text:
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:introduction}
On October 4, 2011 a user reported to the Tor bug tracker that unpublished bridges stop working
after only a few minutes when used from within China \cite{ticket1}. Bridges are unpublished Tor
relays and their very purpose is to help censored users to access the Tor network if the ``main
entrance'' is blocked. The bug report indicated that the Great Firewall of China (GFC) has been
enhanced with the potentiality of dynamically blocking Tor.

This censorship attempt is by no means China's first effort to block Tor. In the past, there have
been efforts to block the website \cite{tpo2}, the public Tor network \cite{tpo1,tpo3} and parts of
bridges \cite{tpo4}. According to reports, these blocks were realised by simple IP blacklisting
and HTTP header filtering \cite{tpo2}. All these blocking attempts had in common that
they were straightforward and inflexible.

In contrast to the above mentioned censorship attempts, the currently observable block appears to be
much more flexible and sophisticated. Freshly set up bridges get blocked within only minutes. In
addition, the GFC blocks bridges dynamically without simply enumerating their IP addresses and
blacklisting them (cf. \cite{Ling2012}).

In this paper, we try to deepen the understanding of the infrastructure used by the GFC to block the
Tor anonymity network. Our contributions are threefold:
\begin{enumerate}
	\item We reveal how Chinese users are hindered from accessing the Tor network.
	\item We conjecture how China's Tor blocking infrastructure is designed.
	\item We discuss evasion strategies.
\end{enumerate}

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section \ref{sec:related} gives an overview of
previous work. Section \ref{sec:setup} introduces our experimental setup. Section \ref{sec:results}
presents how users are prevented from using Tor and Section \ref{sec:analysis} analyses China's
underlying infrastructure. Evasion strategies are discussed in Section \ref{sec:evasion}. Finally,
the paper is concluded in Section \ref{sec:conclusion}.

\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:related}
Our work is not the first documentation of the current Chinese attempts to block the Tor anonymity
network. In \cite{twilde}, Wilde revealed first crucial insights about the block. Over a period of
one week in December 2011, Wilde analysed how \emph{unpublished} Tor bridges are getting scanned
and, as a result, blocked by the GFC. Wilde's experiments relied upon a virtual private server (VPS)
inside China and several Tor EC2 cloud bridges \cite{ec2,TorCloud} located in the USA.

According to Wilde's results, the basic functionality of the Chinese Tor blocking infrastructure is
depicted in Figure \ref{fig:china}. When a Tor user in China establishes a connection to a bridge or
relay, deep packet inspection (DPI) boxes \emph{recognise} the Tor protocol (1). Shortly after a Tor
connection is detected, \emph{active scanning} is initiated (2). The scanning is done by seemingly
random Chinese IP addresses. The scanners connect to the respective bridge and try to
\emph{establish a Tor connection} (3). If it succeeds, the bridge is \emph{blocked}.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{diagrams/china.pdf}
\caption{The structure of the Chinese Tor blocking infrastructure. After DPI boxes identified a Tor
connection to a bridge or relay, active scanners connect to the same machine and induce the block if
the machine ``speaks Tor''.}
\label{fig:china}
\end{figure}

Wilde was able to narrow down the suspected cause for active scanning to the cipher list sent by the
Tor client inside the TLS client hello\footnote{The TLS client hello is sent by the client after a
TCP connection has been established. Details can be found in the Tor design paper
\cite{Dingledine2004}.}. This cipher list appears to be unique and only used by Tor. That gives the
GFC the opportunity to easily identify Tor connections. Furthermore, Wilde noticed that active
scanning is done at multiples of 15 minutes. The GFC launches several scanners to connect to the
bridge at the next full 15 minute multiple when a Tor cipher list was detected. An analysis of the
Tor debug logs yielded that Chinese scanners initiate a TLS connection, conduct a renegotiation and
start building a Tor circuit, once the TLS connection was set up. After the scan succeeded, the IP
address together with the associated port (we now refer to this as ``IP:port tuple'') of the freshly
scanned bridge is blocked resulting in Chinese users not being able to use the bridge anymore.

In addition to the above mentioned key findings, Wilde provided additional data to strengthen his
results such as traceroutes to suspected scanners, a sample of IP addresses believed to be scanners
as well as an analysis of what is known as \emph{garbage scanning}: Chinese scanners sending
seemingly random binary data to TLS-speaking hosts. The garbage scanning does not seem to be related
to Tor although it seems to make use of the same infrastructure.

With respect to Wilde's contribution, we (a) revisit many experiments in greater detail and with
significantly more data, we (b) rectify observations which we did not find to be true anymore and we
(c) answer yet open questions.

\section{Experimental Setup}
\label{sec:setup}
We begin this section by discussing the legal and ethical aspects of our work. We then discuss the
vantage points we used in our analysis and point out the shortcomings.

\subsection{Legal and Ethical Aspects}
During the process of preparing and running our experiments we took special care to not violate any
laws. In addition, all our experiments were in accordance with the terms of service of our service
providers. In order to ensure reproducibility and encourage further research, we publish our
gathered data and developed code\footnote{Both can be found at:
\url{http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/static/gfc/}.}. The data includes IP addresses of Chinese hosts
which were found to conduct active scanning of our Tor bridge. We carefully configured our Tor
bridges to remain unpublished and we always picked randomly chosen high ports to listen to so we can
say that the data is free from legitimate Tor users.

\subsection{Vantage Points}
In order to ensure a high degree of confidence in our results, we used different vantage points. We
had a relay in Russia, bridges in Singapore and Sweden and clients in China.

\textbf{Bridge in Singapore}: A large part of our experiments was conducted with our Tor bridge
located in Singapore. The bridge was running inside the Amazon EC2 cloud \cite{ec2}. The OpenNet
Initiative reports Singapore as a country conducting minimal Internet filtering involving only
pornography \cite{opennet}. Hence, we assume that our experimental results were not falsified by
Internet filtering in Singapore.

\textbf{Bridge in Sweden}: To reproduce certain experiments, we set up Tor bridges located at our
institution in Sweden. Internet filtering at Karlstad University is limited to well-known malware
ports which we avoided during the experiments. Thus, we can rule out filtering mechanisms
interfering with our results.

\textbf{Clients in China}: To avoid biased results, we used two types of vantage points inside
China: open SOCKS proxies and a VPS.

We compiled a list of public Chinese SOCKS proxies by searching Google. We were able to find a total
of 32 SOCKS proxies which were distributed amongst 12 distinct autonomous systems. We used the
SOCKS proxies to rerun certain experiments on a smaller scale to rule out phenomena limited to our
VPS.

Our second vantage point and primary experimental machine is a rented VPS. The VPS ran Linux and
resided in the autonomous system number (ASN) 4808. We had full root access to the VPS which made it
possible for us to sniff traffic and conduct experiments below the application layer such as packet
fragmentation and manipulation.  Most of our experiments were conducted from our VPS whereas the
SOCKS proxies' primary use was to verify results.

\textbf{Relay in Russia}: A public Tor relay located in a Russian data center was used to
investigate the blocking public Tor relays are undergoing. The relay served as middle relay, meaning
that it does not have direct contact with Tor users and it does not see their exit traffic.

\subsection{Shortcomings}
Heisenberg's \emph{uncertainty principle} is not limited to physics \cite{Jia2009} but also applies
to active network measurement to some extent. Injecting packets into a network for the sake of
measuring a phenomena inevitably interferes with the observed results. This is particularly critical
when measuring censorship systems.

Active analysis of a censorship system can easily attract the censor's attention if no special care
is taken to ``stay under the radar''. Due to the fact that China is a sophisticated censor with the
potential power to actively falsify measurement results, we have to point out potential shortcomings
in our experimental setup.

First of all, we have no reliable information about the owners of our public SOCKS proxies.
Whois-lookups did not yield anything suspicious but the information in the records can be spoofed.
Second, our VPS was located in a data center where Tor connections typically do not originate.
We also had no information about whether our service provider conducts Internet filtering and
the type or extent thereof.

We are aware of the above mentioned shortcomings and designed our experiments in a way to minimise
falsifying effects. We reproduced our experiments from different vantage points to eliminate
phenomena limited to one point of view.

\section{Why Alice Cannot Use Tor in China}
\label{sec:results}
This section shows how the Tor anonymity network is blocked in China. We focus on the blocking
mechanisms. A detailed analysis of how the blocking is designed is provided in Section
\ref{sec:analysis}. We present our findings by accompanying Alice who lives in China and wants to
use the Tor network. We point out all the difficulties she faces during her journey towards a free
Internet ranging from accessing the Tor website \cite{tpo0} to the use of bridges.

\subsection{Website Block}
First, the Tor application is required to use the anonymity network. One way to get the binary is to
download it from the website \cite{tpo0}. This is where the censorship begins because the website is
partially inaccessible in China. We discovered that the GFC monitors the ``Host'' field in the HTTP
header\footnote{Something similar has been observed before \cite{tpo2}.}. If the field equals
``torproject.org'', the connection is reset by injected RST segments as described in
\cite{Clayton2006}. Slight variations of the field's content, such as ``orproject.org'' and
``torproject.or'' do not lead to injected RST segments.

We tracked down the cause of the injected RST segments to the ``Host'' field by sending the
same HTTP request to different IP addresses. Our connection was also reset after connecting to
``innocent'' domains such as gmail.com, kau.se and baidu.com. In addition, we were able to connect
to one of the Tor Project's web servers and send a GET request for gmail.com. We received an error
message from the web server without any interference from the GFC. Furthermore, we received the
correct DNS reply for ``torproject.org'' from our Chinese DNS servers. We conclude that the
string ``torproject.org'' in the ``Host'' HTTP field causes injected RST segments and
that the IP addresses of the Tor Project's web servers are not blacklisted.

