4 ms·

Yeah, I think the parent started with some good concepts like "a computer I own" and "not being spied on", but then missed the lack of relation between the two.

Yeah, I think the parent started with some good concepts like "a computer I own" and "not being spied on", but then missed the lack of relation between the two. You can have a computer that does not connect to the Internet, or connects to the Internet very little, or only connects to the Internet through specific communication channels you open in a firewall. That's all very attainable. However, as soon as you communicate with third parties, be it your ISP, a cloud provider, or your end communication partner, you are potentially sharing with more than you intend. It's a "the only way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead" problem. You can't control what other people choose to share.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
I'll go further: when have you ever been able to communicate with guaranteed privacy? Telephone? Nope. Ham radio? Nope. Letters sent through the mail? Nope.
- ROARosen 6y ago
  Letters sent with homing pigeons were mostly private...
  - osobo 6y ago
    Pigeon: ...
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    Trained Peregrine Falcon: Hold my beer.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      That'll give you a denial-of-pigeon attack, but does it really risk interception?
    - JasonFruit 6y ago
      Typical: we started with a technical problem, and started bikeshedding it, so now we have drunk falcons.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    But a pidgeon leaves a trail of metadata on the ground as it carries your message, so this communication channel is still vulnerable to bulk network analysis by some Advanced Persistent Threat.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Alternatively, you can just whitewash that threat vector away.
    - etiam 6y ago
      If it wasn't for the fact that it'd be tax funded I'd love to see them try bulk collection of that.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    I guess The Man is why homing pigeons are extinct now.
    - CRConrad 6y ago
      Are they? I don't think so.
- m463 6y ago
  By turning off the radio, sitting in the pod and talking about HAL behind his back.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    And, as we know full-well, this makes HAL angry and petulant.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Postal mail and telephone were ... relatively secure, inasmuch as that bulk surveillance was expensive. Wiredtapping and postal interception, as well as metadata (pen-trace and postal covers) are possible, but scale poorly when individual lines must be listened to by individual agents, or individual letters carefully opened and resealed. Digital permits surveillance at mass scale. It seems ultimately a fundamental property of the medium, less a bug than simply a feature. There is also a fairly robust tradition of privacy in postal mail (in most countries), and after some false starts, eventually applied to telephony, at least in theory. The situation for email is far less evolved. These days, if you do want secure communications, postal probably offers some real benefits. I'm somewhat surprised that postal remailing services (send an outer message to a central point who deposits the enclosed prepaid inner envelope(s) to final destination(s)) isn't a thing, or at least not one that has any appreciable awareness. The capabilities of voice-to-text and handwriting / optical character recognition make the viability of intercepting virtually any spoken conversation, or any _observed_ written communication, quite high. The costs are much greater than with straight machine-readable character text (ASCII/UTF-8/Unicode), but pretty tractable. My view is increasingly that privacy is an emergent phenomenon responding to ever-increasing surveillance and observation capabilities. The modern discussion began in the 1890s (Warren & Brandeis: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/courses/cs5436/warren-brandeis.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/courses/cs5436/warren-bran...), as technologically-mediated intrusions were increasing greatly in capability. Though what the end-game is I do not know.
  - DocTomoe 6y ago
    I would argue that postal remailing exposes the remailer to legal risk, and (if done with few remailers) gives the surveillers few points of particularly interesting mail hubs. If anything, postal remailing would probably only work in a TOR-like manner, with many, distributed, non-for-profit remailers - but that opens a whole set of new problems, like who pays for the service, what prevents the remailer to just take the delivery for themselves (as undoubtedly such a service would be used to remail illicit substances and other valuables), and how would such a network of legitimate, trustworthy remailers know each other to do some tunnelling?
- Hani1337 6y ago
  pgp, 2fa, tails os. what more do you want?
- LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
  Maybe faked-IP UDP? I have not tried it, but it may be probably banned by ISP.

JKCalhoun 6y ago

I'll go further: when have you ever been able to communicate with guaranteed privacy? Telephone? Nope. Ham radio? Nope. Letters sent through the mail? Nope.

ROARosen 6y ago
Letters sent with homing pigeons were mostly private...
- osobo 6y ago
  Pigeon: ...
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Trained Peregrine Falcon: Hold my beer.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    That'll give you a denial-of-pigeon attack, but does it really risk interception?
  - JasonFruit 6y ago
    Typical: we started with a technical problem, and started bikeshedding it, so now we have drunk falcons.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  But a pidgeon leaves a trail of metadata on the ground as it carries your message, so this communication channel is still vulnerable to bulk network analysis by some Advanced Persistent Threat.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Alternatively, you can just whitewash that threat vector away.
  - etiam 6y ago
    If it wasn't for the fact that it'd be tax funded I'd love to see them try bulk collection of that.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  I guess The Man is why homing pigeons are extinct now.
  - CRConrad 6y ago
    Are they? I don't think so.
m463 6y ago
By turning off the radio, sitting in the pod and talking about HAL behind his back.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  And, as we know full-well, this makes HAL angry and petulant.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Postal mail and telephone were ... relatively secure, inasmuch as that bulk surveillance was expensive. Wiredtapping and postal interception, as well as metadata (pen-trace and postal covers) are possible, but scale poorly when individual lines must be listened to by individual agents, or individual letters carefully opened and resealed. Digital permits surveillance at mass scale. It seems ultimately a fundamental property of the medium, less a bug than simply a feature. There is also a fairly robust tradition of privacy in postal mail (in most countries), and after some false starts, eventually applied to telephony, at least in theory. The situation for email is far less evolved. These days, if you do want secure communications, postal probably offers some real benefits. I'm somewhat surprised that postal remailing services (send an outer message to a central point who deposits the enclosed prepaid inner envelope(s) to final destination(s)) isn't a thing, or at least not one that has any appreciable awareness. The capabilities of voice-to-text and handwriting / optical character recognition make the viability of intercepting virtually any spoken conversation, or any _observed_ written communication, quite high. The costs are much greater than with straight machine-readable character text (ASCII/UTF-8/Unicode), but pretty tractable. My view is increasingly that privacy is an emergent phenomenon responding to ever-increasing surveillance and observation capabilities. The modern discussion began in the 1890s (Warren & Brandeis: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/courses/cs5436/warren-brandeis.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/courses/cs5436/warren-bran...), as technologically-mediated intrusions were increasing greatly in capability. Though what the end-game is I do not know.
- DocTomoe 6y ago
  I would argue that postal remailing exposes the remailer to legal risk, and (if done with few remailers) gives the surveillers few points of particularly interesting mail hubs. If anything, postal remailing would probably only work in a TOR-like manner, with many, distributed, non-for-profit remailers - but that opens a whole set of new problems, like who pays for the service, what prevents the remailer to just take the delivery for themselves (as undoubtedly such a service would be used to remail illicit substances and other valuables), and how would such a network of legitimate, trustworthy remailers know each other to do some tunnelling?
Hani1337 6y ago
pgp, 2fa, tails os. what more do you want?
LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
Maybe faked-IP UDP? I have not tried it, but it may be probably banned by ISP.