4 ms·

I've spent the last four years reading a lot of research papers in this area as part of my PhD research, and while I'm all for increasing the available options

I've spent the last four years reading a lot of research papers in this area as part of my PhD research, and while I'm all for increasing the available options for censorship circumvention it's not clear that Cloak does anything novel when compared to existing systems. The real weakness of all such systems is setup and rendezvous: how do clients find friendly servers, and how do you prevent the censoring regime from finding and blocking them? It's not an easy problem to solve.

yieldcrv 4y ago
Does it need to do anything novel? I always ask my tech cohort people this. They get alot of peer clout from pursuing “original”, when often times their vertical just needs “additional”. Like an additional grocery store in the area. It doesnt need to innovate.
jasode 4y ago
>it's not clear that Cloak does anything novel when compared to existing systems. I'm not an expert on the current state of censorship-circumvention utilities but I found this recent comment when browsing the Cloak source repository that may partially answer your question: https://github.com/cbeuw/Cloak/issues/169#issuecomment-1257480837 https://github.com/cbeuw/Cloak/issues/169#issuecomment-12574... >, and how do you prevent the censoring regime from finding and blocking them? The tools like Cloak try to work on the principle "collateral freedom" which hides censored data inside of "internet services that are too big block" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom And the effectiveness of that strategy depends on the hackability of those internet services as they can sometimes change the rules which close the loopholes of "collateral freedom" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting#Disabling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting#Disabling
junofan 4y ago
Cloak doesn’t appear to be a research project, so novelty may not be a goal. It appears to be extremely simple; that alone may be valuable for some users.
lallysingh 4y ago
It's always the same problems. Here, it looks like you have to know someone who's running one, and transfer the details through a side channel. Those may be problematic, but also maybe not. Even rot13'd over email will probably work.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Does it need to do anything novel? I always ask my tech cohort people this. They get alot of peer clout from pursuing “original”, when often times their vertical just needs “additional”. Like an additional grocery store in the area. It doesnt need to innovate.

jasode 4y ago

>it's not clear that Cloak does anything novel when compared to existing systems. I'm not an expert on the current state of censorship-circumvention utilities but I found this recent comment when browsing the Cloak source repository that may partially answer your question: https://github.com/cbeuw/Cloak/issues/169#issuecomment-1257480837 https://github.com/cbeuw/Cloak/issues/169#issuecomment-12574... >, and how do you prevent the censoring regime from finding and blocking them? The tools like Cloak try to work on the principle "collateral freedom" which hides censored data inside of "internet services that are too big block" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom And the effectiveness of that strategy depends on the hackability of those internet services as they can sometimes change the rules which close the loopholes of "collateral freedom" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting#Disabling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting#Disabling

junofan 4y ago

Cloak doesn’t appear to be a research project, so novelty may not be a goal. It appears to be extremely simple; that alone may be valuable for some users.

lallysingh 4y ago

It's always the same problems. Here, it looks like you have to know someone who's running one, and transfer the details through a side channel. Those may be problematic, but also maybe not. Even rot13'd over email will probably work.