Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

cryptome.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 281 posts

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#171

Post by belorn »

gasull wrote: post #153
yason wrote: post #144

In maybe five to ten years, the internet will effectively split in two. There will be major, commercial service providers such as Facebook-type social media hubs, major news sites but there will also be an invisible internet that is everything internet used to be, and in addition to that encrypted, anonymous, and untraceable. How it shows most prominently at the moment is file sharing. Setting the endless copyright d…

> there will be a major "bazaar" going on underground I thought most people here had heard of The Silk Road onion service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_%28marketplace%29 > An online bank could very well operate in the anonymous network because the traffic is already cryptographically signed, and users can enjoy strong authentication if they wish to or remain a pair of anonymous public/private keys. Or you…

The Silk Road will be a tiny tiny spot of activity if every startup is forced to the alternative network. If the "open" internet is based on who can pay the most to get a competitive quality of service, anything competing with existing products will be pushed out of that market.

Bitcoin and the silk road are not the future, but prototypes of it. It will be interesting to see if they become more than that, but they are showing the way forward if society continues to go down the directions currently being perused.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#172

Post by ChristianMarks »

I'm toying with a very low bit rate protocol for short length messages. Low bit rates are associated with high signal to noise ratios at low power. Most of the messages people send aren't worth sending or receiving, and among those that are worth sending, many are short and non-urgent. There is a need for a slow, highly obfuscated messaging service...

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#173

Post by b6 »

frozenport wrote: post #164
mtgx wrote: post #13

I think this is very relevant here - interview with the NSA whistleblower, William Binney, on how NSA is storing every post people are making online, so they (and FBI) can use it later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuET0kpHoyM No wonder NSA and FBI want warrantless access to private companies by lobbying for new laws like CISPA, and trying to build backdoors in services like Facebook, Skype, Twitter etc. They want…

The FBI's actions aren't in any way different then Google. Who also crawl the Internet and download every post people make.

I'm sorry, but you couldn't be more wrong. The NSA's dossiers are automatically being built from data they're getting via the expensive hardware they forced telecom companies to install, not scraped data from the web.

If your email, or SMS, or voice call, or fax, or IM, or whatever else they care about and know how to parse, ever goes through any of their boxes, it's stored and associated with your entity forever, and may be used to glean unknown levels of insight about you, or used against you in criminal cases.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#174

Post by wildranter »

frozenport wrote: post #164
mtgx wrote: post #13

I think this is very relevant here - interview with the NSA whistleblower, William Binney, on how NSA is storing every post people are making online, so they (and FBI) can use it later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuET0kpHoyM No wonder NSA and FBI want warrantless access to private companies by lobbying for new laws like CISPA, and trying to build backdoors in services like Facebook, Skype, Twitter etc. They want…

The FBI's actions aren't in any way different then Google. Who also crawl the Internet and download every post people make.

Sure they aren't, the difference lies on what they do with the data.

While Google will use that data to show you harmless text advertisement, the FBI might use it to backup a phony case against you, that can ultimately put an end to your freedom.

I'd say that's an incredible difference. Wouldn't you too?

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#175

Post by pemulis »

yason wrote: post #144

In maybe five to ten years, the internet will effectively split in two. There will be major, commercial service providers such as Facebook-type social media hubs, major news sites but there will also be an invisible internet that is everything internet used to be, and in addition to that encrypted, anonymous, and untraceable. How it shows most prominently at the moment is file sharing. Setting the endless copyright d…

> I don't promote or demote filesharing per se: it's just the cutting edge where the future trends will show years before they land elsewhere and that's what it makes it so interesting.

One interesting thing I've noticed that the people behind the best filesharing networks tend to have tremendous success with their later projects.

Napster is the obvious one. After Napster went down, Shawn Fanning co-founded Rupture and Path, and Sean Parker went on to become the first president of Facebook, key investor in Spotify, and managing partner at the Founders Fund.