We found mirrors whose hostname do not contain ``torproject.org'' to be reachable too. And since the
official Tor website offers HTTPS, all Alice has to do is to add an ``s'' after ``http'' in her
browser in order to make the official web site load.

\subsection{The Public Tor Network}
Now that Alice could download the Tor Browser Bundle, she immediately starts it. Without further
configuration, her client first tries to connect to the directory authorities and fetch the
consensus which contains the list of all public Tor relays.

However, all but one of the nine directory authorities are \emph{blocked on the IP layer}. From
within China they neither respond to pings, nor are any TCP services available. From our unfiltered
connection in Sweden we were able to contact the directory authorities over ICMP and TCP. We have no
explanation, however, why the directory authority with the IP address 212.112.245.170 is not
blocked.

If Alice is lucky, her client might connect to the unblocked directory authority and is then able to
download the consensus. But even then Alice has to face disappointment again. As we will describe
in Section \ref{sec:analysis} in detail, almost all of the public relays are blocked from inside
China.

From our middle relay in Russia we were able to verify that the blocking is realised by dropping the
SYN/ACK segment sent by the relay to the client. The SYN segment sent by Alice's client to the relay
passes the GFC unhindered.

\subsection{Bridges}
So far Alice could download the Tor client application but she was unable to use the public network.
The Tor Project came up with the concept of bridges \cite{Dingledine2006a} since it is not hard for
a censor to block access to the public network. Bridges are essentially relays which are not listed
in the public consensus. Their robustness relies on the assumption that it is hard for censors to
find out all their IP addresses and block them.

Alice does not give up and tries her luck with bridges. She obtains some bridge
descriptors\footnote{A bridge (and relay) descriptor is a set of information needed by the Tor
client to connect to the bridge.} from the bridge distribution website \cite{bridges}.
Unfortunately, none of the received bridges were reachable. As it turns out, they are blocked
\emph{in the same way} as public relays: Alice's client can send SYN segments to them and they reply
with a SYN/ACK segment, but the reply segment never reaches its intended destination.

\section{Analysis}
\label{sec:analysis}
The previous section revealed that the Tor network is blocked on at least \emph{three layers}
consisting of the website, the directory authorities and the relays (including bridges). In this
section we take a closer look at the blocking \emph{infrastructure}. In particular, we look at the
origin of the active scans.

\subsection{How Long Do Bridges Remain Blocked?}
So far it is unclear for \emph{how long} a freshly blocked bridge remains blocked. To answer this
question, we invoked two Tor processes on our bridge in Singapore. Before this experiment we changed
the IP address of the machine in Singapore in order to avoid interference with previous experiments.
Both Tor processes were private bridges and listening on TCP port 27418 and 23941. Both ports were
chosen randomly.

In the next step, we made the GFC block both IP:port tuples by initiating Tor connections to them
from our VPS in China. After the GFC started to block both tuples, we set up iptables
\cite{iptables} rules to whitelist our VPS in China to port 23941 and drop all other connections.
That way, the tuple should appear unreachable to the world with the exception of our Chinese VPS.
Port 27418 remained unchanged and hence reachable. We then started monitoring the reachability of
both Tor processes by continuously trying to connect to the processes using telnet from our VPS.

After approximately 12 hours, the Tor process behind port 23941 (which appeared to be unreachable to
the GFC) became reachable again whereas connections to port 27418 still timed out and continued to
do so. In our iptables logs we could find numerous connection attempts stemming from Chinese
scanners. This observation shows that once a Tor bridge has been blocked, it only remains
blocked if Chinese scanners are able to \emph{continuously connect} to the bridge. If they cannot,
the block is \emph{removed}.

\subsection{Is the Public Network Reachable?}
In a previous section we shortly mentioned that most of the public relays are blocked. To verify
this, we downloaded the published consensus from February 23 at 09:00. At the time, the
consensus contained descriptors for a total of 2819 relays. Then, from our Chinese VPS we tried to
establish a TCP connection to the Tor port of every single relay. If we were able to successfully
establish a TCP connection we classified the relay as reachable, otherwise unreachable.

We found that our Chinese client could successfully establish TCP connections with 47 out of all
2819 (1.6\%) public relays. We manually inspected the descriptors of the 47 relays, but could not
find any common property which could have been responsible for the relays being unblocked in China.
We checked the availability of the reachable relays again after a period of three days. Only
one out of the 47 unfiltered relays was still reachable.

\subsection{Where Does the Filtering Happen?}
We want to gain a better understanding of where the Chinese DPI boxes are looking for the Tor
fingerprint. In detail, we try to investigate whether the DPI boxes also analyse domestic and
ingress traffic.

We used six open Chinese SOCKS proxies distributed across four autonomous systems (ASN 4134, 4837,
9808 and 17968) to investigate domestic filtering. We simulated the initiation of a Tor connection
multiple times to randomly chosen TCP ports on our VPS, but could not attract any active scans.

Previous research confirmed that Chinese HTTP keyword filtering is bidirectional \cite{Clayton2006},
i.e., keywords are scanned in both directions. We wanted to find out whether this is true for the
Tor DPI infrastructure too. To verify that, we tried to initiate Tor connections to our Chinese VPS
from our vantage points in Sweden, Russia and Singapore. Despite multiple attempts we were not able
to attract a single scan.

The above mentioned results indicate that Tor filtering is probably only done at Chinese
\emph{border ASes} and only with traffic going from \emph{inside China to the outside world}. We
believe that there are two reasons for this. First, filtering domestic traffic in addition to
international traffic would dramatically increase the amounts of data to analyse since domestic
traffic is believed to be the largest fraction of Chinese traffic \cite{hroberts}. Second, at the
time of this writing there are no relays in China so there is no need to filter domestic or ingress
traffic. Tor usage in China means being able to connect to the outside world.

\subsection{What Pattern Is Matched by the GFC?}
Wilde discovered that the GFC identifies Tor connections by searching for the cipher list sent by
Tor clients \cite{twilde}. The cipher list is part of the TLS client hello which is sent by the Tor
user to the relay or bridge after a TCP connection has been established. This particular cipher
list, see Listing \ref{lst:cipherlist}, appears to be unique to Tor.

\begin{lstlisting}[basicstyle=\footnotesize\ttfamily,caption={Tor cipher list inside TLS client
hello.},label={lst:cipherlist},captionpos=b]
        c0 0a c0 14 00 39 00 38 c0 0f c0 05 00 35 c0 07
        c0 09 c0 11 c0 13 00 33 00 32 c0 0c c0 0e c0 02
        c0 04 00 04 00 05 00 2f c0 08 c0 12 00 16 00 13
        c0 0d c0 03 fe ff 00 0a 00 ff
\end{lstlisting}

According to our experiments, the Chinese DPI boxes are still looking for this particular cipher
list. However, we show that the mere occurence of the cipher list anywhere in the payload is not
enough to trigger scanning. The \emph{context} seems to be relevant.

In order to verify that the context is relevant, we embed the TLS handshake pattern inside an HTTP
request. The TLS handshake was disguised as User-Agent as can be seen in Listing \ref{lst:http}.

\begin{lstlisting}[basicstyle=\footnotesize\ttfamily,caption={Crafted HTTP
request.},label={lst:http},captionpos=b]
                   GET / HTTP/1.1
                   Host: baidu.com
                   User-Agent: <HANDSHAKE>
\end{lstlisting}

We proceeded to send this pseudo HTTP request to our bridge in Singapore. Despite several attempts
with slightly modified requests, we were not able to trigger scanning. We then set the first 6 bytes
in the same HTTP requests to \texttt{0x00} and sent it again. This time, we were able to trigger
scanning. We assume that the ``GET'' string at the beginning of the payload made the DPI boxes load
a different set of patterns to match.

\subsection{Where Are the Scanners Coming From?}
An important question we have not answered yet is where the active scans originate. To get extensive
data for answering this question, we continuously attracted active scanners over a period of 17 days
ranging from March 6 to March 23. We attracted scanners by simulating Tor connections from within
China to our bridge in Singapore\footnote{We repeated the same experiment with a bridge in Sweden
and with open SOCKS proxies and the findings were the same.}. For the simulation of Tor connections,
we created a program whose only purpose was to send the Tor TLS client hello to the bridge and
terminate afterwards. This is enough ``bait'' to attract active scanners. After every Tor connection
simulation, our program remained inactive for a randomly chosen value between 9 and 14 minutes. The
experiment yielded \emph{3295 scans of our bridge}. Our findings based on this data are described below.

\subsubsection{Scanner IP Address Distribution}
We are interested in the scanner's IP address distribution, i.e., how often can we find a particular
IP address in our logs? Our data exhibits two surprising characteristics:
\begin{enumerate}
	\item More than half of all connections---1680 of 3295 (51\%)---were initiated by \emph{a
	single} IP address: 202.108.181.70.
	\item The second half of all addresses is almost \emph{uniformly distributed}. Among all 1615
	remaining addresses, 1584 (98\%) were unique.
\end{enumerate}

The IP address 202.108.181.70 clearly stands out from all observed scanners. Aside from its heavy
activity we could not observe any other peculiarities in its scanning behaviour. The whois-record of
the IP address in Listing \ref{lst:mswhois} states a company named ``Beijing Guanda Technology
Co.Ltd'' as owner.

\begin{lstlisting}[basicstyle=\footnotesize\ttfamily,caption={Whois-record of the master
scanner.},label={lst:mswhois},
captionpos=b]
     inetnum:        202.108.181.0 - 202.108.181.255
     netname:        BJ-GD-TECH-CO
     descr:          Beijing Guanda Technology Co.Ltd
     country:        CN
     admin-c:        CH455-AP
     tech-c:         SY21-AP
     mnt-by:         MAINT-CNCGROUP-BJ
     changed:        suny@publicf.bta.net.cn 20020524
     status:         ASSIGNED NON-PORTABLE
     source:         APNIC

     [...]
\end{lstlisting}

We could only find a company named ``Guanda Technology Amusement Equipment Co., Ltd'' on the
Internet. It is not clear whether this is the same company. However, as explained below, we have
reason to believe that the scanner's IP addresses are spoofed by the GFC so the owner of the IP
address, assuming that it even exists, may not be aware of the scanning activity.

