Viewing profile — devconsole

Growth hacking is hard . We had to learn a few tricks to grow our Hacker News alternative ( https://laarc.io ) Suppose you were to start a site similar to HN. How would you get the…

It looks like I was wrong about this. Will multiple datacenters allow you to continue setting up new accounts using nothing but bitcoin? If you don't need to provide identification…

I just tested it. It looks like I was incorrect. People told me that Reddit shadowbans you if you create a new account using Tor. Maybe that was the case for awhile, or maybe it's …

This is a perfect illustration of how to get busted. For example, the whole idea of "How can I acquire a burner phone?" is misguided, because as soon as you speak into a burner pho…

Then the authorities trace the server component to the person who sold it on Craigslist. And if your opsec isn't perfect, you're busted right there: Did you forget to set up a new …

Not a bad idea, assuming you don't care about taking other people's property and using it in ways they don't expect for personal gain. But it's difficult. Once you no longer contro…

Agreed, but the sheer scope of this operation forces us to consider whether the authorities are playing by all of the rules. Since we don't know which rules are still reliable, the…

It's an open question whether Tor has been compromised to the point that it's now trivial for authorities to locate where darknet websites are hosted. I'm simply making the observa…

It's an interesting idea. I think physically shipping a server to a datacenter is precarious. Remember, it is known that your server is hosting a darknet website. You can't really …

There are some interesting theories being tossed around. I'd like to add one more. The common thread across all darknet websites is the fact that they generally run from datacenter…

Hi dang. Someone downvote bombed a conversation I was having with some fellow HN users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726544 All the comments below that link had a downvote…

Whats DMA access? Direct Memory Access access? This is what happens today. Not in some far off distant distopioan future meant to invoke fear in the ignorant/lazy. Why not talk wit…

The reason it's good to proactively think of future threats is because so many past concerns have proven to be true. Several months ago, no one on Hacker News really believed that …

Also to note that offensive/defensive technical capabilities aren't as asymmetric as they appear for all possible targets of nation states, some yes, but probably not as much to th…

The notion that the government ought to not be allowed into your computer, ever, doesn't seem grounded in either reality or historical precedent. I didn't intend to argue that. I'm…

Unfortunately, projects such as DROPOUTJEEP confirm that the iPhone isn't to be trusted. This is impossible to guarantee today. Certainly if you run the zero-day magnets known as b…

A couple weeks ago, when I asked someone how to verify on demand that a BIOS isn't compromised, someone else quipped "Could be the processors too, better forge those by hand." http…

If that were strictly true, then SOPA would have passed.

Not really. They don't have a way to change their laws. It's Putin's Russia.

What I mean is, how would we verify the BIOS firmware matches what that source code should produce? If it's possible for us to make our own builds (i.e. there's no cryptographic si…

Could you "enable anonymity" at very low bandwidth ... say ... the equivalent of 9600 baud? What a fantastic idea. This seems worth pursuing. It should be possible to configure a m…

How would you verify on demand that the BIOS isn't compromised?

It could be possible to enable someone you trust to use your infrustracture. You don't have to know who this person is. For example, this devconsole HN account that I'm using now i…

With the advent of cryptocurrencies, we're finally in a place someone can pay me to use a portion of my infrastructure for enabling their anonymity. I'm willing to contribute to th…

It's worth noting that Tails doesn't make you impervious. Tails uses Tor, and Tor is vulnerable to NSA and GCHQ attacks. Specifically, they have the capability of deanonymizing ind…