If I had $100 to donate - ACLU or EFF or a 50/50 split?
Also curious as to the opinions of others here. (Although I have considerably less money.)
Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
111–120 of 258 posts
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of running Vuvuzela is dominated by bandwidth, and the paper used AWS prices to estimate the cost; purchasing IP transit directly would lead to about an order of magnitude reduction in costs (still non-trivial, of course).
Order of magnitude? 1Gbit on amazon costs 22k/month. Even an order of magnitude cheaper sounds pretty damn expensive, two orders of magnitude still isn't "cheap". It's really easy to underestimate how big of a ripoff EC2 bandwidth pricing is.
> 1Gbit on amazon costs 22k/month
Is this 1 gigabit of accumulated traffic, or sustained bandwidth guaranteed for an entire month?
1 TiB of accumulated bandwidth at DigitalOcean costs me $5/month. I am unaware of what sustained rates are given that tier of pricing, however.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#113I actually trust OWS in this case. They have taken every precaution to make data seizure (all but) impossible.
Signal is the best shot we have at widespread, usable private communications at this point. It's about time we get around to supporting it. Be pragmatic.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#114It'd be better, of course, if we didn't rely on Signal not storing all that metadata and instead used a protocol which made it impossible for anyone to be in a position to choose whether or not to store it. Unfortunately, the protocols that enable truly traffic–analysis-resistant messaging (I believe the Pynchon Gate[1] is currently the best-of-breed) tend to have increased latency and consume greatly-increased bandw…
I wonder if or when they'll think to ask for the user's associated push messaging ID.
Then they could ask Apple or Google to turn over any cloud data they have for that phone.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#115It'd be better, of course, if we didn't rely on Signal not storing all that metadata and instead used a protocol which made it impossible for anyone to be in a position to choose whether or not to store it. Unfortunately, the protocols that enable truly traffic–analysis-resistant messaging (I believe the Pynchon Gate[1] is currently the best-of-breed) tend to have increased latency and consume greatly-increased bandw…
> Unfortunately, the protocols that enable truly traffic–analysis-resistant messaging (I believe the Pynchon Gate[1] is currently the best-of-breed) tend to have increased latency and consume greatly-increased bandwidth. One recent project that validates this is from ACM SOSP'15 titled "Vuvuzela: scalable private messaging resistant to traffic analysis"[1] (open-access URL): > Vuvuzela has a linear cost in the number…
> Freenet ... which has led to conviction by police, unfortunately.
Just for using it? That's crazy! Do you have a source?
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#116It'd be better, of course, if we didn't rely on Signal not storing all that metadata and instead used a protocol which made it impossible for anyone to be in a position to choose whether or not to store it. Unfortunately, the protocols that enable truly traffic–analysis-resistant messaging (I believe the Pynchon Gate[1] is currently the best-of-breed) tend to have increased latency and consume greatly-increased bandw…
Yeah, but I'm kind of tired of having to fight my own government every step of the way. I'd prefer a political solution at this point.
Interesting. You're (correctly) identifying the government as the problem and the solution you come up with is more government?
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Order of magnitude? 1Gbit on amazon costs 22k/month. Even an order of magnitude cheaper sounds pretty damn expensive, two orders of magnitude still isn't "cheap". It's really easy to underestimate how big of a ripoff EC2 bandwidth pricing is.
> 1Gbit on amazon costs 22k/month Is this 1 gigabit of accumulated traffic, or sustained bandwidth guaranteed for an entire month? 1 TiB of accumulated bandwidth at DigitalOcean costs me $5/month. I am unaware of what sustained rates are given that tier of pricing, however.
1Gbit/s for a month, 328.5 terabytes.
On the expensive end you'd be looking at around $600 for such at $NOT_AMAZON, and on the cheap end you'd get it for "free" because a plenty of hosts have excess bandwidth.
DO doesn't separately charge for BW or enforce any limitations AFAIK.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blockchains can do this. But they create relatively absurd systems of who can/can't send messages based on how much they've mined. Block chains are HORRIBLE for encrypted messaging. Since your message is PERMANENTLY part of the chain. So if a encryption is broken, or your password gets leaked. ANYONE can read your messages. In most cases a DHT is far simpler. But naturally some nodes can be evil and log metadata. Thi…
This trend of proposing a blockchain to solve every problem is hilarious to me. Hammer/nail syndrome.
> Hammer/nail syndrome.
Blockchains address that problem too.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ex post facto laws are unconstitutional, and something like this (where millions would instantly be in violation) would absolutely, 100% end up in front of the Supreme Court.
Some examples of when a law can be retroactively applied: When the Securities Exchange Commission decides that something is a security, it retroactively applies the civil and criminal compliance back to 1934 because it was always a security. I mean, you can argue it in front of a judge if you want, but thats how they established jurisdiction. Same goes for discretionary tax law at the IRS or any regulatory agency I a…
That just goes to show that the Constitution, while imperfect, is better than what we have now.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
#120It'd be better, of course, if we didn't rely on Signal not storing all that metadata and instead used a protocol which made it impossible for anyone to be in a position to choose whether or not to store it. Unfortunately, the protocols that enable truly traffic–analysis-resistant messaging (I believe the Pynchon Gate[1] is currently the best-of-breed) tend to have increased latency and consume greatly-increased bandw…
Yeah, but I'm kind of tired of having to fight my own government every step of the way. I'd prefer a political solution at this point.
You want the government to give up the right to access communications that it has the ability to access? You're talking about a fundamental weakening of government greater than has ever been attempted. Governments have always had the power to access your mail and papers and such, the only changes over time is the legal hurdles they must use to exercise that power.