\subsubsection{Whois Records}
To learn more about the origin of the scanners we iterated over the entire corpus of gathered
scanner IP addresses and fetched the associated whois records. We manually investigated the obtained
records and discovered that all IP addresses are under the control of only two ISPs: \emph{China
Telecom} and \emph{China Unicom}\footnote{Many IP addresses were owned by CNCGroup (China Netcom
Group) as well, but this ISP is now merged with China Unicom.}. Both ISPs do not limit their scanner
IPs to one single network, but instead make use of networks distributed over multiple Chinese
provinces. Using our whois data we found out that the scanner IPs originated from 135 different
networks of varying size.

Judging by the number of subscribers, China Telecom and Unicom are the two biggest ISPs not just in
China, but also worldwide \cite{chinaISP}. In addition, both are run by the state. These two
prerequisites are possibly perfect breeding ground for censorship.

\subsubsection{Autonomous System Origin}
We used the IP to ASN mapping service provided by Team Cymru \cite{ip2asn} to get the autonomous
system number for every observed scanner. The result reveals that all scanners come from \emph{one
of three} ASes\footnote{Recent research efforts showed that China operates 177 autonomous systems
\cite{Roberts2011}.} with the respective percentage of observed scanners in parantheses:
\begin{itemize}
	\item \emph{AS4837}:\\CHINA169-BACKBONE CNCGROUP China169 Backbone (65.7\%)
	\item \emph{AS4134}:\\CHINANET-BACKBONE No.31,Jin-rong Street (30.5\%)
	\item \emph{AS17622}:\\CNCGROUP-GZ China Unicom Guangzhou network (3.8\%)
\end{itemize}

AS4134 is owned by China Telecom and AS4837 as well as AS17622 is owned by China Unicom. AS4134 and
AS4837 are the two largest ASes in China \cite{Roberts2011} and play a crucial role in the
country-wide censorship as pointed out by Xu, Mao and Halderman \cite{Xu2011}. Furthermore, Roberts
et al. \cite{Roberts2011} found out that China's AS level structure is \emph{far from uniform} with
a significant fraction of the countries traffic being routed through AS4134 or AS4837.

\subsubsection{Reverse DNS}
Using Google's open DNS server 8.8.8.8 we conducted reverse DNS lookups for all collected IP
addresses. This process yielded 284 DNS PTR records. With the exception of several misconfigured
records which were resolved to \emph{hn.kd.dhcp}, \emph{hn.kd.ny.adsl} and \emph{hn.kd.pix}, all
records contained either the substring \emph{dynamic} or \emph{adsl} which indicates that the IP
addresses originate from an ISP's address pool. All valid DNS PTR records ended with one of the
following four domain names:
\begin{itemize}
	\item \emph{163data.com.cn} (China Telecom)
	\item \emph{cndata.com} (China Telecom)
	\item \emph{sx.cn} (China Unicom Shanxi Province Network)
	\item \emph{jlccptt.net.cn} (China Unicom Jilin Province Network)
\end{itemize}

\subsubsection{IP Address Spoofing}
In his analysis, Wilde \cite{twilde} already tried to find evidence for a supposable IP address
hijacking conducted by the GFC. The idea was that the GFC might not have its own dedicated address
range---which would be trivial to block for Tor bridges and relays---but instead shortly hijacks
otherwise assigned IP addresses for the sole purpose of scanning. However, Wilde's gathered
traceroute data did not contain any indication for that hypothesis since the traceroute paths during
and after scanning did not differ.

During manual tests we noticed that sometimes shortly after a scan, the respective IP address starts
replying to ping requests\footnote{Note that this is never the case during or immediately after
scans. All ICMP packets are being dropped.}. In order to have more data to analyse, we wrote a
script to automatically gather additional data as soon as a scanner connects and again some minutes
afterwards. In particular, the script did the following:
\begin{itemize}
	\item Run TCP, UDP and ICMP traceroutes immediately after a scan and again 15 minutes later.
	\item Continuously ping the scanning IP address for 15 minutes.
	\item Capture all network traffic during these 15 minutes using tcpdump.
\end{itemize}

Between March 21 and 26 we started an independent round of attracting scanners and let our script
gather the above mentioned additional data. We caused a total of 429 scans coming from 427 unique IP
addresses. From all 429 scans we then extracted all connections where the continuous 15 minute ping
resulted in at least one ping reply packet. This process yielded 85 connections which corresponds to
approximately 20\% of all observed connections.

We analysed the 85 connections by computing:
\begin{itemize}
	\item The amount of minutes until a particular IP address started replying to our ping requests.
	\item The IP TTL difference (new ttl -- old ttl) between packets during the scan and ping
	replies.
\end{itemize}

The results are illustrated in Figure \ref{fig:subfig1} and \ref{fig:subfig2}. Figure
\ref{fig:subfig1} depicts all IP TTL differences between after the scan (when the host starts
replying to ping packets) and during the scan. We had 14 outliers with a TTL difference of 65 and
192 but did not list them in the histogram. It is clearly noticeable that the difference was mostly
1, meaning that after the scan, the TTL was 1 higher than during the scan. Figure \ref{fig:subfig2}
illustrates how long it took for the hosts to start replying to the ping requests. No clear pattern
is visible.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\subfigure[The IP TTL difference between after and during the scan.]{
\includegraphics[scale=.45]{diagrams/ttl-diffs.pdf}
\label{fig:subfig1}
}
\subfigure[The amount of minutes until the host started replying to pings.]{
\includegraphics[scale=.45]{diagrams/reachability-duration.pdf}
\label{fig:subfig2}
}
\label{fig:subfigureExample}
\caption{Analysis of the IP TTL difference \subref{fig:subfig1} and the duration until ping replies
\subref{fig:subfig2}.}
\end{figure}

An example of a traceroute is given in Listing \ref{lst:tr1} and \ref{lst:tr2}. We ran an ICMP
traceroute to the IP address 60.208.176.112 during and 15 minutes after the scan. While the
traceroute timed out during the scan, it finished successfully 15 minutes later. We point out that
the traceroute during the scan timed out \emph{just one hop} before the destination IP address.

One explanation for the changing TTL is that the GFC could be \emph{spoofing IP addresses}. The GFC
could be abusing several IP address pools intended for Internet users to allocate short-lived IP
addresses for the purpose of scanning. We further speculate that sometimes the GFC might be
spoofing IP addresses which are currently in use. When the spoofing ends, we are able to communicate
with the ``underlying'' host which seems to be 1 hop behind the scanning machine. This could mean
that the scanning infrastructure is located at data centers of ISPs.

However, we stress that the GFC conducting IP spoofing is a mere hypothesis. There might be
legitimate reasons for the observed TTL differences. From the GFC's point of view, spoofing ordinary
client IP addresses would be effective since bridges and relays can not block the scanners at
the IP layer. This would imply blocking legitimate Internet users from accessing the Tor network.

\subsection{When Do the Scanners Connect?}
In \cite{twilde}, Wilde stated that all scanners connected within three minutes after multiples of
15 minutes, i.e., during the minute intervals $[0,3]$, $[15,18]$, $[30,33]$ and $[45,48]$. While
these results were in accordance with our first manual tests during January, they did not hold true
for our scanner attraction experiments after January.

Figure \ref{fig:timing} visualises when scanners connect. The $y$-axis depicts the minutes of the
respective hour. Contrary to December 2011, when Wilde ran his experiments, the scanners now seem to
use a broader time interval to launch the scans. In addition, the data contains two time intervals
which are free from scanning. These intervals lasted from March 8 at around 17:30 to March 9 at
10:00 and from March 14 at 10:30 to March 16 at 4:30. We have no explanation why the GFC did not
conduct scanning during that time.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.75\textwidth]{diagrams/probe-minute-timings-scatter.pdf}
\caption{Timing pattern of scanners connecting to our bridge. The $x$-axis depicts the time in days
whereas the $y$-axis represents the minute when a scanner connected to the bridge.}
\label{fig:timing}
\end{figure}

Closer manual analysis yielded that the data exhibits a \emph{diurnal pattern}. In order to make the
pattern visible, we processed the data as four distinct time series with every 15 minute interval
forming one time series, respectively. We smoothed the data points in the time series using simple
exponential smoothing as defined in Equation \ref{equ:ses}. The algorithm takes our data points $x$
as input and produces the smoothed time series $\hat{x}$.

\begin{equation}
\label{equ:ses}
\hat{x}_{t} =
\begin{cases}
x_{0} & \mbox{if } t \le 1 \\
\alpha \cdot x_{t-1} + (1 - \alpha) \cdot \hat{x}_{t-1} & \mbox{otherwise}
\end{cases}
\end{equation}

We experimented with various smoothing factors $0 \le \alpha \le 1$ and found 0.05 to satisfyingly
illustrate the diurnal pattern. The result---a subset of the data ranging from March 16 to March
23---is shown in Figure \ref{fig:diurnal}. Each of the four diagrams represents one of the 15 minute
intervals. The diagrams show that depending on the time of the day, on average, scanners connect
either close to the respective 15 minute multiple or a little bit later.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.85\textwidth]{diagrams/probe-minute-timings-smoothed.pdf}
\caption{Timing pattern of scanners connecting to our bridge. The $x$-axes depict the time in days
whereas the $y$-axes show the smoothed minute when scanners connected to the bridge.}
\label{fig:diurnal}
\end{figure}

We conjecture that the GFC maintains \emph{scanning queues}. When the DPI boxes discover a potential
Tor connection, the IP:port tuple of the suspected bridge is added to a queue. Every 15 minutes,
these queues are processed and all IP:port tuples in the queue are being scanned. In the evening,
more Chinese users try to access the Tor network than during the night. We assume that due to this
additional load, it takes a longer time for the GFC to process the queues.

