6 ms·

Okay, I'll re-state it technically: How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of

by api 14y ago

Okay, I'll re-state it technically: How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data? Hard problem. Trying to solve it would be interesting. Not trying to solve it would make you identical to FreeNet and Tor and all the other efforts in this area, and thus less interesting. I agree that there is no 100% solution to this problem, since all data can be converted to any format. There is also no 100% solution to pollution in a city, for example, or public health, or usability of a GUI. But there are 90% solutions that could make the problem marginal rather than severe. BTW, on my "emotional vomit:" Tell me. If these networks are for real human beings to engage in open communication, what happens when one of these real human beings comes across... say... a picture of a little girl being cooked over an open fire like a pig. (I didn't see this, but I was discussing the Tor .onion network on Reddit and someone claimed they came across this. I believe them.) Do you really think that person is going to return to this network to discuss... say... politics or economics or their local election? It is a problem. To strip away the "emotional vomit," let's call it a usability problem. How do we make a freenet that is usable for non-psychopaths? Edit: what I'm really saying is this: Freenets have been done. It's a solved problem. Add some PK crypto and some hashing and some onion routing and shake. What isn't a solved problem is: make a darknet/freenet that your mom would feel comfortable using. Make one that your average person -- maybe one with kids and thus really turned off by CP -- would want to one-click install from the Mac app store and browse. THAT would make a serious political impact. Now you'd have hordes of average people using an utterly uncensorable chat system that was also hard to data-mine and tie to identity. Right now, most people are going to start browsing the offerings that already exist (Tor is pretty easy to set up) and see stuff like "world's largest archive of hard-core lolita!", close the app, delete it, and never return. That's why these networks are not very popular, and it severely limits their political impact.

