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This is some serious “too interested in seeing if you could, and not stopping to wonder if you should” content. What possible positives are there in exploring h

This is some serious “too interested in seeing if you could, and not stopping to wonder if you should” content. What possible positives are there in exploring how to de-anonymize people whose life and freedom requires anonymity, and who are fighting the good fight?

mskvsk 7y ago
Telling those people how to improve their privacy before Beijing did this.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Slightly tangential since you're specifically discussing communication but I've noticed that the term "privacy" is often getting incorrectly used when discussing surveillance tech (e.g. face recognition). There is no expectation of privacy in a public place. But an important right in a free society is the right to anonymity. A street is not a private place and, as said, there is no expectation of privacy there: Anyone and everyone can see you and what you are doing. But you should have the right to remain anonymous as long as you do not breach the law. That's what called into question these days with e.g. automatic facial recognition.
  - germanier 7y ago
    > A street is not a private place and, as said, there is no expectation of privacy there: Anyone and everyone can see you and what you are doing. Only people physically there can see me and what I am doing. Modern technology enables them to record that and share it globally and across time. It's important to recognize that this ability is not inherent in it being a public place. "Expectation of privacy" and that you can't have it in a public street is a US-centric concept. Other societies draw the line differently.
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Expectation of privacy in public places has never been a concept anywhere. Privacy and public space are simply contradicting terms.
      - CogitoCogito 7y ago
        You're referencing old ideas of public and private life that made sense at a time. Those ideas did not form in a time with ubiquitous surveillance. The ideas may have made sense before in their historical context, but that doesn't mean they make sense today. How about instead you ask yourself why those ideas grew out of that older historical context and whether the same reasoning would apply today? Why not re-read this and think about what germanier means: > Only people physically there can see me and what I am doing. Modern technology enables them to record that and share it globally and across time. It's important to recognize that this ability is not inherent in it being a public place. [ Quote from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713153 ]
        mytailorisrich 7y ago
        This is not an old idea. This is common sense: how can you expect privacy in a public place? Taking pictures of someone specifically may be different because that may be harassment. But in general ending up in pictures and films of others because you were in a public space fits in the standard concept of what a public space is.
        ptx 7y ago
        Imagine you are taking a walk in the forest. The forest is a public place (where I live anyway!) – anyone can walk anywhere they want. Eventually, later in the day, you might need to take a leak, so you do what everyone normally does – go behind a tree. Do you in this situation expect to be photographed and have high-resolution pictures of your genitals posted to Instagram? Don't you think this, if it were a regular occurrence, would interfere with people's age-old custom of enjoying a quiet walk in the public forest?
      - 7y ago
  - abdullahkhalids 7y ago
    > A street is not a private place There are still degrees of this across the world. In certain places, wearing face covering is banned. In others its literally forced on 50% of the population to obscure their head and/or face. Some places don't care at all. Same goes for tinted glass on vehicles. Not saying any of these position is ethical or not.
- _petronius 7y ago
  That's a boneheaded excuse: if the comment was about improving privacy it would be highlighting mitigation strategies, not focussing on exploiting potential vulnerabilities.
roenxi 7y ago
The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching. They've already thought of it, never you worry. The really interesting question for me is, when they inevitably succeed, how much damage they will do to themselves. Reform for the better is basically indistinguishable from chaos and collapse to the regime in power.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  > The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching. Yet they couldn’t control a band of wandering, illiterate horsemen. The human spirit can never be controlled.
  - steve19 7y ago
    Except they did. The horsemen got fat on Chinese food and used to Chinese comforts and culture. They stopped riding and became Chinese (just not Han Chinese). China today claims the whole of Mongolia as theirs.
    - ptx 7y ago
      They don't claim the territory of Outer Mongolia, do they? Only Inner Mongolia is part of China, as far as I know.
      - FooBarWidget 7y ago
        They don't claim it because they seceded it to Russia in order to keep peace with Russia: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-China-re-take-Tibet-but-not-Mongolia/answer/Yu-Hsing-Chen-1 https://www.quora.com/Why-did-China-re-take-Tibet-but-not-Mo...
- _petronius 7y ago
  > The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching. This at least a complete misunderstanding of the history of the Catholic church, which is both terrible at "preaching" and has never given it prime importance either theologically or practically, but also of Chinese civilizational history. Confucianism, the dominant philosophical and religious theory behind the organization of a huge period of the ancient Chinese state, recognized the right to revolution! It also seems irrelevant to the discussion about why it's wrong to leap straight into iterating potential ways to deanonymize protesters instead of suggesting mitigation strategies.
kzzzznot 7y ago
But this is the point of security research, to find vulnerabilities so they can be fixed.
- roca 7y ago
  In practice the point of most security research is: get the paper published and give the talk, or sell the zero-days, or use them yourself, and then move on to the next thing. The actual non-sexy defensive work of cleaning up bugs and implementing countermeasures, i.e. the real work on improving security instead of making it worse, is mostly done by rank-and-file software and hardware developers whose names are never known.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    > the real work on improving security ... is mostly done by ... developers whose names are never known And it's a very thankless job.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
idlewords 7y ago
Seriously, for real. Thank you for making this point.

