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The Fantasy of Opting Out

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Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#191

Post by Retric »

viraptor wrote: post #189
Retric wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a technique not a goal. What are you trying to do?

Find when a specific endpoint / AS / country starts sending dos levels of traffic, (or hack attempts) so they can be banned.

Rate limiting prevents a specific IP from causing a successful DoS. You can log higher level information like county without linking it to a specific user.

In terms of hacking, building a secure site prevents this problem at the source. Banning specific IP’s in a world of proxies and public WiFi is almost useless.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#192

Post by viraptor »

Retric wrote: post #191
viraptor wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find when a specific endpoint / AS / country starts sending dos levels of traffic, (or hack attempts) so they can be banned.

Rate limiting prevents a specific IP from causing a successful DoS. You can log higher level information like county without linking it to a specific user. In terms of hacking, building a secure site prevents this problem at the source. Banning specific IP’s in a world of proxies and public WiFi is almost useless.

You don't ban them forever. Banning specific ranges which impact you right now is very effective too. Also "building a secure site" at some scale is impossible. At some point you try to figure out where the risk is, how to mitigate it, and what happens after a break-in. You can't prevent it. Logging helps track specific behaviour and catch those situations. That's similar to fraud prevention as well. The fact that someone who just logged in from Germany tries to spend credit in a request from Brazil is important and prevents real crime. That kind of information needs to be connected to an account.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#193

Post by Retric »

viraptor wrote: post #192
Retric wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rate limiting prevents a specific IP from causing a successful DoS. You can log higher level information like county without linking it to a specific user. In terms of hacking, building a secure site prevents this problem at the source. Banning specific IP’s in a world of proxies and public WiFi is almost useless.

You don't ban them forever. Banning specific ranges which impact you right now is very effective too. Also "building a secure site" at some scale is impossible. At some point you try to figure out where the risk is, how to mitigate it, and what happens after a break-in. You can't prevent it. Logging helps track specific behaviour and catch those situations. That's similar to fraud prevention as well. The fact that so…

I specifically said you can get and log country information without logging specific IP’s.

Working on at /24 the level does everything else you mentioned.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#194

Post by philwelch »

shadowgovt wrote: post #166
philwelch wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody in Star Trek is serving in the military and has no expectation of privacy while on duty. Plus it only tracks their commbadges. Another consideration might be: what privacy would someone have had living in a premodern or early modern village or even a small town at the turn of the century? Aside from being surveilled in our own homes by Alexa and her kind, are we worse off today?

Not to rabbit-hole too far on this, but in the Next Generation, civilian families are also aboard-ship. However, that's almost certainly modeled as "military families and contractors," and the analogue to modern life is some autonomy is understood by those groups to be given up for the privileges of direct military support (i.e. you have to abide by some policies set by the military when you're granted on-base housin…

Also the civilians don't tend to wear commbadges.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#195

Post by dredmorbius »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #167

Start taking you privacy seriously, and opting out of bad services where you can. This sometimes means not getting to be on $latestplatform, and missing a few conversations, etc. Sticking to your principles is never easy or costless. Even then, verify that what you are using isn't spying on you. That means read the EULAs and TOSs. That means packet sniff your network regularly to find potential issues. etc etc It req…

The article's point is that individual actions really don't scale.

This is a general problem of race-to-the-bottom dynamics -- a form of Gresham's Law. At best, personal resistance simply opens more space for the bad actors / RTTB dynamic.

Instituting systemic blocks, through regulation, legislation, taboo, or other mechanisms, is required.

Individual action can help spread awareness. But it's a first step, not a last.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#196

Post by EGreg »

I have a different take

The information is out there, we cannot rely forever on the inefficiency of an attacker.

Computers and their internet are making it easier to index and correlate this information.

Our location, gait and so on is constantly tracked by phone companies.

But everything else can be found in public by CCTV cameras, drones etc. They are able to literally know where you are at all times. They can analyze your gait, face, tag your car, and so on. Law enforcement can use wifi to see if you’re inside a building and find a good correlation between that and any video.

AI can predict when and where a network of dissidents will organize, and flag police to intercept (palantir is just one company that does this). It would be trivial for an AI-powered government to predict and defuse any uprising or organizing.

People have been outed by timing attacks (being in real-time chatrooms and having their internet cut to confirm it’s them). JK Rowling has been outed by analyzing her style.

Robots will be able to track down a human, outrun and and incapacitate them easily. Forget speeding tickets by cop. They’ll have drones spot the car from the sky, cameras by the road snap the car’s info. If it’s a criminal suspect, they can release little bots to roll up next to a car and puncture its tires to slow it down. Come and collect. No more high speed chases.

We need to let the public have access to this. We need encrypted CCTV video from cameras in college dorm tooms stored and decrypted when there is a need to solve eg a rape court case.

In some way this may also be helpful in the future for preserving alibis because video and audio can now be totally faked with deepfakes, and adversarial iteration will make it go past the uncanny valley into indistinguishability from real video. So the future will have immutable records with timestamps of everything. Where you were and when. Deal with it.

The genie is out of the bottle. More here:

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#197

Post by renox »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #144
mikelyons wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will have to be time, but also immense harm and death before something will be done. It wont just take decades of the discomfort of wondering what they're doing with the data. It will take some sort of massive act against the people done with the data before the outcry will happen, as with any technology. People didn't invent and require seatbelts becasue "you could die" people did die. The question is what wil…

The frustrating this is, we HAVE ALREADY SEEN terrible violations of surveillance and profiling power, in Nazi Germany, Stasi East Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, etc. Tens or hundreds of millions have disappeared, suffered, and died. I guess we didn't take the "universal surveillance/profiling is dangerous" lesson from any of these experiences hard enough, despite it entering into major western literature t…

I think that a 'better' example is what happened in France during WW2: jews were deported to concentration camps, how did they know who was Jewish? Because the French government (before the invasion) had a registry/census who kept this information..

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#198

Post by dang »

ddiq wrote: post #7

It's the year 2027. You get a notification from the H8Watch™ by the ADL app, default installed on every phone, and can't be deleted without jailbreaking. You open the notification, and it shows a video of you from 2 weeks ago, from a camera embedded in the table of the fast food restaurant from where you were eating lunch with your friend. Your voice has been reconstructed through lipreading software and played back…

This account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which ideology they're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for.

Breaking the site guidelines will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#199

Post by dredmorbius »

paulmd wrote: post #37

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of…

I'm gathering some people here aren't familiar with Ursula K. LeGuin's short-story epic.

It's a bit of a stretch for this particular post, but I think there's a connection which can be made.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#200

Post by arminiusreturns »

dredmorbius wrote: post #195
arminiusreturns wrote: post #167

Start taking you privacy seriously, and opting out of bad services where you can. This sometimes means not getting to be on $latestplatform, and missing a few conversations, etc. Sticking to your principles is never easy or costless. Even then, verify that what you are using isn't spying on you. That means read the EULAs and TOSs. That means packet sniff your network regularly to find potential issues. etc etc It req…

The article's point is that individual actions really don't scale. This is a general problem of race-to-the-bottom dynamics -- a form of Gresham's Law. At best, personal resistance simply opens more space for the bad actors / RTTB dynamic. Instituting systemic blocks, through regulation, legislation, taboo, or other mechanisms, is required. Individual action can help spread awareness. But it's a first step, not a las…

I guess in that case I'd be interested in hearing more about the "other mechanisms".
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