user49598 14y ago
The problem is thinking that there is a way. You can't. Data can easily be obfuscated. As long as bits are flowing through your machine from sources that you don't control, you could be middle man to anything.
- davorak 14y ago
  API stated it was a hard problem. Hard problems dealing with cryptography can take years and some times produce PhDs when they are cracked. It is easy to tell it is a hard problem, it is hard to say for sure it is not possible. If you have done the hard work of show it impossible please share and save others from repeating your work.
  - user49598 14y ago
    This isn't about cryptography, this is about what data can be pulled out of bits transfered through your computer. There is no requisite that they be encrypted, they can be obfuscated, hidden, or just not recognizable as illegal to you. There is no way for you to verify that a collection of bits, put on your computer by a 3rd party, does not in fact represent something illegal. You would have to have access to every existing and theoretical encoding, encryption and obfuscation technique, and use them in every theoretical combination to verify such a thing.
  - api 14y ago
    There is at least one free Ph.D thesis topic in this thread. I think solving this problem and creating a darknet that most people would want to use would be at least as impactful as the development of Bitcoin. People said that was impossible too.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    The hard work has already been done and it is easy to demonstrate the problem and the impossibility of telling 'good data' from 'bad data', assuming the system is cryptographically secure, as by definition a cryptographically secure system resists analysis of content. Consider the problem of one time pads. If I have two messages the same length, one made of 'good data' and the other consisting of 'bad data' and I encode them both with different one time pads, then it is possible for the resulting ciphertext version of each message to be identical. Another way of putting this is that for any given ciphertext that has been properly encoded with a one time pad, the only information available about the plaintext is the length of the message (assuming you know already that a one time pad was used) and nothing else.
knowtheory 14y ago
Regarding the social implications and imperatives... I think that groups like LulzSec provide a public service (see "Why the Joker and Not Batman is the Savior of [sic] Us All" http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-the-savior-of-us-all http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-t... ) in that they show the importance and the need for everyone to be security conscious. I wish there were more groups like this out there raiding and dumping stuff periodically. I wonder about whether it'd be political or legally feasible to have a law enforcement agency which just trolled around the internet and attempted to crack services that citizens depend upon. The reason why this is relevant and important to dark nets, is that currently the only folks who use dark nets are folks who have something to hide. That might be folks who are illegitimately persecuted by governments, or folks who are legitimate criminals. These two groups are functionally indistinguishable, even if their intents and causes are different. They both have data they're trying to hide and communicate, without exposing themselves to authorities.
derefr 14y ago
> How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data? If you do really want true anonymity and un-censorability as guarantees of the system design, then no, I don't think users can decide what they don't want to store or transmit. For, if they can, then their governments can coerce them into making the same "choice." Any preference that can be set by a user, can also be forced upon said user by a system administrator, operating system vendor, etc. My real question is, do we need cryptography and anonymity built in at a protocol level to have something that's useful for political activism? It seems to me that there are only two real "innovations" these networks bring over, say, pushing encrypted blobs to people over SFTP drops (these, by coincidence, are both factors I've only really seen on Freenet): 1. That you have the ability to "push" content into the network, such that it will then replicate and spread through the network as it is accessed, without the possibility of an audit trail leading back to the source peer (even though the original source may know which client uploaded it, each peer only knows which other peer they got it from, so all you need to ensure anonymity is an internet cafe); 2. That content cannot be removed from the network easily--as there can always be dark peers who have copies of your data block, who will come online later and repopulate the network even if it has been seemingly purged of a block (by, say, all involved homes and data-centers being raided by the feds)--and that this happens pretty much transparently to the people involved, since people are always joining, leaving, and re-joining the mesh/swarm/whatever-it-is. Encryption need only happen on a layer above this system, where and when it's desired. Anonymity need only happen at the end-points: the users can just access the system over Tor if they don't have the requisite internet cafe/seven proxies handy. As long as you're just passing cat pictures around, why not just throw them onto a simple, infinitely-sized, everyone-can-create-files-but-nobody-can-delete-them DHT-based "disk"? And if you're passing political activism around, just encrypt and sign it like you were going to send it over email, then drop it in the mesh and email the URN instead. (This is presuming a stable PKI key-publishing/querying infrastructure as well, of course.) And if you want to make it convenient for end-users, just make a browser extension that can load those URNs through the mesh as if they were regular HTTP URLs, and does the decryption and signature-validation automatically--and have the mesh software install that browser extension--and then you'll have something.
- 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
neilk 14y ago
I doubt this is easily possible, with Tor as designed. Maybe you could establish a blacklist of CP sites, and that could be applied at the entry and exit nodes of the Tor network. This blacklist would have to be public and checked by many that it didn't contain non-CP sites, so in effect it would be a public directory of CP, which is problematic already. Then, those that run entry and exit nodes could voluntarily apply the blacklist. In this way the Tor community could have its own values, while still being independent of any authority. But this assumes that CP will remain restricted to certain domains in the .onion system, or the traditional DNS system. Which of course they won't. Maybe there will be one .onion domain per picture. Maybe there will be a Flickr of .onion where it's not so easy to figure out who's doing what. Then you'd have to lean on that service to police its own members' content. I can imagine various messy and imperfect ways to limit the amount of CP in the world, or at least make it harder to find, but we just don't have good legal models for dealing with true freedom of speech. And our institutions today would rather persist in the fantasy that they can completely control speech, than accept that their role might just be to advise the citizens on how to police themselves.
erichocean 14y ago
You could require receivers to calculate a difficult problem where the difficulty was based on the "hate" people had for the content, similar to what Zed Shaw tried to do awhile ago with IRC (?). Basically, each person that didn't like the content would spend some CPU time to up the difficulty of transferring it. After awhile, it'd take someone who wanted the content so long that they would give up, in which case the content wouldn't be transferred any more.

by api 14y ago

user49598 14y ago

The problem is thinking that there is a way. You can't. Data can easily be obfuscated. As long as bits are flowing through your machine from sources that you don't control, you could be middle man to anything.

davorak 14y ago
API stated it was a hard problem. Hard problems dealing with cryptography can take years and some times produce PhDs when they are cracked. It is easy to tell it is a hard problem, it is hard to say for sure it is not possible. If you have done the hard work of show it impossible please share and save others from repeating your work.
- user49598 14y ago
  This isn't about cryptography, this is about what data can be pulled out of bits transfered through your computer. There is no requisite that they be encrypted, they can be obfuscated, hidden, or just not recognizable as illegal to you. There is no way for you to verify that a collection of bits, put on your computer by a 3rd party, does not in fact represent something illegal. You would have to have access to every existing and theoretical encoding, encryption and obfuscation technique, and use them in every theoretical combination to verify such a thing.
- api 14y ago
  There is at least one free Ph.D thesis topic in this thread. I think solving this problem and creating a darknet that most people would want to use would be at least as impactful as the development of Bitcoin. People said that was impossible too.
- ktizo 14y ago
  The hard work has already been done and it is easy to demonstrate the problem and the impossibility of telling 'good data' from 'bad data', assuming the system is cryptographically secure, as by definition a cryptographically secure system resists analysis of content. Consider the problem of one time pads. If I have two messages the same length, one made of 'good data' and the other consisting of 'bad data' and I encode them both with different one time pads, then it is possible for the resulting ciphertext version of each message to be identical. Another way of putting this is that for any given ciphertext that has been properly encoded with a one time pad, the only information available about the plaintext is the length of the message (assuming you know already that a one time pad was used) and nothing else.