\subsection{Blocking Malfunction}
During our experiments we noticed a sudden disappearence of active scanning and blocking. This lack
of scanning made it possible for us to successfully initiate Tor connections without causing bridges
to get scanned and blocked. A similar downtime was observed by Wilde \cite{tpo5}.

The downtime started at around January 25 and lasted until January 28. During these
approximately three days many Chinese users were able to use the Tor network as can be seen in
Figure \ref{fig:offline}. The diagram shows a clear increase in usage followed by a drop to the same
level as before. After three days the blocking infrastructure was operating as before and Tor
connections from inside China were subject to the same active scanning as before the downtime.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.9\textwidth]{diagrams/bridge-users.pdf}
\caption{Amount of Chinese bridge users between January 11 and February 5. The spike between January
25 and January 29 indicates a sudden increase of bridge users followed by a decrease. The reason for
the spike was an outage of the Chinese Tor blocking system.}
\label{fig:offline}
\end{figure}

We have no explanation for this downtime but it is worth pointing out that the downtime happened
during the Chinese new year celebration which lasted from January 23 to January 29. During this time
span the overall Internet usage in China decreased visibly as illustrated by Google's Transparency
Report \cite{trans}. This correlation could indicate that the downtime was not an accident but
rather a planned maintenance window.

\section{Evasion}
\label{sec:evasion}
The above sections explored the infrastructure and blocking mechanisms adopted by China to block
access to the Tor network. The question, which remains to be answered, is how to circumvent the
blocking. This section discusses different evasion techniques which greatly differ in their concept
but share the ultimate goal of circumventing the Chinese block.

\subsection{Obfsproxy}
The Tor Project is developing a tool called \emph{obfsproxy} \cite{obfsproxy}. The tool runs
independently of Tor and is obfuscating the network traffic it receives from the Tor process. An
example is shown in Figure \ref{fig:obfsproxy}. In the figure, two obfsproxy instances---a client
and a server---are exchanging obfuscated Tor traffic. Due to the obfuscation, the chinese DPI boxes
are not able to identify the TLS cipher list anymore.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{diagrams/obfsproxy.pdf}
\caption{Obfsproxy obfuscates the communication between a Tor client and a bridge. As a result, the
identification of Tor traffic will be much harder for DPI boxes.}
\label{fig:obfsproxy}
\end{figure}

Obfsproxy implements so called \emph{pluggable transport} meaning that the precise way of
obfuscation is determined by pluggable transport modules. As a result, one could implement a
transport module for HTTP whose purpose is to make Tor traffic look like HTTP. In
\cite{Moghaddam2012}, Moghaddam et al. describe the development of a pluggable transport module
which mimics Skype traffic.

As of March 24, the official obfsproxy bundle \cite{obfsproxy} contained a list of 13 hard-coded
obfsproxy bridges in its configuration file. From our VPS we tested the reachability of all of these
bridges by trying to connect to them via telnet. We found that not a single connection succeeded.
One bridge seemed to be offline and the connection to the remaining 12 bridges was aborted by
spoofed RST segments.

The above result raises the question whether the GFC is able to block all obfsproxy connections or
just the 13 hard-coded bridges. To answer this question, we set up a private obfsproxy bridge in
Sweden and connected to it from within China. We initiated several connections to it over
several hours and could always successfully establish a Tor circuit. We conclude that the IP:port
tuples of the 13 hard-coded obfsproxy bridges were added to a blacklist to prevent widespread use of
the official obfsproxy bundle. However, other obfsproxy bridges remain undetected by the GFC.

\subsection{Blacklisting the Blacklisters}
Chinese active scanners are almost indistinguishable from legitimate users. The scans originate from
seemingly random IP addresses and may even use the official Tor client to connect to suspected
bridges. Still, the scanners exhibit certain characteristics which make it possible to distinguish
between legitimate users and scanners.

\subsubsection{Deaf Time Window}
Figure \ref{fig:timing} indicates that scanners tend to connect at the beginning of every multiple
of 15 minutes. A bridge can exploit this knowledge by simply acting ``deaf'' against all new
connections from China for a while after a 15 minute interval has begun. Incoming TCP SYNs must be
silently dropped so that scanners are not able to connect.

Unfortunately, this strategy inevitably involves many false positives and leads to legitimate users
not being able to connect to the bridge.

\subsubsection{TCP SYN Retransmissions}
In December 2011, Pietrosanti \cite{fabio} observed that Chinese scanners retransmit only one TCP
SYN segment if the first segment is lost. This behaviour differs from modern Windows and Linux
machines which make use of more retransmissions. This phenomena can be equally exploited by
instructing bridges to deliberately ignore the first two TCP SYNs.

We implemented the above two blacklisting strategies in a software tool called ``brdgrd''. The
implementation offers the possibility to only accept the $n$th received SYN segment for a given
IP:port tuple. During our experiments with open SOCKS proxies we noticed that this technique is able
to shield off most scanners, but not all of them. We observed a few false positives which would
result in a bridge being blocked.

While the SYN retransmission technique is able to prevent a large fraction of scanners from
connecting, it causes collateral damage too since legitimate users can find themselves unable to
connect. This is particularly true if there is lots of packet loss between a user and a bridge.
Such a situation can effectively render a bridge unreachable for a user.

\subsection{Packet Fragmentation}
After all, the GFC is by its nature a distributed network intrusion detection system (NIDS). To
evade it, one can look through the glasses of an attacker and consider strategies outlined in a 14
year old paper written by Ptacek and Newsham \cite{Ptacek1998}.

One evasion technique described in the paper is \emph{packet fragmentation} which exploits the fact
that many NIDSes do not conduct packet reassembly. We used the tool \emph{fragroute}
\cite{fragroute} to enforce packet fragmentation on our machine in China. The tool allows the
interception, modification and rewriting of outgoing network traffic and implements most of the
attacks proposed in \cite{Ptacek1998}.

We configured fragroute to split the TCP byte stream to segments of 16 bytes each. At minimum this
configuration divides the 58 byte TLS cipher list into 4 TCP segments. In our test it took 5 TCP
segments to transmit the fragmented cipher list to our bridge as can be seen in Listing
\ref{lst:frag}.

\begin{lstlisting}[basicstyle=\footnotesize\ttfamily,caption={Fragmentation of the cipher list.},
label={lst:frag},captionpos=b]
 Packet n+0: c0 0a
 Packet n+1: c0 14 00 39 00 38 c0 0f c0 05 00 35 c0 07 c0 09
 Packet n+2: c0 11 c0 13 00 33 00 32 c0 0c c0 0e c0 02 c0 04
 Packet n+3: 00 04 00 05 00 2f c0 08 c0 12 00 16 00 13 c0 0d
 Packet n+4: c0 03 fe ff 00 0a 00 ff
\end{lstlisting}

Despite awaiting several multiples of 15 minutes and initiating several fragmented Tor connections,
we never noticed any active scanning of our bridge. This experiment indicates that the GFC does not
conduct packet reassembly. A similar observation was made by Park and Crandall \cite{Park2010}.

We conclude that packet fragmentation on the client side is sufficient to evade detection by the DPI
boxes. Still, this is an unpractical solution given that this method must be supported by \emph{all}
connecting Chinese users. A single user which does not use it triggers active scanning which then
leads to the block of all bridges, that the user is connecting to. Another disadvantage is the
significant protocol overhead due to the small TCP segments which leads to a decrease in throughput.

Due to the problems associated with client side fragmentation, we implemented a way of server side
fragmentation in brdgrd. We extended the tool to \emph{rewrite the TCP window size} announced by the
bridge to the client inside the SYN/ACK segment. Due to the rewritten and small window size, the
client does not transmit the complete TLS cipher list inside one segment but rather splits it across
two or more segments. In our tests we could successfully establish Tor connections from within China
without causing scanning. It must be noted that the rewriting is done without the bridge knowing and
is an abuse of the TCP protocol.

\subsection{Bridge Authorisation}
Scanners can be locked out if bridges are extended to provide a way of authorisation. Such a scheme
is developed by Smits et al. \cite{Smits2011}. The authors propose to use a single packet
authorisation mechanism. That way, a bridge can authorise a user and does not reveal its online
status before the authorisation was successful. For an unauthorised user, such as a scanner, a
bridge would appear to be offline.

\section{Conclusions}
\label{sec:conclusion}
China goes to great lengths to prevent its citizens from accessing the free Internet including the
Tor anonymity network. We showed how access to Tor is being denied and we conjectured how the
blocking and filtering infrastructure is designed. In addition, we discussed and proposed
countermeasures intended to ``unblock'' the Tor network.

Our findings include that the Great Firewall of China might spoof IP addresses for the purpose of
scanning Tor bridges and that domestic as well as ingress traffic does not seem to be subject to Tor
fingerprinting. We also showed that the firewall is easily circumvented by packet fragmentation.

Tor fingerprinting and active scanning is effective for the firewall because Tor traffic is
currently distinguishable from what is regarded as harmless traffic in China. Since Tor is being
used more and more as censorship circumvention tool, it is crucial that this distinguishability is
minimised.

\section*{Acknowledgments}
\label{sec:acks}
We want to thank Fabio Pietrosanti for helping with the experiments and Harald Lampesberger for
helpful comments. In addition, we want to thank the Tor developers (in particular George Kadianakis
and Arturo Filast\`{o}) for their valuable feedback and help.