mskvsk 7y ago

Telling those people how to improve their privacy before Beijing did this.

mytailorisrich 7y ago
Slightly tangential since you're specifically discussing communication but I've noticed that the term "privacy" is often getting incorrectly used when discussing surveillance tech (e.g. face recognition). There is no expectation of privacy in a public place. But an important right in a free society is the right to anonymity. A street is not a private place and, as said, there is no expectation of privacy there: Anyone and everyone can see you and what you are doing. But you should have the right to remain anonymous as long as you do not breach the law. That's what called into question these days with e.g. automatic facial recognition.
- germanier 7y ago
  > A street is not a private place and, as said, there is no expectation of privacy there: Anyone and everyone can see you and what you are doing. Only people physically there can see me and what I am doing. Modern technology enables them to record that and share it globally and across time. It's important to recognize that this ability is not inherent in it being a public place. "Expectation of privacy" and that you can't have it in a public street is a US-centric concept. Other societies draw the line differently.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Expectation of privacy in public places has never been a concept anywhere. Privacy and public space are simply contradicting terms.
    - CogitoCogito 7y ago
      You're referencing old ideas of public and private life that made sense at a time. Those ideas did not form in a time with ubiquitous surveillance. The ideas may have made sense before in their historical context, but that doesn't mean they make sense today. How about instead you ask yourself why those ideas grew out of that older historical context and whether the same reasoning would apply today? Why not re-read this and think about what germanier means: > Only people physically there can see me and what I am doing. Modern technology enables them to record that and share it globally and across time. It's important to recognize that this ability is not inherent in it being a public place. [ Quote from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713153 ]
      - mytailorisrich 7y ago
        This is not an old idea. This is common sense: how can you expect privacy in a public place? Taking pictures of someone specifically may be different because that may be harassment. But in general ending up in pictures and films of others because you were in a public space fits in the standard concept of what a public space is.
        ptx 7y ago
        Imagine you are taking a walk in the forest. The forest is a public place (where I live anyway!) – anyone can walk anywhere they want. Eventually, later in the day, you might need to take a leak, so you do what everyone normally does – go behind a tree. Do you in this situation expect to be photographed and have high-resolution pictures of your genitals posted to Instagram? Don't you think this, if it were a regular occurrence, would interfere with people's age-old custom of enjoying a quiet walk in the public forest?
    - 7y ago
- abdullahkhalids 7y ago
  > A street is not a private place There are still degrees of this across the world. In certain places, wearing face covering is banned. In others its literally forced on 50% of the population to obscure their head and/or face. Some places don't care at all. Same goes for tinted glass on vehicles. Not saying any of these position is ethical or not.
_petronius 7y ago
That's a boneheaded excuse: if the comment was about improving privacy it would be highlighting mitigation strategies, not focussing on exploiting potential vulnerabilities.

roenxi 7y ago

The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching. They've already thought of it, never you worry. The really interesting question for me is, when they inevitably succeed, how much damage they will do to themselves. Reform for the better is basically indistinguishable from chaos and collapse to the regime in power.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago
> The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching. Yet they couldn’t control a band of wandering, illiterate horsemen. The human spirit can never be controlled.
- steve19 7y ago
  Except they did. The horsemen got fat on Chinese food and used to Chinese comforts and culture. They stopped riding and became Chinese (just not Han Chinese). China today claims the whole of Mongolia as theirs.
  - ptx 7y ago
    They don't claim the territory of Outer Mongolia, do they? Only Inner Mongolia is part of China, as far as I know.
    - FooBarWidget 7y ago
      They don't claim it because they seceded it to Russia in order to keep peace with Russia: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-China-re-take-Tibet-but-not-Mongolia/answer/Yu-Hsing-Chen-1 https://www.quora.com/Why-did-China-re-take-Tibet-but-not-Mo...
_petronius 7y ago
> The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching. This at least a complete misunderstanding of the history of the Catholic church, which is both terrible at "preaching" and has never given it prime importance either theologically or practically, but also of Chinese civilizational history. Confucianism, the dominant philosophical and religious theory behind the organization of a huge period of the ancient Chinese state, recognized the right to revolution! It also seems irrelevant to the discussion about why it's wrong to leap straight into iterating potential ways to deanonymize protesters instead of suggesting mitigation strategies.

kzzzznot 7y ago

But this is the point of security research, to find vulnerabilities so they can be fixed.

roca 7y ago
In practice the point of most security research is: get the paper published and give the talk, or sell the zero-days, or use them yourself, and then move on to the next thing. The actual non-sexy defensive work of cleaning up bugs and implementing countermeasures, i.e. the real work on improving security instead of making it worse, is mostly done by rank-and-file software and hardware developers whose names are never known.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  > the real work on improving security ... is mostly done by ... developers whose names are never known And it's a very thankless job.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

idlewords 7y ago

Seriously, for real. Thank you for making this point.