knowtheory 14y ago

Regarding the social implications and imperatives... I think that groups like LulzSec provide a public service (see "Why the Joker and Not Batman is the Savior of [sic] Us All" http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-the-savior-of-us-all http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-t... ) in that they show the importance and the need for everyone to be security conscious. I wish there were more groups like this out there raiding and dumping stuff periodically. I wonder about whether it'd be political or legally feasible to have a law enforcement agency which just trolled around the internet and attempted to crack services that citizens depend upon. The reason why this is relevant and important to dark nets, is that currently the only folks who use dark nets are folks who have something to hide. That might be folks who are illegitimately persecuted by governments, or folks who are legitimate criminals. These two groups are functionally indistinguishable, even if their intents and causes are different. They both have data they're trying to hide and communicate, without exposing themselves to authorities.

derefr 14y ago

> How do we design a system that is anonymous and un-censorable where users can opt out of being relays for certain types of data? If you do really want true anonymity and un-censorability as guarantees of the system design, then no, I don't think users can decide what they don't want to store or transmit. For, if they can, then their governments can coerce them into making the same "choice." Any preference that can be set by a user, can also be forced upon said user by a system administrator, operating system vendor, etc. My real question is, do we need cryptography and anonymity built in at a protocol level to have something that's useful for political activism? It seems to me that there are only two real "innovations" these networks bring over, say, pushing encrypted blobs to people over SFTP drops (these, by coincidence, are both factors I've only really seen on Freenet): 1. That you have the ability to "push" content into the network, such that it will then replicate and spread through the network as it is accessed, without the possibility of an audit trail leading back to the source peer (even though the original source may know which client uploaded it, each peer only knows which other peer they got it from, so all you need to ensure anonymity is an internet cafe); 2. That content cannot be removed from the network easily--as there can always be dark peers who have copies of your data block, who will come online later and repopulate the network even if it has been seemingly purged of a block (by, say, all involved homes and data-centers being raided by the feds)--and that this happens pretty much transparently to the people involved, since people are always joining, leaving, and re-joining the mesh/swarm/whatever-it-is. Encryption need only happen on a layer above this system, where and when it's desired. Anonymity need only happen at the end-points: the users can just access the system over Tor if they don't have the requisite internet cafe/seven proxies handy. As long as you're just passing cat pictures around, why not just throw them onto a simple, infinitely-sized, everyone-can-create-files-but-nobody-can-delete-them DHT-based "disk"? And if you're passing political activism around, just encrypt and sign it like you were going to send it over email, then drop it in the mesh and email the URN instead. (This is presuming a stable PKI key-publishing/querying infrastructure as well, of course.) And if you want to make it convenient for end-users, just make a browser extension that can load those URNs through the mesh as if they were regular HTTP URLs, and does the decryption and signature-validation automatically--and have the mesh software install that browser extension--and then you'll have something.

14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

neilk 14y ago

I doubt this is easily possible, with Tor as designed. Maybe you could establish a blacklist of CP sites, and that could be applied at the entry and exit nodes of the Tor network. This blacklist would have to be public and checked by many that it didn't contain non-CP sites, so in effect it would be a public directory of CP, which is problematic already. Then, those that run entry and exit nodes could voluntarily apply the blacklist. In this way the Tor community could have its own values, while still being independent of any authority. But this assumes that CP will remain restricted to certain domains in the .onion system, or the traditional DNS system. Which of course they won't. Maybe there will be one .onion domain per picture. Maybe there will be a Flickr of .onion where it's not so easy to figure out who's doing what. Then you'd have to lean on that service to police its own members' content. I can imagine various messy and imperfect ways to limit the amount of CP in the world, or at least make it harder to find, but we just don't have good legal models for dealing with true freedom of speech. And our institutions today would rather persist in the fantasy that they can completely control speech, than accept that their role might just be to advise the citizens on how to police themselves.

erichocean 14y ago

You could require receivers to calculate a difficult problem where the difficulty was based on the "hate" people had for the content, similar to what Zed Shaw tried to do awhile ago with IRC (?). Basically, each person that didn't like the content would spend some CPU time to up the difficulty of transferring it. After awhile, it'd take someone who wanted the content so long that they would give up, in which case the content wouldn't be transferred any more.