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We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

blog.torproject.org

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Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#31

Post by shantly »

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.

Privacy and encryption schemes operating over the Internet already assume hostile actors can see your traffic at any or all points between your device and the other end, so that's not an added concern (and yes, lots of entities are snooping on every single thing they can, to be clear). Beyond that, it's just public protocols. Any holes or inadequacies in those that allow monitoring or eavesdropping are well-known and are why privacy and encryption schemes for Internet-enabled software exist in the first place.

All that really remains is that one or more governments have secretly broken essentially all crypto. Which is possible, I guess, but unrelated to their developing the Internet. There's a non-zero chance there are shenanigans going on with some root cert servers for SSL encryption, which require trust for their related identity-assurance schemes to work properly, but again, that's not related to government development of the Internet.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#33

Post by aloknnikhil »

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…

> Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs?

That's one thing I really like about Brave. There's an option for a private Tor session.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#34

Post by gambler »

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…

>Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs?

Considering they don't even have a built-in PGP implementation in Firefox, which would make so much sense, I honestly can't imagine what you described. Tor is a relatively complex technology that requires knowledgeable use on user's part. (I.e. you're not supposed to resize windows, the browsers can't do certain things, it gets chewed up by Cloudflare and so on.)

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#35

Post by ignoramous »

aloknnikhil wrote: post #33
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…

> Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? That's one thing I really like about Brave. There's an option for a private Tor session.

Sending traffic over Tor and using the Tor browser are different things: The former is just a proxy, the latter an anonymity tool. Is Brave doing the former or the latter?

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#36

Post by adonnjohn »

dessant wrote: post #18
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.

Anybody know of any other privacy-oriented Dropbox/Drive alternatives?

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#37

Post by dmix »

eindiran wrote: post #23
dessant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what it actually is. If you look at cloudyo's comment history, its all about Duple.

I don't mind self-promotion on HN, especially if they built it themselves, but this is a bit much.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#38

Post by dmix »

adonnjohn wrote: post #36
dessant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anybody know of any other privacy-oriented Dropbox/Drive alternatives?

I've been using Syncthing for years: https://syncthing.net/

It's entirely P2P, so no 3rd party hosting of your files, no trusting someone's crypto/update schemes, or having to set up your own servers (although you still can easily add it to a VPS if you want offsite). There's also a nice mobile app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.sy...

You can also securely share directories with another person who uses Syncthing, I've found autosync directories are easier than using something like Airdrop for sharing photos with family.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#39

Post by eindiran »

prophesi wrote: post #28
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/ )

Just gonna toss StartPage ( https://www.startpage.com/ ) out there as an alternative to Google. DDG uses bing under the hood. StartPage proxies requests to Google. I've just personally found the latter to give better consistent results, particularly with my searches for technical/programming issues.

DuckDuckGo doesn't "use bing under the hood" exactly: it has a large number of sources, including some other search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Yandex but also its own crawler ("DuckDuckGoBot")[0].

[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources

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