Viewing profile — adamfisk

Uggh in any given project I tend to gauge the hype to working tech ratio. The higher it is, the more annoying the project. BitChat is about as annoying as you get. The reason is si…

Without knowing too much about the drama discussed here, I think the bottom line is that the "old" Freenet was a bit on life support as far as I could tell and absolutely needed th…

Exciting to see Freenet innovating so much, Ian! I haven't really dug in too deep but love that it's in Rust. What's it look like over the wire? How conspicuous is it in the face o…

Author here, but one piece I didn't dive into is CEF vs CDP. Things like Browserbase use Chrome Devtools Protocol, which is useful for manipulating the browser for some use cases, …

I helped build Lantern, a censorship circumvention tool that’s been downloaded over 150 million times globally, with most users in China, Russia, Iran, and the UAE. Before Lantern …

Tor is used relatively little in Iran - https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-country.html... Other tools are much, much more popular, such as Psiphon, Lantern, MahsaNG, …

Theoretically this is true, but in practice it's not. Most p2p services rely on the global internet in some way. The BitTorrent DHT, for example, is unlikely so self-heal in the ev…

You're dramatically underestimating the sophistication of these groups. Think about it: these people are risking their freedom by working on this technology in any capacity. They a…

@reisse is 100% right. Most people outside of heavily censored regions have no clue what technology is actually used in those countries. The well-known, well-established providers …

Oh it's also worth noting that Cloudflare is actually more aggressive in blocking domain fronting than almost anyone else. Lots of folks match the SNI to the Host header, but Cloud…

Fascinating, Filippo. We stayed silent on it at the time primarily because we were keeping a low profile particularly as more and more Chinese were using Lantern, but there was als…

Yes they’ve received funding from DARPA. I realized I forgot that after I posted. Good catch. To my knowledge, that funding is for new anti-censorship transports to sneak traffic i…

First, there’s a vast difference between the state department and the pentagon. Lumping those two together just reflects an unsophisticated understanding of the federal government.…

Um, ok. All of the above projects use not only reproducible builds for many platforms, but they’re all open source, and they all have public security audits. Those three pillars ar…

I’m certainly not defending all US government actions. That’s exactly the point. Levine tries to lump all of this in with surveillance. The US government funds the NSA, that is tru…

“The Navy built it” is a bit of an exaggeration. Paul Syverson did early work on it at the Naval Research Lab, and Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson added to the collaboration at…

Yasha Levine is a conspiracy theorist hack. There’s really no other way to say it. His narrative is attractive to a left leaning audience with shallow knowledge in this area, but t…

Wireguard traffic is easy to identify and therefore easy to block.

Having two NATs is really the only case worth mentioning. Considering almost all internet traffic involves at least one NAT, if you can’t handle a single NAT case, you’ve got issue…

Many Gnutella clients were also using Merkle Trees by about 2002.

His p2p research group was extremely influential in the design of second generation Gnutella search algorithms around 2002, particularly those integrated into LimeWire. Sad to hear…

Or encrypted traffic for that matter -- a lot of VPNs install root certs on your OS.

Full disclosure: I work on Lantern at https://www.getlantern.org . That said, you should just use Lantern. Recently international links out of China are insanely unreliable, but we…

This risk is generally exaggerated. Every once in awhile someone is fined for using a VPN or circumvention tool. Even that is rare, however, and the consequences are relatively ben…