OFFTOPIC: friends from foocamp requests help from outside North America for researching censorship; script to run on *nix

[Michael Shiloh]

Because most responses will be from North America, I thought it would be
particularly valuable if people on this list might be willing to help.

Details here <https://research.owlfolio.org/active-geo/>

>From their website:

Active Geolocation Project

This website is part of a research study conducted by *Nicolas Christin*
and *Zachary Weinberg* at Carnegie Mellon University.

The purpose of our research is to test “active geolocation” algorithms.
These attempt to determine where in the world a computer is, by measuring
how long it takes network messages from that computer to reach other
computers in known locations. We test them by making measurements from
computers in known locations. We can then compare the position calculated
by each algorithm with the truth. We’re also comparing with the position
reported by commercial geolocation services (such as MaxMind
<https://www.maxmind.com/> and Geobytes <http://geobytes.com/>) for the
computer’s IP address.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah at panix.com>
Date: Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 5:37 PM
Subject: Re: [FooCampers] request: run this script on computers worldwide
to help research censorship
To: foocampers at foo.oreilly.com, zackw at cmu.edu


In case you want to spread the word about this request, here's a public
URL to use: https://research.owlfolio.org/active-geo/

And you can retweet https://twitter.com/elwoz/status/751403093116542976
: "I'm looking for volunteers to help with a research project:
https://research.owlfolio.org/active-geo/  Especially want people
outside Europe and North America."


--
Sumana Harihareswara
http://brainwane.net

On 11/04/16 15:34, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> Foo Campers: my friend Zack needs help in his research to measure
> Internet censorship. He's a grad student at CMU and a longtime open
> source software hacker.
>
> (And even if you can't help, you might enjoy his summaries and reviews
> of recent research papers in his field: http://readings.owlfolio.org/ )
>
> Hope you can help!
>
> Sumana Harihareswara
> http://harihareswara.net
>
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: Zack Weinberg <zackw at cmu.edu>
>
>
> Hello, my name is Zack Weinberg, and I'm a researcher at Carnegie Mellon
> University. I am doing experiments in "active geolocation", which is
> when you try to figure out where a computer physically is by measuring
> packet round-trip times from it to computers in known locations.  This
> has been studied carefully within Europe and the continental USA, but
> much less so elsewhere.
>
> I'm specifically trying to develop a technique for verifying that VPN
> exits are in the country that their operator claims they are.  My larger
> research focuses on measuring Internet censorship, for which I need
> network vantage points in precisely the countries where it's hardest to
> get reliable server hosting.  Commercial VPN operators may prefer to
> locate their hosts in countries where it's easier to do business, and
> only *label* them as being in harder-to-access countries.
>
> I am looking for volunteers who can run my measurement scripts on
> computers physically located all over the world.  South America,
> sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania locations are
> especially helpful, but I can use data from anywhere.  You must know the
> latitude and longitude of the computer to within 50km and be willing to
> share that information.  The test performs roughly 10,000 TCP handshakes
> with roughly 1,000 "landmark" computers, at an overall rate of about 20
> handshakes per second, and measures the round-trip times.  No
> application-layer data is transferred.  You may inspect the code before
> running it (and the list of landmarks, but that's just a big list of IP
> addresses so not super informative).  I'm also happy to answer questions
> about the research.
>
> If you're interested, please contact <zackw at cmu.edu>.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> -Zack Weinberg
>

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