Our raw data and code are available at: \\
\url{http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/static/gfc/}.

\bibliographystyle{splncs}


text:
Biografia
Proveniente da una famiglia borghese (suo padre era medico), fin dall'età di sedici anni aveva espresso il desiderio di diventare una cineasta, ma la sua passione per il cinema venne ostacolata dai familiari, che la volevano laureata in lingue. Conseguita la laurea in inglese, tuttavia, Catherine lasciò la provincia e si stabilì a Parigi con l'intento di fare il suo apprendistato nel mondo cinematografico. Per dieci anni lavorò come montatrice e nel 1972 realizzò un documentario sul disegnatore-fotografo tedesco Hans Bellmer.

Per poter girare il primo lungometraggio, Catherine Binet dovette aspettare più di sei anni. Affascinata dal mondo erotico e surreale di Bellmer, elaborò una minuziosissima sceneggiatura di fantasia che ne ricalcava i temi e le atmosfere. I numerosi produttori ai quali veniva presentato il progetto si dimostravano scettici, dichiarando che un'opera simile non avrebbe incontrato i consensi del pubblico. La sceneggiatura fu letta anche da Federico Fellini che, entusiasta, ne parlò a Daniel Toscan du Plantier, manager della Gaumont, ma la situazione si sbloccò solo quando Catherine conobbe il letterato Georges Perec, che si innamorò di lei e del suo progetto, tanto da lanciare una sottoscrizione nel mondo della cultura parigina.

Grazie a questa mobilitazione il film poté finalmente essere realizzato e fu girato in sei settimane, nell'estate 1980. Con il titolo I giochi della contessa Dolingen de Gratz, il lavoro fu presentato a Cannes nel 1981 in una sezione collaterale e ottenne delle recensioni controverse: i critici le rimproverarono soprattutto l'eccessivo barocchismo e la narrazione non lineare. Gli stessi giudizi vennero sostanzialmente riformulati a Venezia, a settembre dello stesso anno, quando il film venne proiettato alla Mostra del cinema, unico film invitato a rappresentare la Francia nella selezione ufficiale.

Delusa dall'esperienza, la Binet si dedicò successivamente alla realizzazione di altri documentari d'arte, tra cui uno sul disegnatore Jacques Carelman (1983) e uno sulla stilista giapponese Hanae Mori (1986). Il mediometraggio Te souviens-tu de Gaspard Winckler? è invece dedicato alla figura del suo compagno Georges Perec, al quale rimase sentimentalmente legata fino alla morte di lui, avvenuta nel 1982.

Filmografia
 Hans Bellmer (1972), documentario
 I giochi della contessa Dolingen de Gratz (1980), lungometraggio
 Trompe-l'œil (1982), documentario
 Les Passages parisiens (1982), documentario
 Jacques Carelman (1983), documentario
 Hanae Mori, haute couture (1986), documentario
 Te souviens-tu de Gaspard Winckler ? (1990), documentario.

Bibliografia
 Benoit Isorni, Per farvi paura con sentimento, su La Repubblica del 29 agosto 1981.

Collegamenti esterni

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
My Top 9 Sapphic Books of 2018
Posted on January 2, 2019 by danikaellis — Leave a reply
As we start in on a new year, I always like looking back on some of the books that really made an impression last year. I made a video of my top 18 books of 2018, but I thought I would highlight the Lesbrary-related books specifically in a post. (Don't worry, most of those other books in the video are still queer, just not with a sapphic main character.) Most of these books have already been reviewed at the Lesbrary, so I've included links to the original reviews if you want more info! These are mostly excerpts from those reviews. They happen to be mostly YA and middle grade books, which isn't a knock against any other genres, just that they were the kind of books I read the most last year. Without further ado:
#9: As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman (review)
Melanie Gillman is one of my favourite artists. I am floored by the the intense detail and time put into every page, done completely in coloured pencils. This story follows Charlie, a queer brown kid feeling very out of place at a white feminist spiritual backpacking trip. Luckily, she finds connection with Sydney, who is trans, and feels that she would not be welcome on this trip if she weren't closeted. Honestly, my only problem with this is that it's only volume one, and it stop somewhat abruptly. I can't wait for the next volume to come out for I can get back to this story! Check out the Lesbrary review for some excerpts of panels from the story.
#8: Drum Roll, Please by Lisa Jenn Bigelow (review)
Melly is 13, and the day before she was dropped off at Camp Rockaway, her parents told her they were getting divorced. She's had no time to process this before she's tossed into this new environment for 2 weeks, and even her best friend being there doesn't seem to help, especially when Olivia is too busy hanging out with her crush to remember her. Melly may be a drum player, but she has trouble finding her own voice. One way or another, these two weeks will change that.
Olivia may not have been there for Melly as much as she wanted, but Melly wasn't communicating with Olivia. Her parents may not have been fair to her to tell her just before she left, but maybe she wasn't being fair to them, either. Melly needs to find herself and get in touch with her own emotions, but that doesn't mean abandoning her empathy. Relationships–of all kinds–are complicated. Communication is difficult. And Drum Roll, Please doesn't try to simplify it. We can be sympathetic from one angle and cruel from another. There aren't easy answers.
#7: Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft edited by Tess Sharpe
I somehow forgot to do a Lesbrary review of this one, which is a shame, because I really liked it! This isn't entirely a queer collection, but there are about 5 stories with sapphic main characters. I loved the different takes on witches, from fairy tale-ish witches to more modern witches, and I liked how the women in the stories drew power from the cultural conception of witches, which have been used against women in history. Here are my pitches for the sapphic stories:
"Starsong" by Tehlor Kay Mejia: Luna's mother is afraid that she'l follow the same path her tia Jasmin did, but Luna has found peace and power in the magic that the stars provide for her. When someone tries to start a debate with her on Instagram about science vs magic, she isn't going to give them the time of day… until she realizes the commentor is a cute girl.
"The Heart In Her Hands" by Tess Sharpe: A common trope of tumblr stories is the soulmate mark: the first words you hear from your soulmate appear on your skin beforehand, so you know when you've met them. "The Heart In Her Hands" turns this romantic idea on its head with a protagonist who resents being told her fate, especially when she's already found the love of her life.
"The Legend of Stone Mary" by Robin Talley: When a witch was killed in the woods by an angry mob, she cast a curse. That curse has continued in the town for many generations, temporarily placated by a statue in her honor. Wendy finds herself helplessly drawn to her ancestor's statue on a stormy Halloween night, with no idea what will happen when she faces it.
"The Gherin Girls" by Emery Lord: Three sisters (one bi, one gay, one straight), all with different abilities (sensing emotions through touch, magic with plants, and magic with cooking). Deals with the aftermath of an emotionally abusive (M/F) relationship.
"Why They Watch Us Burn" by Elizabeth May: 13 girls are sentenced to a work camp for being accused of witches. They are meant to starve, disappear, or break in the woods. Instead, they might just find the power they've been accused of. Trigger warning for rape and victim-blaming.
#6: Girl Made of Stars by Ashley Herring Blake (review)
This is about a YA novel about Mara, who has always been very close to her twin, Owen. So when Mara's best friend, Hannah, accuses Owen of rape, Mara is horrified. She seems to split, believing both of their conflicting stories simultaneously. And as she tries to sort through it, her own unaddressed trauma bubbles to the surface.
This is a premise that I would not trust most authors with, but I knew that Ashley Herring Blake could carry it. Girl Made of Stars faces rape culture head on. It had my stomach in knots, but I couldn't stop turning the pages. I finished it one day–partly because Blake's writing is captivating, partly because I was so invested in these characters that I wanted to know what happened to them, and partly to be able to walk away from this sickening situation. This was another 5 star read for me, and I will definitely be picking up anything Ashley Herring Blake writes in the future.
#5: All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages edited by Saundra Mitchell (review)
All Out is a much-needed book, because it locates queer people (teens in particular) through time. It is optimistic historical fiction: It imagines not only queer teens in the past, but how they might have found happiness there. It rejects the idea that queer people don't have a history–or that if they do, it is fundamentally tragic.
There are a lot of different time periods (~1200s-1999) and cultures involved, although I would have liked to see more stories set outside of North America and Europe. The story that really stood out to me was Malinda Lo's, and luckily for me, it's being made into a novel! Although that's my favourite, I really enjoyed all of them–I didn't feel like there were any really weak stories in this collection.
#4: How to Make a Wish by Ashley Herring Blake (review)
This book deftly deals with grief and unhealthy/abusive family dynamics. Grace's father died when she was young, and since then, her mother hasn't acted much like a mom. Grace feels like it is her responsibility to watch after Maggie. Again, this is a novel that has such nuanced, complex relationships. Grace's best friend, Luca, and his mom have just taken in Eva (Grace's love interest), who has recently lost her mother.
Maggie takes Eva under her wing, causing Grace to agonize over whether she should tell Eva the whole truth about Maggie. I thought it was masterfully handled, and I was completely invested in Grace and Eva–individually and as a couple. But overall, the treatment of abuse and grief layered with a bisexual (yes, using the word bisexual) love story and accompanied with a thoughtful examination of race and art (Eva is a black ballet dancer) all came together into a five star read for me
#2 & 3: Space Battle Lunchtime Vols 1 & 2 by Natalie Riess (review)
All-ages queer lady-type comics are probably my favourite thing to read. My favourite thing to watch is reality baking shows. This comic is an all-ages queer women comic about a competitive cooking show… in space. What could be better?? When I finished volume 1, I thought "Sure, it seems pretty obvious it's queer, but is it technically subtext?" Which would be okay! I still would have liked it! But volume 2 instantly makes it very clear that it's queer. This is so cute and fun. The romance is sweet, the plot is full of hijinks and over-the-top action ("Cannibal Coliseum, where chefs compete to cook… each other.") I mean, really, if "all-ages queer women comic about a competitive cooking show in space" doesn't convince you, what else can I say?
#1: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (review)
Evelyn Hugo is an aging Hollywood starlet who has chosen a relatively unknown journalist to write her life story. Evelyn is such a fascinating character. She's someone that I imagine people would describe as "unlikable." Personally, I loved her. She is such a flawed, complex character. She's also bisexual–she's very deliberate that Monique gets this label right–and the great love of her life is not one of her seven husbands. She has a tumultuous, heartbreaking love affair with another actress. I felt so much for Evelyn, and it made me really think about what it was like for queer women in the 1950s. Evelyn was privileged in many ways: rich, famous, white-passing–but she was also trapped. She couldn't publicly acknowledge the love of her life without losing everything else she had built. The most authentic part of her was the one she felt she had to keep hidden. This a beautifully written and fascinating story about one of my favourite characters I've encountered in a long time.
Those are my favourite sapphic books I read in 2018! Below is my video with my full top 18 books, if you're curious. I think only one of them in neither by nor about queer people. Let me know what your favourite reads of 2018 are, and I'll add them to my TBR mountain!
This entry was posted in Articles by danikaellis. Bookmark the permalink.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Car window tinting serves a lot of different purposes. Once installed by a professional you and your car will feel the benefits of this amazing accessory right away.
There are a lot of great benefits to car window tinting Walloon, especially when made by a professional as this will deter UV rays that mostly gets inside your vehicle. This will also hinder glare while driving.
If you don't like people peeking inside your vehicle while it is parked and you are away, window tints will give you that added privacy. The application will just give the occupants unobstructed views while not letting unwanted onlookers to keep on peering in.
The window films are mostly applied inside of the vehicle's windows by a technician who can properly measure the needed film for the window. Once they have the proper size, they will cut the film and will proceed with the installation by cleaning the inside and outside of the window and carefully removing all possible dust before starting the process.
Does it really provide safety and security?
Once window tints are properly installed, your car will have an added safety and security, especially during emergencies. Professional-grade tint has powerful bonding properties that give that protected layer to your windows. This application will become a barrier against the shattered glass.
Car window tinting is made to block 99% of UV rays which helps your car interior to not fade and deteriorate. Your leather seat, cloth, plastic vinyl, dashboard, and all the other things you have inside will be protected from too much exposure from the sun once you have your car windows tinted.


