We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance • Hacker News Board

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#11

Post by cloudyo » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

And to continue with privacy oriented solutions that allow you to better avoid surveillance...

-Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail (https://protonmail.com/)

-Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk)

-Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple (https://www.duple.io/en/)

-Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal (https://signal.org/)

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#12

Post by scohesc » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:58 PM UTC

schoen wrote: post #9

sp332 wrote: post #4

The Tor browser helps with websites, but with a "privacy router" you can make sure connections from apps and the OS are routed as well. E.g. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/glinet/mudi-4g-lte-priv...

I was excited about this concept a few years ago and talked it over with the Tor developers. Their concern is that the Tor Browser has an elaborate ongoing effort to prevent tracking by removing unique identifiers and isolating session state. A regular browser used through Tor would be extremely trackable because it wouldn't hide or isolate any of these things, and indeed you could associate Tor activity with non-Tor…

So it would be pretty much similar to all these dime a dozen VPN companies shilling "Ultimate anonymity! Safe from hackers! Screw the fed!" but it's just in a physical form.

Interesting!

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#13

Post by svara » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

What if there was a browser extension that randomly selected, say, about 1% of requests to be routed through tor? Everybody using it would help make Tor safer, while being just minimally annoyed by the latency and the CAPTCHAs. Plus it might incentivize hosts to be less annoying to Tor users, if they saw a bigger fraction of legitimate traffic. I think I'd chip in and use it...

Anything wrong with that idea?

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#14

Post by schoen » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

zionic wrote: post #3

Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? Going further, what if every Tor tab (by default, letting you opt out) acted as a node on the network and donated some minuscule bandwidth? I can see some tech heads being against such a thing, but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used while their private tab is…

The Tor FAQ addresses this at

https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#EverybodyAR...

Some other problems:

* Possibly Sybil attacks get worse or harder to detect, because attackers can convincing simulate being a bunch of regular users with a browser

* Possibly mitigating malicious nodes gets harder, because people can create lots of super-ephemeral nodes that fail to forward traffic, but there's no way to notice this in time to protect other users

* Users could be very angry about relaying exit traffic without expecting it, especially if they got in legal trouble as a result (when EFF ran a campaign to encourage people to run Tor nodes, we discouraged people from running exit nodes in their homes)

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#15

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

olivermarks wrote: post #10

If DARPA created the internet aren't there are all sorts of backdoors and systems we don't know about built in? I've never really understood - if you can - those fundamentals.

Well, the thing about the internet is that it's completely open: implementers work off of specifications. If you're curious what sort of back doors might be in the specifications, you can read them all at ietf.org (although there are a lot of them). How they're implemented varies from one implementation to the next, but they _have_ to follow the specification, or else they won't be compatible with other implementations, leaving little room for "secret" back doors in the specifications themselves.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#16

Post by icelancer » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

zionic wrote: post #3

Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? Going further, what if every Tor tab (by default, letting you opt out) acted as a node on the network and donated some minuscule bandwidth? I can see some tech heads being against such a thing, but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used while their private tab is…

And leading to wide swaths of users being banned from tons of sites that use one of the many publicly-available tor banlists for some reason they have zero understanding of.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#17

Post by frankharv » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

zionic wrote: post #3

Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? Going further, what if every Tor tab (by default, letting you opt out) acted as a node on the network and donated some minuscule bandwidth? I can see some tech heads being against such a thing, but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used while their private tab is…

I must admit I am perplexed by the last line in the story: "Donate today, and Mozilla will match every dollar of your donation."

I personally do not think that Mozilla is doing enough to protect its users and is partially to blame for where we are. They seem to be piling more and more features on that users don't want.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#18

Post by dessant » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

cloudyo wrote: post #11

And to continue with privacy oriented solutions that allow you to better avoid surveillance... -Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail ( https://protonmail.com/ ) -Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk ) -Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple ( https://www.duple.io/en/ ) -Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal ( https://signal.org/ )

This reads like one of those articles where they list established services and casually include an unknown one. It's best to disclose your affiliation.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#19

Post by schoen » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:03 PM UTC

olivermarks wrote: post #10

If DARPA created the internet aren't there are all sorts of backdoors and systems we don't know about built in? I've never really understood - if you can - those fundamentals.

The Internet protocols are all public and are developed by IETF, not DARPA.

https://www.ietf.org/

The Internet is operated by Internet service providers, not DARPA. The U.S. government role in directly operating the Internet ended in 1995 with the shutdown of NSFNet. The ISPs buy hardware from private companies that implement the public Internet protocols.

That doesn't mean that there aren't backdoors of various kinds in Internet infrastructure, but whatever backdoors exist aren't likely to exist by virtue of DARPA's role in funding the original research.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#20

Post by daffy » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

cloudyo wrote: post #11

And to continue with privacy oriented solutions that allow you to better avoid surveillance... -Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail ( https://protonmail.com/ ) -Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk ) -Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple ( https://www.duple.io/en/ ) -Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal ( https://signal.org/ )

another alternative to gmail is https://posteo.de