DNS. Why? Does this prevent any spam? Not really, but what the heck - this is what they decided to check. It turns out that for a few seconds, a network problem rendered the technion unreachable and the DNS did not work. So the mail server decided that this mail was spam. I was lucky that they decided to *bounce* this alleged spam. Normally, this wouldn't even happen, and the alleged spam is just discarded and you never know why (because most of the from addresses are on spam are forged, there is no point in bouncing). I've seen even stranger things happening. Mails from yahoo.com silently dropped because some newbie sysadmin saw a lot of spam "from" @yahoo.com and decided to drop mail based on "from" address). Mails from an entire country dropped because someone thought that most spam comes from it. And so on. It would have been nice to see your evidence. Perhaps we could give you a different explanation than the government's involvement. > Do you know any secure way to send and receive E-mails, without > censorship and without the risk of someone blocking them? What about a webmail like Gmail? I don't see how break into that, seeing that login is done with SSL and that the servers lie in another country and Google probably won't cooperate with the Israeli government. Use the URL https://mail.google.com/mail/ and your entire connection to Google, not just the login, will be through SSL. This will make you immune to eavesdropping or man-in-the-middle attacks from the government. Of course, if the government has broken into your own machine, they may have installed malicious software there. Open your machine, look for any unrecoginized hardware, then reinstall your system from scratch, keep it up to date, and put up a software firewall (e.g., iptables on Linux). > If you think I deserve it, think again. Today it's me, tomorrow it > can be you too! About that, see the famous poem in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came... -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Sep 11 2006, 18 Elul 5766 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |In God we Trust -- all others must submit http://nadav.harel.org.il |an X.509 certificate. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
