4 ms·

This is completely outside my areas of expertise, and there may already be a name for it, or it may be the dumb thing every rookie thinks of, but what about thi

by GrantS 13y ago

This is completely outside my areas of expertise, and there may already be a name for it, or it may be the dumb thing every rookie thinks of, but what about this: ignoring issues of bandwidth and power consumption (!), if every communications device broadcast a constant stream of data and every other communications device received every bit of data and ignored the (nearly 100%) of it that it didn't care about at the moment, you would eliminate the ability to know who was communicating with whom and when, right? The metadata is gone. If that's true, then now you just need to solve two problems: (1) how to keep the stuff (which you know is being broadcast to absolutely everyone) secret, and (2) how to coordinate the communication. Isn't that just cryptography and synchronizing watches while exchanging secrets in meatspace, stuff that's been known since before computers were part of it? (The point of ignoring power and bandwidth is to determine if this is ever possible in any universe, not just if it's possible for us right now.)

zanny 13y ago
Thus is a sledgehammer proposition, because while the minute power utilization to move packets across fiber or coax is insignificant, running the entire Internet at peak throughout all the time would be a huge electrical burden. You know how your phone runs out juice really fast on 4g? Do that, all the time, on everything. Data centers would melt.
- GrantS 13y ago
  I do completely realize this, but if that's truly the only barrier then we're left in the interesting position in which we can increase society's freedom of communication by increasing energy efficiency. Or maybe then someone could prove that real freedom is impossible due to the physics of the situation, or that freedom is possible today for exactly X people because we must limit ourselves to X devices in the world for the system to work, or that we need to harness the power of 1000 suns to achieve true freedom -- whatever, to me it still seems an interesting thought experiment to establish the boundaries of the problem. I can see why more practical minds may hate this approach. EDIT: Ah, or maybe there is a bitrate at which free communication is possible today -- if everyone sends only 96 bits per day or 8 bits per day at equal intervals, would this keep the internet from melting down. Over time, that bitrate would increase.
e3pi 13y ago
>...if every communications device broadcast a constant stream of data and every other communications device received every bit of data and ignored the (nearly 100%) of it that it didn't care about at the moment, you would eliminate the ability to know who was communicating with whom and when, right? The metadata is gone. Amateur Radio may address this directly or protocols to model, build upon. License requirements are also becoming more relaxed, accessible: Packet radio is a form of packet switching technology used to transmit digital data via radio or wireless communications links. It uses the same concepts of data transmission via Datagram that are fundamental to communications via the Internet, as opposed to the older techniques used by dedicated or switched circuits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio SailMail is radio based e-mail system designed for yacht owners operating beyond line-of-sight radio links to the internet. Much of its underlying technology is built upon the Winlink software originally developed by amateur radio enthusiasts .[1] Operation on SailMail network frequencies requires a license for the Marine Radiotelephone Service. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailmail SSB as a speech-scrambling technique SSB techniques can also be adapted to frequency-shift and frequency-invert baseband waveforms. These effects were used, in conjunction with other filtering techniques, during World War II as a simple method for speech encryption. Radiotelephone conversations between the US and Britain were intercepted and "decrypted" by the Germans; they included some early conversations between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill. In fact, the signals could be understood directly by trained operators. Largely to allow secure communications between Roosevelt and Churchill, the SIGSALY system of digital encryption was devised. Today, such simple inversion-based speech encryption techniques are easily decrypted using simple techniques and are no longer regarded as secure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#SSB_as_a_speech-scrambling_technique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#SSB_...
- GrantS 13y ago
  Thanks for this context -- these were all new to me.
- kbaker 13y ago
  Amateur radio can't be used since the FCC prohibits the use of encryption or otherwise obfuscating the content of messages. Also, commercial use of amateur radio is prohibited which means using e.g. an open WiFi access point with your call sign as the SSID could be trouble if someone were to go to amazon.com... it's a gray area though.
hamoid 13y ago
Even if data was continuously sent, you could still analyze the data by protocol. You can find out who sends e-mails to who, who our contacts are in Twitter, Facebook, Skype, how often we exchange data with them... One could build an anonymization tool that adds randomness addressing those one by one. For instance, to avoid our e-mail exchanges being analyzed, this tool could exchange random e-mails in the background with people we don't know. Just to mess up with who our contacts are. To make a list of "users of Tor" being no longer useful, the tool would send and receive data to the Tor network one random day per week. It would anonymize searches (this already exists) by making random searches. It should visit random websites But would you add random contacts to your Facebook account? To Skype? ... Dealing with all aspects is hard, it would waste electricity and resources, and I think it would just make analysis harder, not impossible.