text:
Article about Jack in StageSource
The following is an article from the Winter, 2002 Marquee newsletter published by StageSource in Boston. It is edited by Kate Kelly.
E-FORUM (with Boston-area playwrights RUSSELL LEES and JACK NEARY)
Please tell our readers a little bit about yourself and where we may have seen your work.
Russell Lees: I'm originally from Salt Lake City, where my father was the entire theatre department at a small liberal arts college. Boston audiences may have seen my work at Boston Playwrights Theatre, Merrimack Rep or Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre. I occasionally direct as well and was lucky to direct The Silver Coast at Boston Playwrights with some of Boston's best actors. I also directed ImprovBoston for a year or so in the early 90's.
Jack Neary: I've been working in theatre since the mid-seventies, as an actor, director, producer and playwright. I've been Artistic Director of the Summer Theatre at Mount Holyoke College, and I co-founded New Century Theatre in Northampton. My plays have been produced all over the country, including locally at the MRT, the Foothills Theatre, Theatre Lobby, and many community theatres. My plays FIRST NIGHT, TO FORGIVE, DIVINE and JERRY FINNEGAN'S SISTER might be recognizable to a few folks.
How did you become a part of the Boston Theatre Community?
RL: I landed here by chance and started taking classes in directing and playwrighting at Harvard Extension School from David Wheeler and Kate Snodgrass. Kate encouraged me to apply for Derek Walcott's playwriting program at BU and there you have it.
JN: By being born and raised in Lowell, and by pretty much staying close by, even though I've done a couple of stints in New York and in western Massachusetts.
Where do you find the most support as a playwright?
RL: It's a lonely, lonely job. Kate Snodgrass and the resources at Boston Playwrights have been a big support.
JN: Interesting question. I think I find the most support from my audience and my friends in the business. Yes, I have a couple of agents, and my work gets done relatively frequently, but the reason I'm still writing (without having scored that one big mega-blast success that those of us who do this crave) is because when I write a joke the audience laughs, and my friends encourage me to write more. I think some (not all) literary managers and dramaturgs find their noses tilting upwards in pain when they read scripts about non-dysfunctional people who happen to be funny. They call it "TV" and chuck it in the out-basket. I know, this makes me sound whiny, but I've always found literary managers and dramaturgs far more accessible after they've seen my stuff in front of an audience. And it's tough to get my stuff in front of an audience without the support of literary managers and dramaturgs who "get it" when they read it. Survival, then, becomes a bit of a challenge.
What was the first theatre piece you ever had produced? First piece in this area?
RL: My first play, Monday Night Football, was produced in a 70 seat theatre in Salt Lake City many, many years ago. It was back when it was hip to have lots of foul language and drug use on stage, and I actually did get some people to walk out. My first local production was The Case of the Blue Narcissus at Boston Playwrights in 1992. Cyndi Freeman, who's gone on to fame with her one-woman shows, was featured in that production.
JN: My very first play was called THE THICKEST PLOT and it was produced at Smith College when I was a graduate student there. My play FIRST NIGHT was produced in one-act form at a festival at the Foothills Theatre in Worcester in 1985, featuring Mark Cartier, Donna Asali, and directed by Nancy Kindelan, all Boston theatre veterans.
What do you think about the concept that one must go to New York to be taken seriously as a theatre professional?
RL: It's certainly not true for playwrights. It may be that to be taken seriously, a playwright needs a New York production at some point, but there's no big advantage to actually living there.
JN: Well, it depends on the individual professional's definition of being taken seriously. Of course, anyone can be taken seriously anywhere if he or she is serious and is willing to be taken. However, my experience as a writer is that you can have all the plays you want published and produced, but until one script is given the NYC imprimatur, it remains an uphill struggle. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it's harder and faster than most rules I know.
How do you feel about the efforts made to produce new works in the local theatre community?
RL: There's quite a bit of activity in support of new works in this town. A local playwright who's determined has opportunities at the venues at the BCA, Centastage, Boston Playwrights, and other places as well. It also seems like local audience interest in new works is finally growing. I think the tricky bit in Boston is that, once you get a production in a smallish space, what do you do then? There's no clear path to getting other productions or to moving a production to a larger, more commercial space. I've always thought that it would be of enormous benefit if some of the local companies who produce new work were able to develop relationships with off-off-Broadway companies. In this way, successful local productions and plays would have some path to the greater exposure of a New York production.
JN: Unfortunately, I've not taken advantage of the seemingly growing opportunities being made available by some of the local theatres. I've tended to introduce my new plays in western Massachusetts theatres where I've worked for many years. I have, however, been very fortunate to have been part of the Boston Theater Marathon of ten-minute plays every year so far, and I find it an exhilarating experience. I don't know how many writers have been approached by producers and artistic directors who have seen work at the Marathon, but it seems to me to be a great place for A.D.s to find local playwrights they might want to work with, and perhaps even commission. There's always the possibility that the new sentimental two-character romantic comedy commissioned will make a big splash and pay a sponsoring theatre's rent for many years to come. End of commercial.
What are your thoughts on the Boston Theatre Marathon? Have you ever seen anything like it anywhere else?
RL: It's unique. Other places have 10-minute play evenings and the like, but as far as I know, a play marathon that brings together a city's entire theatre community in all its reaches exists nowhere else.
JN: See above.
Do you get to see much local theatre?
RL: I do get to pretty much local theatre. I like theatre in small venues, and have lots of friends involved in productions at Boston Playwrights. I live in the building that houses the Threshold Theatre, which often has good productions. Also, I can walk from my place to the BCA in about 20 minutes, so I go there a lot. I get to the Peabody House in Somerville with some regularity as well.
JN: Not as much as I should. And I apologize.
Do you have a "wish list" of services or opportunities that you think might be realistic in Boston with some help (from StageSource or anyone else)?
RL: You know, I really don't.
JN: Not really. I think StageSource has already contributed greatly to the dialogue. Bottom line, though, is that writers have to write and hope that producers and artistic directors continue to allow the occasional non-NYC-ordained piece to be born in Boston. I know it does happen, and I trust it will happen even more often. I also trust that the traditional script, the well-made-play as it's been called, will not dismissed out of hand without serious consideration. Just because a play has a beginning, a middle and an end, and a few good jokes, and nobody dies or has cancer or is a serial killer, doesn't mean it's not worth putting in front of an audience.
Russell Lees' play NIXON'S NIXON will be performed at the Huntington Theatre Company March 1 - March 31, 2002.
Jack Neary will direct LEND ME A TENOR for the Lyric Stage Company of Boston with performances running April 19 - May 18, 2002.


