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Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

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Re: Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

#111

Post by smsm42 »

vacri wrote: post #108
smsm42 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it is exactly the situation. Nobody is "held ransom" by anybody. But voters that think like you - low-information voters that can vote for anybody provided that he is "our guy" because "their guy" is The Devil himself - are exactly the reason why it happens again and again. And will happen until the majority abandons such mentality - which I personally wouldn't expect happening any time soon.

Voters that think like me live in a multipolar democracy that currently has a minority government in power. It's a tacit weakness of the US system that there can only be two viable parties. "If everyone changed and voted for a third person" is not a retort, because it still requires everyone jumping on the same bandwagon to effect a win; it'll just be a different brand of wagon.

Two viable parties are plenty enough if they are real parties and not a collection of people that use different-colored jerseys to play the same game. Unfortunately, right now majority of voter will vote for "their guy" almost no matter what, which lets "their guy" very broad license on any bad behavior. If the voters would say "either you put a leash on NSA or we're not voting for you, period" - then things may have been going in different direction. But voters don't do that - if you see, for example, how many voters of party A supported government surveillance when party A is in power and when party B is in power, the difference is depressingly significant. Because if "our guys" do it, it must be good, but if "their guys" do it, it must be bad. That's how we get into such a mess.

Re: Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

#112

Post by threeseed »

cookiecaper wrote: post #86
aqme28 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it sensationalist? The headline was not that there is a vulnerability in TOR, but a vulnerability in "half of all TOR sites."

The headline implies that the "compromise" is an inherent failure in the protocol (or else how could "half" of all sites be infected?) instead of the reality that the hosting provider intentionally placed an exploit in all of their pages. A better title may be like: "major .onion hosting service infiltrated by feds, all sites converted to honeypots; founder arrested". This does not imply any fundamental flaws in Tor…

You're being bizarrely pedantic.

If the headline had read "half of all web sites compromised" I would never have it thought it was because of some underlying fault with HTTP.

Re: Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

#114

Post by asveikau »

duaneb wrote: post #63
asveikau wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a bit over ten years ago, "javascript is annoying" was a mainstream position among hacker types. That seems to be long gone by now. I guess hardware catching up with resource requirements took away one of the biggest reasons against it. And most people really embraced the web as more than a document platform. I think part of me still misses the old way of thinking about it.

I don't have any base issue with javascript; I think it's a wonderful way to build web applications. However, TOR and the dark net has entirely different considerations, and the cost of letting unvetted code run without asking you from a site you know nothing about is far, far greater. I wouldn't be surprised if just being on TOR would be convincing evidence for an unknowledgable jury, even if the site was about some…

I see the first two sentences of your reply as inextricably linked and contradictory. You don't think it's the culture of it being acceptable to make sites that won't work without JS that is ultimately forcing the Tor folks to enable it? For instance, reading up on this subject I found this:

> Why is NoScript configured to allow JavaScript by default in the Tor Browser Bundle? Isn't that unsafe?

> We configure NoScript to allow JavaScript by default in the Tor Browser Bundle because many websites will not work with JavaScript disabled. Most users would give up on Tor entirely if a website they want to use requires JavaScript, ...

https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#TBBJavaScriptEna...

Re: Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

#115

Post by JulianMorrison »

vacri wrote: post #108
smsm42 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it is exactly the situation. Nobody is "held ransom" by anybody. But voters that think like you - low-information voters that can vote for anybody provided that he is "our guy" because "their guy" is The Devil himself - are exactly the reason why it happens again and again. And will happen until the majority abandons such mentality - which I personally wouldn't expect happening any time soon.

Voters that think like me live in a multipolar democracy that currently has a minority government in power. It's a tacit weakness of the US system that there can only be two viable parties. "If everyone changed and voted for a third person" is not a retort, because it still requires everyone jumping on the same bandwagon to effect a win; it'll just be a different brand of wagon.

You are missing the fact that you have multipolar primaries.

