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Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

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Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#151

Post by poet »

gnosis wrote: post #147
poet wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you got the idea that nation states are the only ones who use cryptography. Plenty of activists, along with other non-state actors do so all the time. We're not talking about users, we're talking about attackers and developers. Why would users have anything to do with our discussion? Plenty of cryptography is also designed by individuals not in the service of any nation state (as far as we know, an…

"We're not talking about users, we're talking about attackers and developers. Why would users have anything to do with our discussion?" Actually, in the message you responded to, I was specifically talking about users. I've been talking about users of crypto/stego all along! They're the ones who take virtually all of the risk. The people who write the crypto/stego often aren't even in the same country, and they do th…

That testing is only worthwhile if your threat model does not include the government itself, which has a vested interest in breaking all encryption, whether or not it has been "certified" by them.

The government also has a vested intrest that the cryptography used by itself and its citizens be reasonably secure, else industrial espionage and other similar activities become trivial. Note that the NSA approved AES for the protection of Top Secret information. If you want to argue the NSA deliberately let the majority of classified information in the United States be protected by a flawed algorithm you're going to have to provide some proof.

How is it not available? There are plenty of people who design and analyze stego. There's your expertise.

The people that are good at building and designing crypto and stego (Are there any good stego systems? Doubt it.) systems are outside the paygrade of most companies, nevermind activists. The expertise is not available.

--

Your arguments are disconnected from reality and don't really have any particularly notable knowledge of this domain. This conversation has been a net loss, and judging by your average of ~2 karma per comment, other people seem to agree. I'll let you have the last word if you'd like it, but please refrain from wasting so much space in the future.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#152

Post by tptacek »

gnosis wrote: post #143
tptacek wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about individuals versus nation states. You're handwaving.

And your two-sentence reply that didn't specifically address a single point in my post is supposed to be some deep, thorough analysis? Pot, meet kettle. Despite this, I'll do you the kindness of actually addressing the point you made by giving you a big, "so what?" Activists and dissidents often go up against nation states. That's the nature of the business. And they knowingly take risks to do so. The question is, ar…

You made an asinine comparison, between cryptography/cryptanalysis (where advances involve fundamental breakthroughs in mathematics and information theory) and stegonography/steganalysis (where advances have been made, recently, from simple measurement studies).

How in-depth do you want me to get with you? I gave you an actual (high-level, easy-to-read, summarized) academic source. You clearly haven't read it. Why not go take some time with it and come back not sounding like a crank?

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#153

Post by gnosis »

poet wrote: post #146
gnosis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your two-sentence reply that didn't specifically address a single point in my post is supposed to be some deep, thorough analysis? Pot, meet kettle. Despite this, I'll do you the kindness of actually addressing the point you made by giving you a big, "so what?" Activists and dissidents often go up against nation states. That's the nature of the business. And they knowingly take risks to do so. The question is, ar…

How about a third option: they use a method of communication that wont get them killed. You're presenting a false dichotomy.

"How about a third option: they use a method of communication that wont get them killed. You're presenting a false dichotomy."

Got any suggestions? Because I know the millions of Chinese who attempt to circumvent China's firewall daily would love to hear about it.

The point is that probably 90% of the time, these people aren't using anything better than bare encryption (if that), and they're drawing attention to themselves anyway. If they're going to do that anyway, I think it makes much more sense to hide the communication via stego.

But if you've got a better idea, let's hear it.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#154

Post by tptacek »

gnosis wrote: post #153
poet wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a third option: they use a method of communication that wont get them killed. You're presenting a false dichotomy.

"How about a third option: they use a method of communication that wont get them killed. You're presenting a false dichotomy." Got any suggestions? Because I know the millions of Chinese who attempt to circumvent China's firewall daily would love to hear about it. The point is that probably 90% of the time, these people aren't using anything better than bare encryption (if that), and they're drawing attention to them…

Hard problems don't become easier just because they find social justice applications. Math doesn't care what China does to its dissidents, as Wang Xiaoyun has made pretty clear to us.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#155

Post by rbanffy »

zedshaw wrote: post #129
drats wrote: post #24

Ad Hominems are a-ok now are they? Well here's Zed's thought process: a) Read Greenwald Salon article accusing Wired of having shady connections. b) Roll that basic premise into a set of wild accusations and things we already know about Tor. c) Sit back and enjoy the whole chaos of the troll. When someone attacks bring out the usual sockpuppets and sycophants to say "but Zed does all this great coding", "Zed is not l…