Above: The Xafellis family. My parents, Amersisouda and Panagiotis- and their children, Christos, Prokopia and me..
Above Right: My parents, Panagiotis and Amerisouda.
Above: My father, Panagiotis, with my brother, Christos, cutting timber. Circa 1969.
Above Right: With a group of friends in Sydney (1969). I am in the foreground. Second from the right is Prokopis Panagis and third is Efstratios Keramidas.
Above: On stage with the Mytilenian comedy, Isotita. I am first from the left- dressed in the vrakes.
Above Right: Dressed in traditional Mytilenian costumes at the Carnivale organised by the Progressive Community of Agiassos (Sydney). Escorting me is Sophia Vetsikas. Circa 1985.


text:
Chambers, William (1800 - 1883) - free download ebooks and read online
There are ebooks for online read and free download by Chambers, William on this page. Also you can read a bio of Chambers, William.
William Chambers may refer to:...
If you want to know more about Chambers, William - read more at en.wikipedia.org
Ebooks of Chambers, William (free download ebooks and read online):
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 418 Volume 17, New Series, January 3, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419 Volume 17, New Series, January 10, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 423 Volume 17, New Series, February 7, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424 Volume 17, New Series, February 14, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 by Chambers, William
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Volume 17, Index New Series, January-June 1852 by Chambers, William


A Swiss native, Susan is a multilingual communications professional, business executive and word nerd. She was part of the original launch and editorial team behind Swiss movie magazine close-up! and has written, ghostwritten and edited for several publications and in-house magazines in English, German, French and Italian. Susan is a board member and contributor of online culture mag The Woolf and a board member of The Powerhouse Network for Professional Women in Zürich.


Charlotte Mason was a British educator in the 1800's and the early 1900's who believed in "living books" instead of dry facts and textbooks, and whose revolutionary methods of teaching focused on three aspects: Education is an Atmosphere, a Discipline, a Life. Atmosphere was the home environment and very important to the physical and emotional development, mind and soul of the child, discipline was the consistent exercise of good, daily habits, and life was academics.
When I first heard about Charlotte Mason, I thought, "Why would I want to use a homeschool method of a dead woman who lived in the 1800's?" Not to be crass or anything, but I didn't see the point at first. Then I began to study her writings in For The Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola, and then Charlotte Mason's own works, The Original Homeschooling Series. Her methods are so freeing from the traditional, familiar, boring public school ways that you and I grew up on!
Charlotte believed children should be given "living thoughts and ideas," and not given dry facts and boring textbooks. Let's face it, how many of us loved the textbooks we used to have to read in public school? How many of our own children like textbooks in our homeschools?
Do you do "school-at-home?" I used to until I discovered Charlotte. I also confess that at times when I have been extremely fatigued, stressed out, or preoccupied, I have reverted back to old ways – ways that do not work – i.e., boring facts, dry textbooks and workbooks. As our daughter Leah has said before when I've done this, "You throw a book at me and expect me to get it." And I can always tell a difference in Leah's interest level when I do this. She complains, she whines, she resists. Every time I have used Charlotte's freeing methods, though, Leah has learned so much, she is very interested in the subject, and she has fun!
With Charlotte's methods, children are encouraged to read a wide range of "living books" in each academic subject. "Living books" are books told in story form by an author who is passionate about the subject, that whet the appetite for learning more. Examples would be stories like the Just So stories, Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Charles Dickens' works, and other classics.
In case you think these are old-fashioned books and your kids wouldn't be the slightest bit interested, there are also many modern books that qualify as "living book" – books told from a story point of view and stir the imagination, on subjects ranging from science fiction to medieval history to language arts. You can find some listed by grade and subject at Living Books Curriculum, in the catalog of Christian Books Distributors, Borders, and Barnes and Nobles bookstores.
Charlotte stressed narration of material covered to help the child retain what they had read, to fully use the powers of the mind, and to kindle the imagination. Narration is the child telling back in his own words what he read or has seen, either in writing or verbally. Children begin by narrating out loud a children's story and stories from the Bible. As they grow older, they begin to write their narrations, which leads into learning how to write essays, stories, compositions, and research papers. It is amazing how much detail your children will remember from reading a story, or from studying a beautiful art picture (called "Picture Study").
Copywork from the Bible and great literature, combined with dictation, help students to learn to think and write great thoughts, print and write in cursive well, spell correctly, and use proper grammar and punctuation. The copywork should be done with their best handwriting. Sloppy work is not acceptable.
You can keep the copywork in either notebooks that your children enjoy with their favorite characters such as Tinkerbell or Ariel the mermaid, in notebooks (called "Notebooking"), or in beautifully bound, more expensive journals. This is your child's work and should be treated with respect by them and others. It is a source of pride and joy, especially as you see their handwriting, spelling, grammar and punctuation improving over the years. Initially you will be looking over their copywork books to check for mistakes and to give encouragement, and then they will do this themselves, catching their own mistakes in copying.
Charlotte believed children should be given short but effective lessons in a variety of subjects. A lot of times, children tend to dawdle and lose their concentration during long lessons, and Charlotte believed lessons lasting from 15-20 minutes was best for their minds to stay alert. If you have a child who gets easily distracted and bored like our daughter Leah, these short lessons are great. It makes such a difference in her ability to concentrate, and she does her work better when the lessons don't drag on for an hour.
The bulk of all academic work should be done during the morning hours, so homework would not usually be required late into the night like today's public school children often have to do. She believed lessons of the primary academic subjects should be done in the morning, and afternoons should be left free for reading, art, playing outside, hobbies, family time, resting, and other leisurely activities. This is when your kids can ride their bikes, skate, paint, have friends over to play, go to the library or a movie, or whatever they like to relax. Our daughter has a computer software program with a tablet for drawing graphic art that she enjoys doing.
Hands-on experiences during lessons are encouraged, such as holding and drawing leaves that changed each season, petting a baby bunny, feeling different types of clothing and other textures, doing science experiments, and using a variety of art methods. Charlotte believed children should engage all their physical senses if they have them. The world is meant to explore and to enjoy.
Charlotte believed that children should spend hours outdoors every day (unless weather was really bad) to appreciate God's creation, to study nature, and to get fresh air and to play for overall physical, mental, and spiritual health. Along with plenty of physical exercise, she stressed nutritional, leisurely meals with the family and sufficient sleep. Charlotte would be horrified at today's obese youth who sit around for hours playing violent video games and surfing the net, who live on diets of candy, sodas, and fast food. She believed children should be fed a steady idea of great ideas, something to think and learn about every day.
If you are looking for a homeschool method that can be used with any learning style (visual, auditory or hands-on learners), that encourages children to learn and to love learning without getting burned out, that excels academically, that fosters family closeness and intimacy with God, and that brings great freedom to your homeschooling, Charlotte's methods are for you. You can learn more at www.charlottemason.com and www.cindyrushton.com. I also encourage you to buy Susan Scaheffer Macaulay's For The Children's Sake, Karen Andreola's Charlotte Mason Companion, and Charlotte Mason's The Original Home School Series.


text:
Visual Art Jun 10, 2015
Mary Ann Peters, 2015 Stranger Genius Award Nominee in Visual Art
Delicate and unbreakable. Kelly O / lettering Mike Force
Paintings of Syria and Lebanon, hidden gardens, sculptures of bread cast in bronze.
Can be found:
Raising her hand at art talks to ask hard questions.
Smuggled actual floor plans into seemingly pure geometric abstractions.
Mary Ann Peters has been creating sophisticated abstract watercolors on the soft, smooth surfaces of clay-coated panels for decades. She could have continued doing that into the sunset, encoding her subject matter—her family's homeland in Syria and Lebanon—by wrapping it in beautiful swirls and cascades of paint. She had good reasons for keeping her subjects partly obscured. First, the art world is only cyclically interested in anything unabashedly political, narrative, female, or minority. Would alluding too directly to Syria and Lebanon get Peters cast as "the Arab American artist"?
But there was another problem, too, a more internal one. Peters, who graduated from the University of Washington with her master's in fine arts in 1977, was not able to travel to her family's homeland—ever—until 2012. What compelled her also eluded her. How do you make imagery of what you don't know and can't see?
Peters's North Star has been a piece of paper she keeps tucked away at home. It's an old family letter she inherited, written to her father by his father. When the younger man was leaving Syria to go to Yale and Eurocentric America, the older man gave his advice in the form of a request: "I know it's difficult, but please find the Syrian boys." Find your people. Don't lose us. That way, you won't lose yourself.
"Storyboard (2)" Watercolor gouache on clayboard. Mary Ann Peters
Taking her cue from that request, Peters set out in 2012 to do the reverse of her father's journey and make her first visit to her family's homeland. When she finally saw it up close, she grasped how far away those Syrian lives she's chasing in her work really are from her own, regardless of their incontrovertible link. The realization opened her up to experimentation, and released her from the implied task of forced empathy, yielding pieces that are more confident even as they're less knowing.
Early this year, she showed a breakthrough body of work in new mediums and new approaches. There were small, intimate paintings based on photographs taken from the internet (ranging from pictures of war to placid, mystical landscapes), capturing that duality of being close but not being there. There were cast-bronze pita pockets, the food burned away in the casting process, pitas now both bread and bronze, delicate and unbreakable, here and gone. There was a large, mesmerizing installation of a hidden garden, and a woven tapestry based on an old satirical cartoon. And still there were those classic, dust-stormy abstracts, which demonstrate yet again that Peters is, as has been obvious for a very long time, one hell of a painter. From here, she could do anything.
You might also be interested in this:
Mary Ann Peters, Winner of the 2015 Stranger Genius Award in Art


text:
Q: ext4 Filesystem Corrupt - Bad Drive. Fsck Failing. How to Recover? I run a small Linux-Based openmediavault home media server in my house stacked full of drives, no RAID or backup (don't have the space) and it's all media files.
I noticed a a 3 TB drive full of multimedia downloads started acting up when I streamed video from it so I went to the shell and ran an fsck -fy on it.  Lots of errors:

*

*"Group descriptor XXXX checksum is XXXXX, should be XXXXX, FIXED
Block bitmap for group XXXX is not in group.
WARNING: SERVERE DATA LOSS POSSIBLE"
relocate? (Y)"
(Hundreds of those.)