Re: Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

#117

Post by vacri »

Volpe wrote: post #110
vacri wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voters that think like me live in a multipolar democracy that currently has a minority government in power. It's a tacit weakness of the US system that there can only be two viable parties. "If everyone changed and voted for a third person" is not a retort, because it still requires everyone jumping on the same bandwagon to effect a win; it'll just be a different brand of wagon.

It's a two party system, but the two parties don't have to be the same ones that are their now. I don't understand the "viable alternative" arguement. You are saying "I won't vote for who I really want to vote, because they'll never win, because everyone else won't vote for them" ...

If you had rapid iteration - elections every month - then a tertiary party would have something of a chance. As it stands, the iterations are so slow, that with FPTP voting, the two main parties will just move slightly to diminish the threat - the incumbent edifice carries on.

With preferential voting (or similar), you actually have the realistic probability of more than one party being in power. Here in Australia, the current government is formed from one major party, one minor party, and a couple of independents. It's not just 'mathematically possible', but a plausible outcome. That can't really happen with FPTP voting. Well, it can happen, but it's an oddity - see the current situation in the UK with the lib dems.

"I won't vote for who I really want to vote, because they'll never win, because everyone else won't vote for them"

The problem here is that by voting for someone whom you slightly prefer, you split the vote in a FPTP system, making them both lose out to the third person you didn't want in. If 60% of the population want a left-wing candidate, and they're split evenly-ish, they'll still lose out to the single right-wing candidate who only has 40%. It sounds self-defeating on paper, but in real terms it's more like self-preservation.

Re: Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

#118

Post by AdrianRossouw »

shabble wrote: post #71
keyme wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't have to do much. Once you execute pretty much any (non-sandboxed) code on a machine, you can bypass something like TOR easily. From this point, any network packet sent by the payload to the feds effectively de-anonymizes the user completely. Also, by including a tracking cookie in the JS, they can cross reference all user activity on the compromised websites with the newly discovered IP address.

> Once you execute pretty much any (non-sandboxed) code on a machine, you can bypass something like TOR easily. From this point, any network packet sent by the payload to the feds effectively de-anonymizes the user completely. One partial solution would be to run the Tor client on a physically separate machine which acts as a transparent proxy for your browsing/internet box, and blocks any direct contact with the pub…

you can use a raspberry pi for it. there's a nice tor-proxy kit on adafruit.

personally i think a separate machine booted using the tails bootdisk and no write access to anything is probably the safest.

Re: Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

#119

Post by vacri »

smsm42 wrote: post #111
vacri wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voters that think like me live in a multipolar democracy that currently has a minority government in power. It's a tacit weakness of the US system that there can only be two viable parties. "If everyone changed and voted for a third person" is not a retort, because it still requires everyone jumping on the same bandwagon to effect a win; it'll just be a different brand of wagon.

Two viable parties are plenty enough if they are real parties and not a collection of people that use different-colored jerseys to play the same game. Unfortunately, right now majority of voter will vote for "their guy" almost no matter what, which lets "their guy" very broad license on any bad behavior. If the voters would say "either you put a leash on NSA or we're not voting for you, period" - then things may have…

Two parties aren't enough by any stretch, given how varied and multi-headed politics are. There are so many different facets and foci, that there's no way you can do a representative bipolar split across them all.

The other problem with systems that settle to two-party systems is that swing voters hold a disproportionate amount of power... which is ironic, given that the swing voters are usually not as politically interested as bloc supporters.

Re: Freedom Hosting sites compromised, founder arrested

#120

Post by bobbydavid »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #35

Am I the only one who is f*cking tired of FBI and other violence based organizations using pedophilia as their excuse to raid and bust people ? Think of the children! Yes .. a good front to make it so that they can just bust anything using SWAT forces. Is pedophilia such a big problem? Really ? I would like to see one study about pedophilia and the problems it creates, instead of what the problems that NSA and FBI ar…

Human trafficking. Yes, this actually happens, both around the world and in America.

The argument I've heard is that a frictionless child pornography market effects an increased financial incentive to traffic children.

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