Kazaa is another great example. After their legal walloping, the founders and development team behind Kazaa regrouped to form Skype.

And then there's The Pirate Bay, which is still rolling merrily along, court rulings notwithstanding. Its team hasn't created any billion-dollar companies yet (we'll see what happens with Flattr), but they created a political party that's won elections in multiple countries, as well as the webhosting company PRQ, which was Wikileaks' home in its early days.

I don't think all of these later successes are a coincidence. Filesharing involves hard technical problems, hard logistical problems, and intense competition. If you were an investor, a blind strategy of giving money to the best pirates you can find seems like it might be surprisingly sound.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#176

Post by hythloday »

revelation wrote: post #67
mtgx wrote: post #13

I think this is very relevant here - interview with the NSA whistleblower, William Binney, on how NSA is storing every post people are making online, so they (and FBI) can use it later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuET0kpHoyM No wonder NSA and FBI want warrantless access to private companies by lobbying for new laws like CISPA, and trying to build backdoors in services like Facebook, Skype, Twitter etc. They want…

I think the point is democratic states should (need) not have intelligence agencies with unlimited powers. They corrupt the state as they establish themselves as a central pillar of power (next to the military and the government). They don't even have any historical roots in western political systems. The country with the claim to that is Russia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana ), where they were commonly used…

The role of an internal secret police goes back at least as far as the Roman Frumentarii[0] and I think you can trace a direct lineage from Walsingham's[1] operations to the CIA/NSA.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frumentarii [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Walsingham#Entrapment_o...

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#177

Post by tomp »

jka wrote: post #158
yason wrote: post #144

In maybe five to ten years, the internet will effectively split in two. There will be major, commercial service providers such as Facebook-type social media hubs, major news sites but there will also be an invisible internet that is everything internet used to be, and in addition to that encrypted, anonymous, and untraceable. How it shows most prominently at the moment is file sharing. Setting the endless copyright d…

Just as a thought experiment, what do you think of an alternative reality in which even more of reality is transparent - including the operations of commercial, political, and other entities? Preferably collated and maintained by the community rather than centralized entities, crucially; somewhat akin to a shared wikipedia. The thing that worries me about this push towards encryption and anonymity is that it does aff…

I would prefer a reality/society where everything is public and transparent, however, we cannot do that yet. We would need much more evenly distributed social power and means of production. Maybe robots can enable that in a few decades?

See http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#178

Post by mrich »

This article seems to propose that encryption is the solution to everything. However, it should be relatively easy to discern an encrypted message from an unencrypted one. When everbody starts encrypting and this really poses a threat to intelligence agencies and governments it will simply be outlawed and payload that is deemed encrypted will not be routed.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#179

Post by lkozma »

yason wrote: post #144

In maybe five to ten years, the internet will effectively split in two. There will be major, commercial service providers such as Facebook-type social media hubs, major news sites but there will also be an invisible internet that is everything internet used to be, and in addition to that encrypted, anonymous, and untraceable. How it shows most prominently at the moment is file sharing. Setting the endless copyright d…

I found your comment more insightful than the article.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#180

Post by nodata »

dguido wrote: post #170
mtgx wrote: post #13

I think this is very relevant here - interview with the NSA whistleblower, William Binney, on how NSA is storing every post people are making online, so they (and FBI) can use it later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuET0kpHoyM No wonder NSA and FBI want warrantless access to private companies by lobbying for new laws like CISPA, and trying to build backdoors in services like Facebook, Skype, Twitter etc. They want…

You know, people keep repeating this assumption that the NSA stores every post that people make online. Maybe someone should do a quick back of the envelope calculation to see how feasible that actually is? My guess is that it's nowhere near possible given the amount of network traffic coming into/out of the US and current hard drive storage technology. IMHO the extreme amount of volume and limitations of storage spa…

So somebody else should do a calculation, and based on the result of that calculation which you didn't do, people should use common sense more often?
Post reply on HN