4 ms·

Nonsense they are an MVNO they don’t really control their network they and their provider still track you (even if only for signaling purposes) and the SIM card

Nonsense they are an MVNO they don’t really control their network they and their provider still track you (even if only for signaling purposes) and the SIM card can’t really block anything they just route all your data through TOR which is actually a pretty poor thing to do from an OpSec perspective. Also with mobile phones data only or not all mobile phones must be able to call emergency services and provide their location data if you are so paranoid that you elect to use TOR for everything you might considering never touching a mobile phone again.

logicallee 8y ago
>they just route all your data through TOR which is actually a pretty poor thing to do from an OpSec perspective. Could you elaborate? (On the second half, i.e. why you say so.)
- Rjevski 8y ago
  See my comment above. Basically they host the Tor bridge and so your traffic (before being Torified) is still visible to the upstream carrier.
  - ryanlol 8y ago
    I'm sorry, but this is just completely wrong. Traffic is torified on localhost when it goes into the Tor daemon.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  Because TOR provides anonymity not privacy, privacy and anonymity are in principle opposites the more private something is the less anonymous it is and vise versa. Privacy is the agency you have over controlling your interactions and information, anonymity is the level of distance you have between a certain interaction and your identity. A private conversation cannot be anonymous because you need to be able to establish and verify the identity of the parties involved and have trust in them not to dessiminate that information further. TOR focuses on anonymity which means that if you use it to access things in private such as your gmail or bank account that anonymity goes out the window as you now can be tied to an identity. Pushing everything through TOR can also include services that are not anonymous by definition which can expose your identity.
  - logicallee 8y ago
    I think this is an interesting perspective but I need more clarification. Let's take these cases: 1. I am the only user of my logicallee front-end on a server somewhere. Nobody knows who I am. I'm also a shitty admin and don't have ssl enabled properly, everyone between me and the server can see everything between us. 2. Same thing but now I'm a good admin and the conversation with the server is private and nobody can break. 3. Same as 1 except this time instead of being the only user, 1.2 billion other users use it too. Google is a shitty web admin and anyone can decrypt my gmail session. 4. Same thing as 3 except this time Google is a great sys admin and so people can't decrypt session info. Can you talk about the privacy and anonymity levels of these 4 scenarios? What about a scenario 5 where Google is the world's perfect possible admin and their servers are coded to be so secure, nobody at Google can access anyone's inbox or what mail they're sending in practice. Obviously they can in theory, but assume their practice is perfect and doesn't do that. Really interested in your answers.
    - rsync 8y ago
      "Can you talk about the privacy and anonymity levels of these 4 scenarios?" Your thinking is going in the right direction here, but you should consider some deeper analysis of your behavior ... In your example, 1.2B people access gmail - so far, so good. But how many people access gmail and HN ? How about gmail and HN and MeFi ? All during US timezone waking hours ? You can see where I am going with this. Now let's look at a different angle - you only visit gmail, so you're safely back in the 1.2B herd, right ? But how many people visit gmail with OSX ? With OSX vX.Y ? With your screen resolution, your enabled fonts, and your patch level? You might be very surprised at how unique your web hit really is.[1] The point being made here is that if you funnel all of your usage (traffic ?) everywhere, you create a usage "fingerprint" that can then be noticed or logged or tracked or correlated anywhere else you go. It's not hopeless - you could spin up a throwaway VM that you would only use for gmail and nothing else, but again - there are opsec considerations there that can sink the whole operation, just like above, if you aren't very, very careful. [1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
      - 8y ago
jelly 8y ago
They (Brass Horn) mention this pitfall on the product page: https://brasshorncommunications.uk/projects/Onion3G/ https://brasshorncommunications.uk/projects/Onion3G/
- dogma1138 8y ago
  That’s not the point the point is that their mobile carrier tracks your location and device which they can’t control and pushing all your traffic through TOR deanonymizes it if you use any service which is tied to your identity so a default route all rule for daily internet usage via TOR isn’t a good idea.
droopybuns 8y ago
Yeah- I agree. Reconfigure the APN on the network side and you have clearly isolated the source of given traffic. This is either a government honeypot, or it should be rebranded as “rusty trombone.”
AlexCoventry 8y ago
> all mobile phones must be able to call emergency services and provide their location data I also had this impression, but on the other hand, I've had to call 911 a couple of times, and they've always asked me for my location, and denied that they have location data. What are the relevant statutes/regulations mandating that phones report location data?
- dogma1138 8y ago
  In North America specifically e911 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1 For mobile phones RRLP (and its LTE descendant) has been in the GSM spec for years now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_resource_location_services_protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_resource_location_serv... However they still ask for details because it’s more accurate and faster to ask and while they can get your location if the location is in a building with 200 apartments it doesn’t really help but denying they have the info when it’s an FCC mandate is a bit silly.
  - Hupriene 8y ago
    The accuracy requirements for e911 are quite low and are given in terms of a target average. From Wikipedia: > Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP. Accuracy rates must meet FCC standards on average within any given participating PSAP service area by September 11, 2012 As such the location provided by a barely-compliant mobile phone provider would only have a 50% chance (depending on distribution and what average means exactly in this context) of being within 300 meters of the actual location of the call. I don't know what the real world numbers look like, but it seems very reasonable that the emergency service personnel would need much more accurate location information than that in order to respond without a lot of searching.
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      Where I live, if you call 311 after 5pm you get routed to the 911 operator. I called 311 at 2am once, and had to give the address to the 911 operator because she had no data at all. This was from an AT&T phone, so it's a miracle I got through at all. (AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are all 1-bar for the 50,000 people near where I live, and they constantly complain about it on the neighborhood web sites. Only Sprint has a good signal, and that's because of old Nextel gub'mint contract towers.)
jlg23 8y ago
The article details the product is a protection against now mandatory logging on OSI-levels 4+. You are arguing on lower levels the introduced solution does not aim at. I overall share the sentiment "to be safe, just do not emit signals" but still think the SIM is a good start as it heightens the requirements for tracking on layers 4+.

logicallee 8y ago

>they just route all your data through TOR which is actually a pretty poor thing to do from an OpSec perspective. Could you elaborate? (On the second half, i.e. why you say so.)

