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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

#61

Post by schoen »

olivermarks wrote: post #56
gambler wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read up on the history of the internet. ARPA was funding researchers who ended up creating what we call the internet today. This doesn't mean it was "ordered" by Pentagon or something of that sort. Most of the ideas came from individuals acting on their own accord.

Very aware of the history of the ietf public internet, and the US Military Network (MILNET) for Unclassified traffic Defense Secure Network One (DSNET 1) for Secret traffic Defense Secure Network Two (DSNET 2) for Top Secret traffic Defense Secure Network Three (DSNET 3) for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI).

What sort of backdoors does that history make you suspect?

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#62

Post by ignoramous »

bcrypt wrote: post #58
ignoramous wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

i run security at Brave and here's the answer from Taylor, our lead Tor dev: Using the Tor network is one part of internet anonymity, serving to conceal where you are. But using the Tor network does no good if the application helpfully adds X-My-Actual-IP-Address: 123.45.67.8 to every HTTP request, and browsers tend to do a lot of things like that which we have to play whack-a-mole with. What we implement in Brave is…

It is great to hear that Brave is indeed doing more than just proxy.

It has a great UX already and with VPN0 announced a month or so back, Brave is really pushing the envelope and do seem to have the right mindset.

Also, thanks a lot for responding.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#63

Post by prophesi »

eindiran wrote: post #39
prophesi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you for the correction; is this a recent development? I'll definitely give DDG another try, especially in light of rapnie's comment about StartPage's recent acquisition by a company with a very likely conflict of interest.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#64

Post by iudqnolq »

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.

Not that it matters, but if you're worried DARPA funded the internet you should be more worried Radio Free Asia (founded by the CIA during the Cold War and currently funded by the US government) funds Tor development right now.

I don't think this means there are back doors. I did find it amusing Jacob Applebaum hung around in Berlin pretending to be in exile because of American repression while being paid a $100,000 salary by the State Department, funneled indirectly through the military industrial complex.

Source: https://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/ (I think Pando's core facts are correct but some of their conclusions are overblown)

Edit: mixed up CIA and State Dept

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#65

Post by olivermarks »

schoen wrote: post #61
olivermarks wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very aware of the history of the ietf public internet, and the US Military Network (MILNET) for Unclassified traffic Defense Secure Network One (DSNET 1) for Secret traffic Defense Secure Network Two (DSNET 2) for Top Secret traffic Defense Secure Network Three (DSNET 3) for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI).

What sort of backdoors does that history make you suspect?

Something at a progenitor level that no one is aware of but which is called by certain actions

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#66

Post by schoen »

olivermarks wrote: post #65
schoen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of backdoors does that history make you suspect?

Something at a progenitor level that no one is aware of but which is called by certain actions

Implemented in hardware? Software? Protocol flaws? By ISPs? By other infrastructure operators?

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#67

Post by ngcc_hk »

einpoklum wrote: post #60
eindiran wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ross Ulbricht made some mistakes by reusing account names etc that he had made on the clearnet[0, 1]. But at the time there were (tinfoil-hat-wearing) folks that thought that this was actually parallel construction and Tor was backdoored. Here is the relevant section from the Times article on the IRS agent that figured it out: """ Mr. Alford’s preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for…

The Silk Road guy was using _GMail_ ? Heh. Interesting.

And not move from time to time? May be you always get caught.
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