5 ms·

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

by 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.
        memexy 6y ago
        Makes sense. I remember going to a bay area talk about Bulletproofs but the talk was abstract enough that I didn't get too much out of it. Interesting to see that Monero is using them.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I understand. Still, I feel better using ProtonMail than FastMail, and I consider FastMail to be preferable to gmail. I also feel better only touching Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook in a private browsing tab. I understand that they can to some extent still use my data to make money for themselves and not share any back with me. I understand that even limiting the data collected in me, I am still subject to nudging, herding, and conditioning - but I hope to impede these actions against me. I am an author and I rely on social media a few times a year to notify readers of new books, updates, etc. Otherwise I would be happy disconnecting, as I have disconnected from corporate news services.
  - rapnie 6y ago
    Instead of Twitter you could use Nitter [0] for reading and use Invidious [1] instead of YouTube. There is also a privacy-friendly Insta client, but I forgot which one. I often take the effort to convert the URL's to these sites before sharing with others (there are plugins that do this automatically). [0] https://nitter.net/about https://nitter.net/about [1] https://invidio.us https://invidio.us Also check https://switching.software https://switching.software
    - mark_l_watson 6y ago
      Thanks, great resources. I must admit to having never seen these three sites before.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Look up remailers, think Tor for e-mail. No blockchain necessary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk_anonymous_remailer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk_anonymous_remaile...
  - eVeechu7 6y ago
    Are remailers in a healthy state at the moment? Do large email providers accept mail sent through them or just mark it as spam?
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      I doubt there's a ready network of cypherpunk remailers sitting around at the moment. I seem to recall (~20 years ago) a lot of remailers ended up with spam problems. However the system by which they operate is relatively easy to implement by volunteers. The model is very similar to Tor's onion routing (they're both Chaumian mix networks). I could see middle relays run by volunteers on their Gmail accounts (or whatever) with exit nodes being established addresses specifically for the purpose of being exit nodes. Exit nodes might require messages be signed by a publicly available key or one registered with the exit node. The sender does need a public key for all the hops. So the final recipient needs to have a key known to the sender. While spammers could send stuff to people they know public keys for, they wouldn't necessarily be able to send random spam to people. IIRC in the historical spam problems the sender would make an anonymous (non-crypto) remailer the final recipient so the network would forward the encrypted messages around but the last one would remail the unencrypted message to an included distribution list or listserve or something. Since anonymous remailers aren't a thing anymore that spam vector is closed. Remailers were an interesting thing a long time ago. Because they work on extant infrastructure I think they could be a cool thing again.

by jsf01 6y ago

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.
      - memexy 6y ago
        Makes sense. I remember going to a bay area talk about Bulletproofs but the talk was abstract enough that I didn't get too much out of it. Interesting to see that Monero is using them.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I understand. Still, I feel better using ProtonMail than FastMail, and I consider FastMail to be preferable to gmail. I also feel better only touching Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook in a private browsing tab. I understand that they can to some extent still use my data to make money for themselves and not share any back with me. I understand that even limiting the data collected in me, I am still subject to nudging, herding, and conditioning - but I hope to impede these actions against me. I am an author and I rely on social media a few times a year to notify readers of new books, updates, etc. Otherwise I would be happy disconnecting, as I have disconnected from corporate news services.
- rapnie 6y ago
  Instead of Twitter you could use Nitter [0] for reading and use Invidious [1] instead of YouTube. There is also a privacy-friendly Insta client, but I forgot which one. I often take the effort to convert the URL's to these sites before sharing with others (there are plugins that do this automatically). [0] https://nitter.net/about https://nitter.net/about [1] https://invidio.us https://invidio.us Also check https://switching.software https://switching.software
  - mark_l_watson 6y ago
    Thanks, great resources. I must admit to having never seen these three sites before.
giantrobot 6y ago
Look up remailers, think Tor for e-mail. No blockchain necessary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk_anonymous_remailer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk_anonymous_remaile...
- eVeechu7 6y ago
  Are remailers in a healthy state at the moment? Do large email providers accept mail sent through them or just mark it as spam?
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    I doubt there's a ready network of cypherpunk remailers sitting around at the moment. I seem to recall (~20 years ago) a lot of remailers ended up with spam problems. However the system by which they operate is relatively easy to implement by volunteers. The model is very similar to Tor's onion routing (they're both Chaumian mix networks). I could see middle relays run by volunteers on their Gmail accounts (or whatever) with exit nodes being established addresses specifically for the purpose of being exit nodes. Exit nodes might require messages be signed by a publicly available key or one registered with the exit node. The sender does need a public key for all the hops. So the final recipient needs to have a key known to the sender. While spammers could send stuff to people they know public keys for, they wouldn't necessarily be able to send random spam to people. IIRC in the historical spam problems the sender would make an anonymous (non-crypto) remailer the final recipient so the network would forward the encrypted messages around but the last one would remail the unencrypted message to an included distribution list or listserve or something. Since anonymous remailers aren't a thing anymore that spam vector is closed. Remailers were an interesting thing a long time ago. Because they work on extant infrastructure I think they could be a cool thing again.