[OTR-users] QQ is blocking OTR

[Eliah Kagan]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Ananda Samaddar (...) wrote:
> [snip]
>> We
>> currently have to rely on the goodwill of Microsoft / Yahoo / AOL /
>> Google / Your Jabber admin not to block OTR.  A weak point indeed.
>
> This is still true even if OTR never had a fixed string: they could
> always block anything that doesn't look like recognizable human
> language and while OTR data could be converted to something that
> looked like plaintext the overhead would be enormous and it would
> simply become a perceptual arms race.

We would have the upper hand in the "arms race". The complexity of
blocking anything that doesn't look like human language would itself
be very extensive, if you are going to allow things like URLs. Also,
QQ supports many human languages. The overhead of concealing messages
in what appears to be human language, while significant, would scale
with the number of people using OTR, whereas the overhead of
recognizing and blocking OTRlike patterns would quickly become taxing
on QQ's servers.

It should be difficult and costly to prevent people from communicating
privately, and even if we cannot prevent OTR from being blocked in the
long run, we can arrange for difficulty and cost on the part of those
who would block it.

-Eliah