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VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

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Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#101

Post by eitland »

rolltiide wrote: post #97
johnpowell wrote: post #51

I refuse to use a browser with a cryptocurrency attached to it. It feels like the only reason it is being pushed so hard is so BAT holders can make a buck. It might be a great browser but I will always think of it as onecoin with a some chrome tossed in.

“I refuse to use an airline with a digital currency attached to it” “I refuse to use a credit card with a digital currency attached to it” But since nobody says that, you lose your mind when a blockchain based one is used? Which is also as entirely optional as the above programs? Which you use as an ad hominem attack to add non-sequiturs to any contribution under the “Brave” brand such as this ZK VPN system which doe…

GP didn't say digital currency but cryptocurrency.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#102

Post by rolltiide »

eitland wrote: post #101
rolltiide wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I refuse to use an airline with a digital currency attached to it” “I refuse to use a credit card with a digital currency attached to it” But since nobody says that, you lose your mind when a blockchain based one is used? Which is also as entirely optional as the above programs? Which you use as an ad hominem attack to add non-sequiturs to any contribution under the “Brave” brand such as this ZK VPN system which doe…

GP didn't say digital currency but cryptocurrency.

what difference does an optional rewards program make when its on a blockchain and also has nothing to do with the article?

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#103

Post by rolltiide »

dimator wrote: post #7

The whitelist based approach seems pretty limiting, doesn't it? If every exit node is expected to enumerate the domains it will carry traffic to, what happens if a client needs to connect to a new site? Are exit nodes intended to keep massive, curated whitelists? Something isn't adding up, to me. If the assumption is that all "good" sites _can_ be enumerated, then wouldn't Tor (or other systems) exit nodes already be…

TOR exit nodes can modify some data to clearnet sites, including blocking

They can't do this to onion services

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#104

Post by SomeOldThrow »

safeplanet-fesa wrote: post #89
johnpowell wrote: post #51

I refuse to use a browser with a cryptocurrency attached to it. It feels like the only reason it is being pushed so hard is so BAT holders can make a buck. It might be a great browser but I will always think of it as onecoin with a some chrome tossed in.

Exactly. I am a big hater of everything that even remotely feels like a shitcoin. BAT is a silly useless project; I would not hate it if there was no conflict of interests, even if it's a silly project; but there is a huge conflict of interest - the developers want to make money out of thin air by issuing their tokens. I already wrote this before in another comment. Basic Attention Token is not a secure cryptographic…

Actually this is a missing piece that essentially allows content based micro transactions and allows cutting out ad salesmen. Win for everyone. But ad salesmen.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#105

Post by jancsika »

spsful wrote: post #83
knocte wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who wants to sell you advertising. Inaccurate. Brave wants to overhaul advertising: to be able to switch it off completely paying a fee, or earn money by not switching it off (and thus watching the ads), tune it, etc

This is why I happily set Brave Ads to show me the maximum amount of ads per hour. Brave is serving ads in a privacy-conscious implantation which uses local machine intelligence to determine interests. There's no broker trying to sell your data to advertisers and yet personalized ads can still be served. Also, Brave Ads show up as a notification. Much more aesthetically pleasing than those whole-page ads that some we…

I agree that their system avoids a lot of the ethical problems that would come from leaking all the user data to ad networks.

Having said that-- ads are an unethical distracting nuisance. From the evidence of every use case outside of esoteric journals they will increase their aggression even to the point of threatening to destroy the value in the medium to which they are attached. Try listening to a Youtube version of "Tristan und Isolde" that has ads turned on. It becomes a broken video file at that point.

Worse-- web site owners have already shown that they lack the expertise needed to asses the ethics of the ad delivery systems they use. I can't tell you how many otherwise ethical open source devs used to have a fake download button from ad malware right above the real download button for their software. Never mind that the previous incarnation of Sourceforge just decided to turn evil one day and bundle malware. I don't think Github would do the same thing today, but most open source devs have no plan of what to do if they did. So we're not any better off today in terms of awareness of these problems.

Plus, adding cryptocurrency tokens to that same confusion in no way makes it easier for those same devs to suss out the ethics.