*"Superblock has an invalid journal (inode 8).
CLEARED

** ext3 journal has been deleted - filesystem is now ext2 only * "
Tons of "Buffer I/O error on device sdX1, logical block XXXXXXXXXXXXX"
"Error reading block XXXXXX (attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) while getting next inode from scan)."
I want this drive out of my system and in the garbage as fast as possible, however, I'd really like a shot at getting any remaining data that is on there (whatever I did not already corrupt further by running these fsck -f -y -c -t commands and saying yes to everything)...
I am mainly a Windows desktop user and a "set and forget" user with Linux so I'm hoping there might be some tricks/commands I can run on this drive to try and at least mount it to get at my content.  I can't seem to even get the drive mounted now -- Even went to far to try and connect it to my Mac desktop running MacFUSE and the Mac only saw the 800 MB that was free (didn't even see the 2.2 TB ext4 partition that held all the data files.  I think my partitions are way messed up.
I did run a dumpe2fs | grep superblock command on the file system and there were a ton of backup superblocks it found, which may be good news and somewhere to start?
Even if I can get SOME data off this thing, I'll be happy.
Help?

A: If you feel more comfortable using Windows, there's http://www.ext2fsd.com/, or ext file system for Windows.
If you install that and then mount the drive in a Windows computer, you should be able to read the partitions and remaining data.
Otherwise, boot from a livecd and try to copy remaining data to another location (other drive, network, whatever).
Also try to check the disk with diagnostic tools (bios tools? hirens? ubcd?) to see if the drive is actually failing, or just the file system on it. There's a tiny little chance you can save the drive
But seriously, just like you know that every living thing will die one day, you know that hard drives give up too. Some sooner, others later. You just can't tell. Either make sure you have a backup, redundant RAID or just live with the loss.
If it's all downloaded media, chances are you can download it again and it's not worth the trouble.

A: Go ahead and add another hdd to your rig and setup your OS again. Once you have a stable system, if the drive isnt completely toast you should be able to mount it and attempt to recover your data from it.
You will need to keep both hdd in the case and connected btw.
Once the old hdd is mounted to the new OS and both are EXT4 you should be able to navigate the old hdd file system with the native file browser.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Words (or phrases) describe products or services; explain a product's mechanisms; or tell customers how to use a product. Such terms are also used to tag content to support activities such as reporting, search, and personalization.
Technical terms are incorporated into the lexicon based on usage in a variety of content types, including product sheets, material declarations, support articles, informational videos, etc. The governance committee works with content and localization teams to select terms that reflect the organization's perspective or that of a specific business unit and geographical region. Inconsistent use of terminology can cause confusion or result in legal problems, and, in particularly egregious medically related cases, it can kill[ThinkReliability 2010][Day Translations 2015].
Careful terminology management can facilitate translation reuse, reduce errors during authoring or translation, shorten revision time, and help streamline the content creation and localization process.
Terminology management systems maintain terms in a central database and allow terminologists to organize approved (and unapproved) terms in multiple languages. These systems define terms and provide editorial guidelines based on pre-established rules.
Governance committees of editors, terminologists, localization experts, and in-country reviewers should define these rules and provide input into usage guidelines. Governance over terms is based both on systematic rules and on this committee's decisions[Solarek 2013].
[Solarek 2013] Terminology Management DOs and DON'Ts. Weronika Solarek. Argos Multilingual. Recorded webinar about best practices for managing terminology.
[ThinkReliability 2010] Errors in Translated Medication Instructions. Patient Safety Blog. blog post giving examples of problems with translations due to inconsistent terminology.
[Day Translations 2015] Misdiagnoses and Deaths: Why Medical Translations Must be Done by Professionals: Day Translations blog post that discusses medical translation errors that caused patient harm. This post shows why translations should be done by professionals and how important terminology management can be to good translation.
Rebecca Schneider's career includes involvement in content strategy, library science, and knowledge management. In 2010, she formed Azzard Consulting, a content strategy services and staffing firm, based on the conviction that there are good, better, and best ways to manage content. She continues and builds on that work with AvenueCX. Rebecca has guided content strategy in a variety of industries, including automotive, semiconductors, telecommunications, retail, financial services, and international development.


text:
Reuters API
Wal-Mart to enter voice-shopping market via Google platform
Wal-Mart Stores Inc is teaming up with Alphabet Inc's Google to enter the nascent voice-shopping market, currently dominated by Amazon.com Inc, adding another front to Wal-Mart's battle with the online megastore.
Google, which makes the Android software used to run most of the world's smartphones, will offer hundreds of thousands of Walmart items on its voice-controlled Google Assistant platform from late September, Walmart's head of e-commerce, Marc Lore, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Lore, who joined the world's largest retailer after it bought his e-commerce company Jet.com, said Wal-Mart would offer a wider selection than any retailer on the platform.
Amazon, whose voice-controlled aide Alexa allows users to shop from the retailer, has the lion's share of the U.S. voice-controlled device industry, with its Echo devices accounting for 72.2 percent of the market in 2016, far ahead of the Google Home gadget's 22 percent, according to research firm eMarketer.
Amazon has also dominated Wal-Mart and other brick-and-mortar retailers in online sales.
Wal-Mart has begun pushing back aggressively, however, offering discounts to customers who buy online and pick up in-store, and free two-day shipping for purchases of $35 or more. The latter move even forced Amazon, which rarely imitates the competition, to lower its threshold for free shipping.
Lore said in the blog post Wal-Mart was also integrating its quick reordering tool into Google's same-day delivery service.
"One of the primary-use cases for voice shopping will be the ability to build a basket of previously purchased everyday essentials," he said in an interview.
He added that Wal-Mart has bigger plans for voice shopping next year that will involve capitalizing on its 4,700 U.S. stores to "create customer experiences that don't currently exist within voice shopping anywhere else."
Customers might be able to use voice shopping to pick up a discounted order in-store or buy fresh groceries across the country, he said.
But while both Amazon and Google's voice-controlled speakers are gaining in popularity, people still mainly use them for such basic tasks as placing phone calls or playing music.
To boost voice purchases, Amazon has started offering Alexa-only shopping deals.
"We're still in early days, but shopping isn't yet one of the big uses of the devices," Victoria Petrock, principal analyst at research firm eMarketer, said on Tuesday.
"Obstacles to people using the devices to shop are cost and privacy. A little more than six in 10 people are concerned that these virtual assistants are spying on them."
Walmart accused of bias against workers with criminal histories


text:
Chinese visitor numbers reach record highs | UKCVA briefing
In 2012, when the UK China Visitor alliance was founded by Walpole, the New West End Company, London First, Global Blue and McArthurGlen to work with the government to grow significantly Chinese visitors, the UK issued just 210,958 visitor visas in China. 2017 figures released by the Home Office this month show that figure has risen to 531,967, a 152% increase since 2012.
Figures released today by Global Blue show that spending on shopping by Chinese visitors in the UK grew by 32% in 2017, building on a 26% rise in 2016. This compares with just 5% growth in the Eurozone in 2017 and a 21% fall in 2016. Other statistics include:
2017 Chinese visitor numbers to UK reach record highs, breaking the half million mark.
New Global Blue figures show annual Chinese visitor spend on shopping in UK rose by 32% in 2017.
UK outperforms Schengen in the increase in visitor visas issued for the first time.
UKCVA and VisitBritain announces formation of new Chinese Visitor Working Group to build on success and drive Chinese visitor numbers to new heights.
2017 visitor visa figures show that Chinese visitors to the UK have soared by 0ver 150% in the five years since 2012.
The latest UK China Visa Alliance briefing took place on Wednesday 14th March at the Hippodrome in Leicester Square, where over 100 business leaders from across the UK gathered to hear Brian Bickell, Chairman of the UKCVA announce the launch of the new Chinese Visitor Working Group in partnership with VisitBritain. This Working Group will explore a wide range of practical initiatives to attract even more Chinese visitors to the UK, examining new ways to increase demand to visit the UK, as well as making it easier to visit through better connectivity and continuation of measures that have already streamlined the visa application process.
The meeting also heard from Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP, Secretary of State Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who is responsible for tourism, along with Minister Zhu Qui of the Chinese Embassy, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Chairman of the Conservative Friends of the Chinese and Jacques Stern, Chief Executive of Global Blue, the world's leading tax free shopping refund operator.
The UKCVA has worked with government to look at practical ways to streamline the application process in China for both a UK and Schengen visa so that they can more easily include the UK on multi-country tours of Europe. This has led to:
· The UK accepting Schengen application forms to apply for a UK visa, so halving the paperwork
· A Visa Application Centre sharing pilot with Belgium so that Chinese visitors can apply for both visas at the same time and place
· The introduction of a 2 year multi-entry visa as standard (replacing the standard 6 month visa) as a pilot
· A commitment to introducing a 10 year visa as standard
For the first time, in 2016, the UK outperformed Schengen in terms of the annual increase in visas issued in China (+20% for the UK, -12% for Schengen) while overtaking Germany and Italy and drawing close to France in the number of visitor visas issued. The introduction by Schengen of biometric visas, similar to the UK, has created opportunities to build on these initiatives and successes.
Power of the Chinese Spend
The Chinese are the world's highest spending tourists, with an expenditure of $261.1bn worldwide in 2016.
Global Blue figures show that Chinese shoppers have been driving Tax Free Shopping globally, growing from 21% of global tax free shopping spend in 2010 to 43% in 2017. Global Blue predict continued strong growth in Chinese visitor numbers as its middle class grows.
Research by New West End Company, based on Global Blue figures show, that in 2016 the Chinese were the biggest spenders in London's West End, accounting for 25% of all tax-free shopping. Visitors from Saudi Arabia, the next highest spenders, account for 7% of sales the next highest spenders.
At a time when international tourism is growing in importance to the UK economy as Britain prepares to leaves the EU, it is vital that Government and business continue to work together to attract even more Chinese visitors.
For more information, please contact charlotte.keesing@thewalpole.co.uk.