Rjevski 8y ago
See my comment above. Basically they host the Tor bridge and so your traffic (before being Torified) is still visible to the upstream carrier.
- ryanlol 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is just completely wrong. Traffic is torified on localhost when it goes into the Tor daemon.
dogma1138 8y ago
Because TOR provides anonymity not privacy, privacy and anonymity are in principle opposites the more private something is the less anonymous it is and vise versa. Privacy is the agency you have over controlling your interactions and information, anonymity is the level of distance you have between a certain interaction and your identity. A private conversation cannot be anonymous because you need to be able to establish and verify the identity of the parties involved and have trust in them not to dessiminate that information further. TOR focuses on anonymity which means that if you use it to access things in private such as your gmail or bank account that anonymity goes out the window as you now can be tied to an identity. Pushing everything through TOR can also include services that are not anonymous by definition which can expose your identity.
- logicallee 8y ago
  I think this is an interesting perspective but I need more clarification. Let's take these cases: 1. I am the only user of my logicallee front-end on a server somewhere. Nobody knows who I am. I'm also a shitty admin and don't have ssl enabled properly, everyone between me and the server can see everything between us. 2. Same thing but now I'm a good admin and the conversation with the server is private and nobody can break. 3. Same as 1 except this time instead of being the only user, 1.2 billion other users use it too. Google is a shitty web admin and anyone can decrypt my gmail session. 4. Same thing as 3 except this time Google is a great sys admin and so people can't decrypt session info. Can you talk about the privacy and anonymity levels of these 4 scenarios? What about a scenario 5 where Google is the world's perfect possible admin and their servers are coded to be so secure, nobody at Google can access anyone's inbox or what mail they're sending in practice. Obviously they can in theory, but assume their practice is perfect and doesn't do that. Really interested in your answers.
  - rsync 8y ago
    "Can you talk about the privacy and anonymity levels of these 4 scenarios?" Your thinking is going in the right direction here, but you should consider some deeper analysis of your behavior ... In your example, 1.2B people access gmail - so far, so good. But how many people access gmail and HN ? How about gmail and HN and MeFi ? All during US timezone waking hours ? You can see where I am going with this. Now let's look at a different angle - you only visit gmail, so you're safely back in the 1.2B herd, right ? But how many people visit gmail with OSX ? With OSX vX.Y ? With your screen resolution, your enabled fonts, and your patch level? You might be very surprised at how unique your web hit really is.[1] The point being made here is that if you funnel all of your usage (traffic ?) everywhere, you create a usage "fingerprint" that can then be noticed or logged or tracked or correlated anywhere else you go. It's not hopeless - you could spin up a throwaway VM that you would only use for gmail and nothing else, but again - there are opsec considerations there that can sink the whole operation, just like above, if you aren't very, very careful. [1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
    - 8y ago

jelly 8y ago

They (Brass Horn) mention this pitfall on the product page: https://brasshorncommunications.uk/projects/Onion3G/ https://brasshorncommunications.uk/projects/Onion3G/

dogma1138 8y ago
That’s not the point the point is that their mobile carrier tracks your location and device which they can’t control and pushing all your traffic through TOR deanonymizes it if you use any service which is tied to your identity so a default route all rule for daily internet usage via TOR isn’t a good idea.

droopybuns 8y ago

Yeah- I agree. Reconfigure the APN on the network side and you have clearly isolated the source of given traffic. This is either a government honeypot, or it should be rebranded as “rusty trombone.”

AlexCoventry 8y ago

> all mobile phones must be able to call emergency services and provide their location data I also had this impression, but on the other hand, I've had to call 911 a couple of times, and they've always asked me for my location, and denied that they have location data. What are the relevant statutes/regulations mandating that phones report location data?

dogma1138 8y ago
In North America specifically e911 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1 For mobile phones RRLP (and its LTE descendant) has been in the GSM spec for years now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_resource_location_services_protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_resource_location_serv... However they still ask for details because it’s more accurate and faster to ask and while they can get your location if the location is in a building with 200 apartments it doesn’t really help but denying they have the info when it’s an FCC mandate is a bit silly.
- Hupriene 8y ago
  The accuracy requirements for e911 are quite low and are given in terms of a target average. From Wikipedia: > Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP. Accuracy rates must meet FCC standards on average within any given participating PSAP service area by September 11, 2012 As such the location provided by a barely-compliant mobile phone provider would only have a 50% chance (depending on distribution and what average means exactly in this context) of being within 300 meters of the actual location of the call. I don't know what the real world numbers look like, but it seems very reasonable that the emergency service personnel would need much more accurate location information than that in order to respond without a lot of searching.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Where I live, if you call 311 after 5pm you get routed to the 911 operator. I called 311 at 2am once, and had to give the address to the 911 operator because she had no data at all. This was from an AT&T phone, so it's a miracle I got through at all. (AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are all 1-bar for the 50,000 people near where I live, and they constantly complain about it on the neighborhood web sites. Only Sprint has a good signal, and that's because of old Nextel gub'mint contract towers.)

jlg23 8y ago

The article details the product is a protection against now mandatory logging on OSI-levels 4+. You are arguing on lower levels the introduced solution does not aim at. I overall share the sentiment "to be safe, just do not emit signals" but still think the SIM is a good start as it heightens the requirements for tracking on layers 4+.