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“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

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Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear Alex, although this may sound like a revelation, but governments do not fear. They are fictitious entities. Non-humans. One may think about them as a software.

Dear ommunist, I think you are right, governments like "Matrix" which control every childprocess.

No, dear. They are just putting childprocesses into existence. If there is no state, there are no citizens.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#122
post #117
post #54

I was visiting China recently (my first time there). I thought bypassing The Great Firewall was going to be as simple as an "ssh -D" SOCKS setup, or a "ssh -w" tunnel. Oh boy, I was wrong. If you try this, or even a basic OpenVPN setup, you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out. After some research I read onlin…

What is this supposed to mean? https://github.com/clowwindy/ShadowVPN "Removed according to regulations."

Did you miss the original link?

https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/issues/124#is...

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#123

I find this comment amazing: https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/issues/124#is... Even with root account, you are not in full control of your Mac - you are sandboxed by Apple.

I think you have that backwards. You, as the person with physical access, is in full control as SIP can be controlled from recovery mode. Processes running as root are no longer trusted to have full access to the system. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#124
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the result of a recent change in OS X 10.11, called System Integrity Protection. It's a big step in the wrong direction [opinion], especially because it does nothing to verify "integrity". It prevents changes to the System directory by conventional means (and injection into system processes). If malware were to figure out a way to disable SIP from userland, it could install itself in such a way that nothing s…

Not really surprising, though: Apple has been making OS X a little worse with every iteration.

Tell me about it. I recently bit the bullet and upgraded to 10.10 after waiting for quite a while. Man... Firefox has been crashing regularly since then, the Mail.app will also crash every now and then, and to top it off, the system itself has crashed twice on me over the past... two weeks. Sigh

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#125
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being facetious here - what country do you live in that you think the government can't/won't interfere with your code?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your use of English, because it is difficult to see how this is not a facetious question. There are relatively few countries in which the government both could and would interfere with someone's publication of code, and I think only in China is there both widespread computer use and internet access, on the one hand, and state security actors (the civil police, actually) who have the soph…

> There are relatively few countries in which the government both could and would interfere with someone's publication of code

It's not about interfering with someone's publication of code. It's about neutralizing threats to rulers' rule.

China's rulers shut this guy down because his tool might enable too much free speech among the masses, which, in turn, would pose a threat to the government's rule.

As for the idea that "it couldn't happen here!", see how the US government "interfered" with someone's publication of articles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUYMPZ4nEOY

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ebudnWlh4

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#126
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the thing, you can't disable SIP from userland. It can only be disabled when booted into recovery mode. So yes, it absolutely does verify integrity, because it makes it so malware cannot embed itself into the system. Your last sentence there is 100% pure grade A FUD. You may as well just say "every security measure is bullshit, because if malware were to figure a way around it, then it wouldn't work". It's…

It's a boot argument to the kernel, stored in NVRAM. These arguments are normally mutable. Apple had to write code to prevent modifying said arguments. Said code can have flaws. But lets say you don't find a vulnerability in SIP userland detection, and instead find a kernel exploit to get around the protection: If malware were to figure a way around it, then even antivirus software can't uninstall it. Only Apple can.…

Don't be alarmist, worst case a cleaning tool would have to be run from recovery mode, but nuke and pave is usually the recommended cause of action if you get a infected with a rootkit.

SIP holes will be found, and Apple will patch them just like other security flaws.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#127
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are more than a few countries where this sort of thing could easily happen. Tech talks get canceled at the behest of the powers that be with some regularity, I don't think requests to take down source code would be out of the question. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/07/2... http://www.csoonline.com/article/2947377/network-security/pr...

You think that, but your links are to two cancelled presentations at conferences, neither of which has any clear connection with the 'powers that be', unless you consider the SEI and Carnegie Mellon University to be the 'powers that be'. Both those conferences occur in a single country, one which was not even able, under its own laws, to effectively suppress the distribution of cryptographic code when it was legally…

Do you think you're allowed to talk about the government suppressing you?

And the point isn't that they weren't able to suppress crypto code; it's that they tried.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#129
post #19
post #7

While I understand what the gov is trying to do, who's to say somebody else that doesn't live in China maintains the project and puts it on GitHub for all the world to see?

Maybe they are going to block or attack GitHub again until GitHub takes down all clones of it.

They will, one day. anyway Gmail was gone, which I think is the most impossible site to be blocked.

PS: nice to see you here. :)

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#130
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this supposed to mean? https://github.com/clowwindy/ShadowVPN "Removed according to regulations."

Did you miss the original link? https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-iOS/issues/124#is...

As a matter of fact I did, thank you.

Let me just find the nearest cliff to jump off.

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