by GrantS 13y ago

zanny 13y ago

Thus is a sledgehammer proposition, because while the minute power utilization to move packets across fiber or coax is insignificant, running the entire Internet at peak throughout all the time would be a huge electrical burden. You know how your phone runs out juice really fast on 4g? Do that, all the time, on everything. Data centers would melt.

GrantS 13y ago
I do completely realize this, but if that's truly the only barrier then we're left in the interesting position in which we can increase society's freedom of communication by increasing energy efficiency. Or maybe then someone could prove that real freedom is impossible due to the physics of the situation, or that freedom is possible today for exactly X people because we must limit ourselves to X devices in the world for the system to work, or that we need to harness the power of 1000 suns to achieve true freedom -- whatever, to me it still seems an interesting thought experiment to establish the boundaries of the problem. I can see why more practical minds may hate this approach. EDIT: Ah, or maybe there is a bitrate at which free communication is possible today -- if everyone sends only 96 bits per day or 8 bits per day at equal intervals, would this keep the internet from melting down. Over time, that bitrate would increase.

e3pi 13y ago

>...if every communications device broadcast a constant stream of data and every other communications device received every bit of data and ignored the (nearly 100%) of it that it didn't care about at the moment, you would eliminate the ability to know who was communicating with whom and when, right? The metadata is gone. Amateur Radio may address this directly or protocols to model, build upon. License requirements are also becoming more relaxed, accessible: Packet radio is a form of packet switching technology used to transmit digital data via radio or wireless communications links. It uses the same concepts of data transmission via Datagram that are fundamental to communications via the Internet, as opposed to the older techniques used by dedicated or switched circuits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio SailMail is radio based e-mail system designed for yacht owners operating beyond line-of-sight radio links to the internet. Much of its underlying technology is built upon the Winlink software originally developed by amateur radio enthusiasts .[1] Operation on SailMail network frequencies requires a license for the Marine Radiotelephone Service. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailmail SSB as a speech-scrambling technique SSB techniques can also be adapted to frequency-shift and frequency-invert baseband waveforms. These effects were used, in conjunction with other filtering techniques, during World War II as a simple method for speech encryption. Radiotelephone conversations between the US and Britain were intercepted and "decrypted" by the Germans; they included some early conversations between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill. In fact, the signals could be understood directly by trained operators. Largely to allow secure communications between Roosevelt and Churchill, the SIGSALY system of digital encryption was devised. Today, such simple inversion-based speech encryption techniques are easily decrypted using simple techniques and are no longer regarded as secure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#SSB_as_a_speech-scrambling_technique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#SSB_...

GrantS 13y ago
Thanks for this context -- these were all new to me.
kbaker 13y ago
Amateur radio can't be used since the FCC prohibits the use of encryption or otherwise obfuscating the content of messages. Also, commercial use of amateur radio is prohibited which means using e.g. an open WiFi access point with your call sign as the SSID could be trouble if someone were to go to amazon.com... it's a gray area though.

hamoid 13y ago

Even if data was continuously sent, you could still analyze the data by protocol. You can find out who sends e-mails to who, who our contacts are in Twitter, Facebook, Skype, how often we exchange data with them... One could build an anonymization tool that adds randomness addressing those one by one. For instance, to avoid our e-mail exchanges being analyzed, this tool could exchange random e-mails in the background with people we don't know. Just to mess up with who our contacts are. To make a list of "users of Tor" being no longer useful, the tool would send and receive data to the Tor network one random day per week. It would anonymize searches (this already exists) by making random searches. It should visit random websites But would you add random contacts to your Facebook account? To Skype? ... Dealing with all aspects is hard, it would waste electricity and resources, and I think it would just make analysis harder, not impossible.