6 ms·

> While I understand his personal reasons pj = Pamela Jones But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian

by rolux 13y ago

> While I understand his personal reasons pj = Pamela Jones But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London. It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.

willvarfar 13y ago
> we need entirely new communication protocols Whole new enforcement of privacy laws, you mean?
- rolux 13y ago
  No, I mean protocols. While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. (But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)
  - willvarfar 13y ago
    Its a subject I keep an eye on, e.g. freenet and off-the-record messaging. I think these systems cannot work :( If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion-email http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies. Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight of abuse :(
    - rolux 13y ago
      Just two points: - That's why I prefer to think about protocols, as opposed to a system (i.e. global implementation of one or more generalized protocols) - You don't always have to solve the problem theoretically; solving it practically may be good enough. A system can be usable for a long time, before it collapses under abuse.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      Its not as though we don't have a spam problem already… Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion – anonymous but requiring micro-payments. Say, 500 or 1000 satoshi (around a tenth of a cent) per message delivered – not as a means of generating revenue, but as a way to destroy email's current "if I only get one sale per 100,000 emails I send, that just means I need to send 10,000,000 emails a day to get my desired 100sale/day" vulnerability - if that actually cost the spammer $10,000/day, it just wouldn't happen. ('course that required having hard currency to bitcoin exchanges easy enough for the general public to use, and scalable enough to service a significant proportion of internet-using people)
      - pessimizer 13y ago
        >Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion That's not fresh. I think it may have even been entertained by Congress for a while.
      - willvarfar 13y ago
        Yes there have been various attempts at proof-of-work algorithms to fight e.g. spam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system Bitcoin is itself a proof-of-work system. However, these again don't work. The abuser has ample resources to actually do the work on: a botnet.
    - nanoscopic 13y ago
      Your final statement here is not true. The way in which you keep anonymity with an onion system is as follows: 1. Use a central originating server for onion packet sourcing 2. Make it public who all users are 3. Have onion packet creation contain "token of receipt" for all messages along the chain. 4. Rate limit message origination from users 5. Ban users who refuse to forward encrypted packets at a steady rate 6. Only allow small message sizes ( 10k ) 7. Have all online users constantly originate "bogus" packets to random users 8... I am currently writing such a system. Some details up at circleofdistrust.com in about a month or so.
      - willvarfar 13y ago
        How do you rate limit users? Are not originator traffic and pass thru traffic indisquishable, so a receiving peer cannot tell the if a node is just well connected and has a lot of traffic on behalf of others, or is an abuser? And how to measure forward rates?
        nanoscopic 13y ago
        There are two types of nodes in the system, "servers" and "users". All servers communicate with each other so that they are all aware of all existing "servers" globally. There will likely be a limit on who is allowed and authorized to be a server. ( likely a list of their public keys published to the main site for the project ) All packets must be hashed and authorized ( signed ) by the server before they can be sent out. Any packet not authorized by a server will be rejected. In this way, servers will rate limit originating packets. The traffic is distinguishable because the onion layer is identified at each level. If, after unwrapping your layer, you discover the underlying "level" is not 1 less than your own informed level, the ip origination will be flagged back to the server for spamming. Current estimate for number of onion levels is 100. Actual destination should be somewhere in the middle 60 or so, to prevent government tracing of the packet because all hops. At each hop, random delays will be implemented, as well as injection of extra data and/or disguising the entire packets as other forms of tcp communication. ( to prevent dropping of the packets through filtering ) The "servers" know that users are sending out origination packets at a specific rate and to whom, but nothing about the layers beyond the first. Additionally, the entire onion packet is never sent to any server, only a hash of it with specific other information. This way, "servers" can never be accused of harboring illegal data of any sort. Forwarding rates are measured because each onion layer containing a "message of receipt" that is sent back to the server. The server receieves all of those from the originating user before approving the onion packet. The only think attackers of the system could try to do is attempt to DDOS users of the system. This is prevented inherently by it being known at all types all users logged into the system ( this is public knowledge in the system ). Communication is only allowed from valid behaving users.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    If your laws are being ignored by institutions in power, you have bigger problems, and you can't code your way out of each one fast enough.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. So you intent of fixing just a small point of the whole mess (the surveillance thing) and not the overall mess (bad governments, something that affects 100% of our life and countries)? Not to mention there is nothing to fix this way. Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time.
    - rolux 13y ago
      No, I'm just saying that working technology (like general purpose computers as affordable consumer goods) may be harder to ignore than "the voice of the people". (In Philosophy, you'd call this position "materialist", I assume.)
    - bigiain 13y ago
      "Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time." I think that genie is well out-of-the-bottle. Did you see the article recently about installing linux on the microcontroller on a hard disk controller board? There's no end of "consumer electronics" that have "general purpose computers" inside them. Hell, I'm helping out some people deploying christmas lights with a half-gigahertz ARM Linux board with wifi as a controller. (hardware details here: http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-open-source/ http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-op... if you're curious). They've shipped over a million RaspberryPi's in the last 16 months - they're mostly still going to be useable in 20 years time, and between now and then pretty much every toy,appliance,car,tv,phone,coffeemachine,whatever is going to contain something capable of running linux...
      - raintrees 13y ago
        Fertile ground for David Suarez' Daemon...
  - mcv 13y ago
    You need to fix both of course. The broken political situation needs to be fixed, but communication protocols need to be improved too. And of course, as long as the current political situation in the US lasts, cloud services in the US cannot be trusted. Run your own server, or use a server abroad.
  - ordinary 13y ago
    Popular movements have accomplished incredible things over the centuries, and almost none (I'm hedging, I want to say there were none at all) of them were achieved by ticking a box on a voting form. The level of repression in the West today, while certainly not at its lowest point ever, is still lower than it's been for much of the past century. It's easy to feel helpless and isolated, to feel like you can't do anything because the government is so big and you're so small. Realise that this feeling of helplessness is not based in reality. It is fostered; not by some kind of global conspiracy between government and business, but because it serves the interests of powerful people and institutions everywhere. There is no need for them to cooperate, for them to get together in shady backrooms to decide how next to disempower you. Their interests just happen to align. But that isolation is not something you're forced into. You can break free. It's not easy, but if people suffering under military dictatorships can do it, then in our (still) relatively free society, we can do it too. Anyone who feels like this should read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I'm rereading it these days (relistening, actually), and while it's certainly not perfect, you'll get a lot out of the shift in viewpoint.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I think we need to press hard on all the above (and below). Code, vote, protest, move money, organize people, &c.
Torn 13y ago
For anyone looking for the sort of topics the Guardian can no-longer report on, and the dangers all reporters now face: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...
zenocon 13y ago
> It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols How about new government - one that isn't broken and tramples on all of our civil liberties? The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex
- Torn 13y ago
  > The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex Yeah that'll happen
- fluidcruft 13y ago
  BRB building cover for drone attacks.
- chii 13y ago
  in order to dismantle the MIC, you first need equivelent or better millitary power. How else do you do it?