Ad hominems are totally alright in my book, especially since everyone loves doing them to me and then bitching when they're done back. For example, your post doesn't have a single link giving counter evidence. You'd think you could bring some of that out but so far, in this entire thread, there hasn't been one link with counter evidence. There's been links to our twitter conversation, links to things supporting Tor i…

> Ad hominems are totally alright in my book

Zed, find a therapist, please. You are a talented person but your mind needs debugging.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#156

Post by tptacek »

pulpfiction wrote: post #68

Well, Mr. Zed Shaw is trolling. No doubt about that. I wonder how he makes the conspiracy theories about NSA when Tor is open source? He is free to investigate the source code for 'backdoors'. Such conspiracy theories and trolling are nothing but desperate attempts for attention.

It's a myth that having the source code for a cryptosystem is going to allow you to spot backdoors. Crypto flaws have hidden for many, many years in far more important projects than Tor. Crypto flaws are very subtle; you can create a backdoor in a crypto routine simply by changing the way it happens to influence the L1 cache.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#158

Post by redthrowaway »

zedshaw wrote: post #125
redthrowaway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who is disappointed that two supposedly professional adults can't manage to have a grown up conversation about this? Reading the back and forth is pretty disheartening.

Oh, it's pretty much impossible to have any rational conversation these days. The majority of the technology speech these days is manipulative, flat out wrong, very anti free speech, and hyperbolic. When you start from that, there's just no point trying to be reasonable.

While I agree, you started the conversation by breaking Godwin's Law. I don't think Applebaum paid particularly close attention to your piece, but I probably wouldn't either in his position. A cursory skimming of your post reads as, "would you eat a sandwich from Hitler? No? Then why do you use software from Applebaum?" I don't think that's a fair distillation of your argument, but it is reasonable to think that someone briefly scanning your work might think it to be so.

Complaining about tech speech being hyperbolic whilst simultaneously [implicitly] comparing Applebaum to Hitler is a little ballsy, tbh.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#159

Post by j_baker »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #117
billswift wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So I find the whole first half of the text to be a flabby way of saying that the arguments of dishonest people need to be evaluated more critically than those of honest people. But I find that the arguments of honest people need to be critically evaluated too. You over-simplified the argument here, I think. I read it more as a person's motivations need to be considered, not particularly honesty. And nearly everybody…

a person's motivations need to be considered But how can we know a person's actual motivations? Those are internal to the individual, we can't see them. Heck, in many ways the individual himself doesn't really understand his own motivations. Trying to consider motivations is thus completely fruitless. We only have the history of a person's actions, and to a lesser extent, the history of his statements, to guide us.

Stop being naive.

What is a used car salesman's motivation? It's reasonable to assume that their motivation is to get you to buy a used car.

What is a crack addict's motivation? It's reasonable to assume that their motivation is to get more crack.

These are somewhat extreme cases, but you can almost always tell what a person's motivation is by observing them. What is a married man's motivation for not wearing his ring? He either: forgot it, lost it, is having an affair, or is no longer married. And you can probably tell which if you ask him the right questions.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#160

Post by roc »

agl wrote: post #29

(I rather suspect that Mr Shaw is trolling, but anyway.) It's certainly true that humans have all manner of interesting behaviors owing to the fact that we're smart apes with huge numbers of survival heuristics. I would pause before taking a sandwich from Hitler, because I'm human, but it's not pertinent to the question of whether the sandwich is any good. (Except in as far as you think it more or less likely that th…

It's not a trivial question of who is offering you something. It's a combination of who is offering you something, what they're offering and how much you need it.

If you were dying of thirst and Hitler had a water bottle, against any other concerns, you're taking it. Also, if you needed change for a pay phone to call a tow truck and Hitler offered you a quarter, you're probably not going to stick to your principles in that case either; because the risks are so much lower and need a bit higher than the aforementioned sandwich (we'll suppose you have gloves and no plans on licking the quarter before inserting it into the phone).

So, really, that Zed doesn't use Tor says more about his own situation than whether he thinks a better or truly-trustworthy way to anonymize live bits is even possible.

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