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Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

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Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#12

Post by dfc »

deno wrote: post #8
dfc wrote: post #5

Its unfortunate that they were not distributed via bittorrent and/or a tor hidden service. The files are large enough that downloading them with the "free download" option is a terribly long wait. I do not understand how this has so many upvotes after being up for such a short time. Have that many people actually downloaded the files already? Does anyone have any guesses about the string at the end of the announcemen…

It’s not straightforward to distribute via Bittorrent anonymously.

What hurdles/risks are present in bittorrent that are not incurred when uploading to a free file hosting service? I do not think bittorrent and/or free file services provide any serious level of anonymity against a group with pockets as deep as the CoS. Let's not forget these are the people that brought down anon.penet.fi...

N.B.: I also updated my post to include using a tor hidden service. I thought I had included it originally.

From the responses I have read it seems that I should have been more clear that I was also taking censorship resistance into consideration.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#14

Post by dfc »

javajosh wrote: post #10
dfc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a strange philosophy/view-point for HN...

Au contraire. Journalists are highly motivated to plough through the data for the scoop. ("Data scoop" is certainly an interesting development in our 21st century, btw!) I'm happy to let a highly motivated person do the ploughing, and give me the highlights, especially about a subject as marginally interesting as Scientology.

Au contraire? Respectfully, in my opinion sitting back and hoping someone else has the motivation to be inquisitive/curious is counter to the spirit of HN.

Furthermore as others have pointed out (as well as myself in another thread) CoS has deep pockets and I imagine that serves as a decent motivation for big media to not publish the incident.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#16

Post by deno »

dfc wrote: post #12
deno wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not straightforward to distribute via Bittorrent anonymously.

What hurdles/risks are present in bittorrent that are not incurred when uploading to a free file hosting service? I do not think bittorrent and/or free file services provide any serious level of anonymity against a group with pockets as deep as the CoS. Let's not forget these are the people that brought down anon.penet.fi... N.B.: I also updated my post to include using a tor hidden service. I thought I had included…

Just use Tor bundle and that’s it. The only way you can shoot yourself in foot is if you use flash uploader and that bypasses Tor (fortunately plugins are disabled in Tor bundle AFAIK).

Seeding via Tor? You need to configure Torrent client to use Tor, make sure it doesn’t leak anything (DNS lookups, publishing to DHT or tracker, some stuff on the protocol level was a problem as well). There’s nothing that comes working out of the box. Of course it’s not rocket science, it’s just a bit more work.

Hosting just via hidden service is actually worse than uploading to random locations on clearnet:

1) Still no way to do load balancing with hidden services

2) It’s usually slower anyway

3) If your server gets compromised you’re toasted, unless you use hacked servers, or buy your servers with Bitcoins or stolen CCs.

The best network for publishing that kind of leaks would be Freenet or I2P + Tahoe. But those are not nearly as popular (and secure) as Tor.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#19

Post by dfc »

raphman wrote: post #11

Some of the emails can apparently be read at [1], [2] - via [3] [1] http://pic.pwny.biz/x/ed_at_scientology.co.at/ [2] http://pic.pwny.biz/x/buchladen_at_scientology.co.at/ [3] http://blog.esowatch.com/?p=8247 (in German, of course)

Using CoralCDN may be a lot better for everyone.

http://pic.pwny.biz.nyud.net/x/buchladen_at_scientology.co.a...

http://pic.pwny.biz.nyud.net/x/ed_at_scientology.co.at/

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#20

Post by MultiRRomero »

Am I the only one who doesn't find this all that positive? I already think scientology is bad/evil/dangerous, and I think that illegally getting access to their secrets might make the opposition (us) look worse in the public eye. Everybody has dirty secrets, both sides, and it's a bit low to go after the other side's private emails. It'd be much easier to fight/debate against their public image, which is easy enough, without having to resort to intrusive attacks. We have the warrant system in the states for a reason, and if this were to happen in court the evidence would just get tossed right out.

Idk, am I alone here? Am I wrong? I'm open to contrary opinions.

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