Live data from Hacker News

Forced Exposure

groklaw.net

231–240 of 430 posts

Re: Forced Exposure

#231
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I mean protocols. While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. (But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)

Its a subject I keep an eye on, e.g. freenet and off-the-record messaging. I think these systems cannot work :( If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies. Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight…

Your final statement here is not true. The way in which you keep anonymity with an onion system is as follows: 1. Use a central originating server for onion packet sourcing 2. Make it public who all users are 3. Have onion packet creation contain "token of receipt" for all messages along the chain. 4. Rate limit message origination from users 5. Ban users who refuse to forward encrypted packets at a steady rate 6. Only allow small message sizes ( 10k ) 7. Have all online users constantly originate "bogus" packets to random users 8...

I am currently writing such a system. Some details up at circleofdistrust.com in about a month or so.

Re: Forced Exposure

#232
post #35

Since we weren't allowed to say it when it was relevant, and the point was muddled and trampled on in pseudo-rational debates (“Can you find evidence that they’re abusing this new legislation?”, etc.), I'll go ahead and say it now: it's happening. There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, m…

I'm not saying things are good in America right now, but I think our problems are due to my fellow citizens, not some evil cabal of overlords. If we're all gonna steer the plane into the ground, well, I wish we wouldn't, but from everything I see we are doing this to ourselves. We went crazy over terrorism, and we didn't come back.

If 75% of the polled public believes that linking minimum wage to the cost of living is a good and correct thing, and legislation continues to be passed attempting to lower or inhibit raising minimum wage, who would you suggest controls the legislation? It's certainly not the 75%.

Re: Forced Exposure

#233
post #8

How feasible is Freenet for email? We can use PGP today, but the metadata is available to all. But what journalists who need to communicate more anonymously that that used pseudonymous PGP keys - one per story, rather one per person, and posted encrypted messages on Freenet?

It works. Freenet has Freemail[0]. I'd like to bring attention to I2PBote[1] too.

Both of these solutions are distributed, encrypted entirely (even metadata) and solve email's privacy problems.

[0] http://freenetproject.org/freemail.html

[1] http://i2pbote.i2p.us/

Re: Forced Exposure

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations can't put me in jail.

Not directly, but who do you think runs the jails and lobbies for stricter laws to fill those jails?

"Corporations" are not a single entity. Some are more aligned with the development of society, some hinder it. It is harmful to lump all corporations in one group.

Re: Forced Exposure

#235
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's time to act, now Suggested courses of action? Tried and didn't work: * voting * not voting * protesting online / offline * writing about these issues, raising awareness What options do we have left? Violence? Hopefully there's more.

Corporate boycotts. Massive, Internet-wide corporate boycotts. Corporate lobbyists influence/fund politicians so influence the funders. See "Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim" ( http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t... ) What would the effects be from a flash boycott if X-million people suddenly stopped buying from a corporation? Someone could devise a model to ca…

[deleted]

Re: Forced Exposure

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to see PJ publish her public key and encourage people to learn how to use it. That helps, but it doesn't mask the data groups like the NSA are really after (who is talking to who, and when).

I am in the process of developing a new messaging system to address exactly that issue ( anonymous communication where it is unclear who is talking to who ) The way in which it will work is having all users of the system constantly send encrypted streams to each other ( mostly gibberish ). When you want to send a real message you simply replace the encrypted gibberish with some real content. It will implement "onion"…

Anybody building such systems today should have a plan for when (not if) they receive a National Security Letter.

Re: Forced Exposure

#238
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama continues to push hard to steal what little privacy rights US citizens have remaining. He is openly hostile about it, and lies about it constantly. Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going to get worse.

We -- all citizens of Western countries -- should seriously stop voting altogether. And I mean full stop. When the next election comes, nobody votes. That'll destabilize things right quick.

It is a curious quirk of psychology that a single vote for a two major parties is considered to matter, despite being guaranteed not to sway the outcome, while a vote for a third party is considered "wasted". And even curiouser, choosing not to vote at all is considered the more rational option.

Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be implemented state-by-state.

Re: Forced Exposure

#239
post #116
post #35

Since we weren't allowed to say it when it was relevant, and the point was muddled and trampled on in pseudo-rational debates (“Can you find evidence that they’re abusing this new legislation?”, etc.), I'll go ahead and say it now: it's happening. There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, m…

> the best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the information they consume The comparison that some have made between the US Government and Stasi is more accurate than you think, with regards of Zersetzung : > By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that methods of overt persecution which had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. It was realised that…

While I see the potential for "Zersetzung", it just doesn't scale as well as mass surveillance.

If your communication (and location) data is stored by US companies complicit with programs like PRISM, and there is no hope that this data will ever be destroyed, then that's enough to make you communicate (and move) a lot more cautiously.

Re: Forced Exposure

#240
post #35

Since we weren't allowed to say it when it was relevant, and the point was muddled and trampled on in pseudo-rational debates (“Can you find evidence that they’re abusing this new legislation?”, etc.), I'll go ahead and say it now: it's happening. There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, m…

I'm not saying things are good in America right now, but I think our problems are due to my fellow citizens, not some evil cabal of overlords. If we're all gonna steer the plane into the ground, well, I wish we wouldn't, but from everything I see we are doing this to ourselves. We went crazy over terrorism, and we didn't come back.

We went crazy over terrorism? Who's we? Am I part of the we that helped pass the PATRIOT Act (which was an Act of Congress) without reading it?

Am I the one who pitched Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify an invasion of an irrelevant country that resulted in ~125,000 dead civilians?

Am I the one who has been helping build the system that has devalued an American college degree to the point of worthlessness? Did I decide to over-advertise the college experience to impressionable kids? Did I decide to give more student loan money to college students? Did I decide to raise the cost of my university to account for said federal dollars that I can now obtain out of greed?

Of course there's a bleeting majority supporting all of this. They're, like all citizens in a democracy, only as good as the media they're fed: http://fsi.stanford.edu/publications/how_to_subvert_democrac...

But many of the policies and actions are coming from a higher-level than your average citizen.

EDIT: However, I agree that the stupidity and apathy of the general populace is at least partly to blame. The people who know what's up ahead of time aren't confident enough to act until it's obvious, in which case it's usually too late. The rest just don't care and assume someone else will solve the problem. Further, following trends and the subsequent inability to make it through a turbulent or confusing time without devolving into mass panic and animal-like behavior is also a problem.

Post reply on HN