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I am tempted to onionize my site for political (if that is the correct word) reasons. I am almost done reading The Surveillance Economy and it feels like almos

I am tempted to onionize my site for political (if that is the correct word) reasons. I am almost done reading The Surveillance Economy and it feels like almost an obligation to push back. (Using ProtonMail, use a large leased server in Germany at Hetzner for my routine work and writing, and using private browsing tabs when I must use Twitter or Reddit.) It looks like Onion domain hosting services are $5-$8/month, but going through their checklist and making one of my VPSs approved would be educational.

zelly 6y ago
> It looks like Onion domain hosting services are $5-$8/month You don't need a special host. You just need to run Tor and connect to the network.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Running an Tor Hidden Service doesn't require a specific host. As far as I know the traffic it generates will not be malicious. You only need to worry about malicious traffic and Tor-friendly ISPs if you plan to run an exit node (and at this point you need to consider the legal implications as well). Furthermore if you are not hosting any illegal/objectionable content and don't need to hide from law enforcement or state-sponsored attackers, a lot of the security concerns around anonymizing the server no longer apply either.
jsf01 6y ago
Using a centralized service which, ultimately, you have to take at their word seems to me like it should not be necessary in this age of trustless networks and innovation in decentralized technology. Speaking in particular about ProtonMail here. Are there any email services that are provably private?
- lend000 6y ago
  Frankly this is one of the few non-financial areas where blockchain-like technologies make sense: anonymously creating and routing connections. Right now, you can encrypt the contents of your email, but there is no hiding who is the recipient and who is the sender, certainly not from the mail service on either end. Until you solve that problem (for example, by posting encrypted versions on a public blockchain), you never get a truly end-to-end secure communication channel.
  - memexy 6y ago
    How does a blockchain solve the anonymity and routing problem? If I post anything on a public blockchain it will be cryptographically verified to have come from a specific account because all transactions are signed: https://blog.signatura.co/using-the-blockchain-as-a-digital-signature-scheme-f584278ae826 https://blog.signatura.co/using-the-blockchain-as-a-digital-.... > Bitcoin uses digital signatures (ECDSA) to prove ownership of funds, so sending bitcoins requires the owner of them to digitally sign authorizing the transfer. This transaction is sent to Bitcoin’s public network and later recorded in Bitcoin’s public database (blockchain), so anyone can verify it by checking its digital signature. If everything is signed and verified to come from a specific account then that's by definition not anonymous. To be anonymous it would need to be the case that no one could figure out who sent the transaction (making the sender of the transaction anonymous), i.e. it couldn't be tied back to any specific account.
    - lend000 6y ago
      Perhaps you are not familiar with Monero or Zcash.
      - memexy 6y ago
        I'm not familiar with many things. How does Monero or Zcash solve the problem of anonymity.
        zaarn 6y ago
        Monero uses ring-signatures; every transaction is signed by multiple signatures and it's impossible who is the actual signer. You also cannot tell what public address belongs to the signature, nor which public address is supposed to be the recipient. There is a reveal key that you can give tax authorities to reveal only you as a sender or receiver of a transaction but not the other end of it. Monero makes it impossible to tell what is what and gives people who want to trace money a very hard time doing so. ZCash uses Zero Knowledge Proofs. A ZK Proof (in this case zkSNARKs) is a way you can prove that you own a key to a second party without a third party being able to tell if there was an actual key involved (it is very easy for two colluding parties to fake a successfull ZK Proof). IIRC ZCash basically allows you to prove that a transaction has moved money correctly between two accounts without revealing what accounts those are or how much money was transacted. There is knowlegde of how much money is in the shielded pool, ie, all money behind ZK Proofs. Either approach has different advantages and disadvantages.
clashmeifyoucan 6y ago
you don't need to spend money if you have a server or even a raspberry pi or something—I run a mirror of my clearnet website as an onion service and it was a fairly straightforward setup.

zelly 6y ago

> It looks like Onion domain hosting services are $5-$8/month You don't need a special host. You just need to run Tor and connect to the network.

Nextgrid 6y ago
Running an Tor Hidden Service doesn't require a specific host. As far as I know the traffic it generates will not be malicious. You only need to worry about malicious traffic and Tor-friendly ISPs if you plan to run an exit node (and at this point you need to consider the legal implications as well). Furthermore if you are not hosting any illegal/objectionable content and don't need to hide from law enforcement or state-sponsored attackers, a lot of the security concerns around anonymizing the server no longer apply either.

jsf01 6y ago

Using a centralized service which, ultimately, you have to take at their word seems to me like it should not be necessary in this age of trustless networks and innovation in decentralized technology. Speaking in particular about ProtonMail here. Are there any email services that are provably private?

lend000 6y ago
Frankly this is one of the few non-financial areas where blockchain-like technologies make sense: anonymously creating and routing connections. Right now, you can encrypt the contents of your email, but there is no hiding who is the recipient and who is the sender, certainly not from the mail service on either end. Until you solve that problem (for example, by posting encrypted versions on a public blockchain), you never get a truly end-to-end secure communication channel.
- memexy 6y ago
  How does a blockchain solve the anonymity and routing problem? If I post anything on a public blockchain it will be cryptographically verified to have come from a specific account because all transactions are signed: https://blog.signatura.co/using-the-blockchain-as-a-digital-signature-scheme-f584278ae826 https://blog.signatura.co/using-the-blockchain-as-a-digital-.... > Bitcoin uses digital signatures (ECDSA) to prove ownership of funds, so sending bitcoins requires the owner of them to digitally sign authorizing the transfer. This transaction is sent to Bitcoin’s public network and later recorded in Bitcoin’s public database (blockchain), so anyone can verify it by checking its digital signature. If everything is signed and verified to come from a specific account then that's by definition not anonymous. To be anonymous it would need to be the case that no one could figure out who sent the transaction (making the sender of the transaction anonymous), i.e. it couldn't be tied back to any specific account.
  - lend000 6y ago
    Perhaps you are not familiar with Monero or Zcash.
    - memexy 6y ago
      I'm not familiar with many things. How does Monero or Zcash solve the problem of anonymity.
      - zaarn 6y ago
        Monero uses ring-signatures; every transaction is signed by multiple signatures and it's impossible who is the actual signer. You also cannot tell what public address belongs to the signature, nor which public address is supposed to be the recipient. There is a reveal key that you can give tax authorities to reveal only you as a sender or receiver of a transaction but not the other end of it. Monero makes it impossible to tell what is what and gives people who want to trace money a very hard time doing so. ZCash uses Zero Knowledge Proofs. A ZK Proof (in this case zkSNARKs) is a way you can prove that you own a key to a second party without a third party being able to tell if there was an actual key involved (it is very easy for two colluding parties to fake a successfull ZK Proof). IIRC ZCash basically allows you to prove that a transaction has moved money correctly between two accounts without revealing what accounts those are or how much money was transacted. There is knowlegde of how much money is in the shielded pool, ie, all money behind ZK Proofs. Either approach has different advantages and disadvantages.

clashmeifyoucan 6y ago

you don't need to spend money if you have a server or even a raspberry pi or something—I run a mirror of my clearnet website as an onion service and it was a fairly straightforward setup.