Edit: just to be clear-- the fake download button came from the ad network domain. The site owners almost certainly just leveraged ads to pay the bills under the logic, "How bad could it possibly be for the UX?" They'll ask the same question of Brave's system, or any system, and have the same lack of expertise with which to understand the given answer.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#106

Post by colordrops »

Spivak wrote: post #85
colordrops wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's opt-in, and the feature can even be completely hidden in the settings. Brave is an awesome browser. Certainly better than Chrome when it comes to privacy.

Better than Chrome is such a low bar though. Chromium is better than Chrome, Kiwi is better than Chrome, Edge is better than Chrome.

Is it a low bar? Chrome has the best JS and rendering engine in existence. Brave has all that, being a fork, and also the best privacy, except maybe the Duck browser. It's only missing the configurability and extensibility of Firefox, but that's arguably a privacy liability.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#107

Post by icelancer »

blfr wrote: post #59
mirimir wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but it's my understanding that they can blacklist pretty much the same sites as for exit relays. So your email client may stop working, Also search sites, social media, etc.

Obviously, anyone can blacklist anyone for any reason on the Internet and relay nodes' IPs are public. But do they? I run a relay node on my personal server and never had any issues. But 1) I rarely browse the Internet from that IP and 2) it's in OVH so if it were blacklisted, it could be because of that.

Banks, Amazon, etc. Ended up on a blacklist for serving a relay from my personal home IP.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#108

Post by mlyle »

snagglegaggle wrote: post #86
mlyle wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses zero knowledge proofs, so it doesn't really give anyone on the way proof-of-destination.

You have proof that someone visited a specific site because it uses a value derived from that site's SSL cert. You just don't have any more knowledge than that.

No.. You wouldn't need a ZKP for that.

From the paper:

> Note that such a proof is not straightforward. We firstly prove that a ciphertext, CS N I , is the result of an encryption without disclosing the public key nor the plaintext. This causes the highest overhead in our construction. We use the construction presented in [7] for this purpose.

> Then we need to link the public key encrypted in clause two, with the one used in clause one. For this we use a proof that two commitments hide the same secret [5].

> Finally the third clause can be openly computed by A given that it received the public key from R.

> Using this, S can convince A that the tunnel created is to a domain that the latter considers valid, without disclosing which one.

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#109

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

jonathansampson wrote: post #91
johnpowell wrote: post #51

I refuse to use a browser with a cryptocurrency attached to it. It feels like the only reason it is being pushed so hard is so BAT holders can make a buck. It might be a great browser but I will always think of it as onecoin with a some chrome tossed in.

Hello, John! I'm Sampson, a developer on the browser. The BAT component is not on-by-default in Brave. By default, you get a browser that blocks third-party trackers (and the ads that rely on them), prevents fingerprinting, crypto-jacking, auto-play media, and more. Unfortunately, the ad-system that has become infested with malicious tracking and more is also a means by which creators across the Web find support. Thi…

Given that IP address, user agent, fonts, screen dimensions, and a few other data points easily found via JavaScript can create a fingerprint [0], isn't a bit disingenuous to suggest any browser can truly block tracking, especially if JavaScript is enabled?

I could use cURL to perform all web browsing, but my IP Address + User Agent could still be tracked by the website I visit.

With time, what seems to be occurring is a game of cat-and-mouse where trackers develop more powerful heuristics for creating fingerprints.

[0]: https://amiunique.org/

Re: VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN

#110

Post by bubersson »

randaouser wrote: post #19

One step further that Ive prototyped is Encrypted and Distributed Search. The VPN relays willing to take the traffic can also double as Web crawlers. The vpn clients encrypt their search terms and vpn relays encrypt their search indexes, and perform ElGamal Homomorphic private set intersection with MINHASH in Elliptic Curve Field. This leads to better then key word, worse then current age context search from google b…

To make this type of search higher precision&recall you would have to focus especially on the indexing part (e.g. improve NLU of concepts in the pages), right? The training of such ML models could be federated across the nodes in a private way.
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