by rolux 13y ago

willvarfar 13y ago

> we need entirely new communication protocols Whole new enforcement of privacy laws, you mean?

rolux 13y ago
No, I mean protocols. While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. (But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)
- willvarfar 13y ago
  Its a subject I keep an eye on, e.g. freenet and off-the-record messaging. I think these systems cannot work :( If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion-email http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies. Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight of abuse :(
  - rolux 13y ago
    Just two points: - That's why I prefer to think about protocols, as opposed to a system (i.e. global implementation of one or more generalized protocols) - You don't always have to solve the problem theoretically; solving it practically may be good enough. A system can be usable for a long time, before it collapses under abuse.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    Its not as though we don't have a spam problem already… Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion – anonymous but requiring micro-payments. Say, 500 or 1000 satoshi (around a tenth of a cent) per message delivered – not as a means of generating revenue, but as a way to destroy email's current "if I only get one sale per 100,000 emails I send, that just means I need to send 10,000,000 emails a day to get my desired 100sale/day" vulnerability - if that actually cost the spammer $10,000/day, it just wouldn't happen. ('course that required having hard currency to bitcoin exchanges easy enough for the general public to use, and scalable enough to service a significant proportion of internet-using people)
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      >Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion That's not fresh. I think it may have even been entertained by Congress for a while.
    - willvarfar 13y ago
      Yes there have been various attempts at proof-of-work algorithms to fight e.g. spam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system Bitcoin is itself a proof-of-work system. However, these again don't work. The abuser has ample resources to actually do the work on: a botnet.
  - nanoscopic 13y ago
    Your final statement here is not true. The way in which you keep anonymity with an onion system is as follows: 1. Use a central originating server for onion packet sourcing 2. Make it public who all users are 3. Have onion packet creation contain "token of receipt" for all messages along the chain. 4. Rate limit message origination from users 5. Ban users who refuse to forward encrypted packets at a steady rate 6. Only allow small message sizes ( 10k ) 7. Have all online users constantly originate "bogus" packets to random users 8... I am currently writing such a system. Some details up at circleofdistrust.com in about a month or so.
    - willvarfar 13y ago
      How do you rate limit users? Are not originator traffic and pass thru traffic indisquishable, so a receiving peer cannot tell the if a node is just well connected and has a lot of traffic on behalf of others, or is an abuser? And how to measure forward rates?
      - nanoscopic 13y ago
        There are two types of nodes in the system, "servers" and "users". All servers communicate with each other so that they are all aware of all existing "servers" globally. There will likely be a limit on who is allowed and authorized to be a server. ( likely a list of their public keys published to the main site for the project ) All packets must be hashed and authorized ( signed ) by the server before they can be sent out. Any packet not authorized by a server will be rejected. In this way, servers will rate limit originating packets. The traffic is distinguishable because the onion layer is identified at each level. If, after unwrapping your layer, you discover the underlying "level" is not 1 less than your own informed level, the ip origination will be flagged back to the server for spamming. Current estimate for number of onion levels is 100. Actual destination should be somewhere in the middle 60 or so, to prevent government tracing of the packet because all hops. At each hop, random delays will be implemented, as well as injection of extra data and/or disguising the entire packets as other forms of tcp communication. ( to prevent dropping of the packets through filtering ) The "servers" know that users are sending out origination packets at a specific rate and to whom, but nothing about the layers beyond the first. Additionally, the entire onion packet is never sent to any server, only a hash of it with specific other information. This way, "servers" can never be accused of harboring illegal data of any sort. Forwarding rates are measured because each onion layer containing a "message of receipt" that is sent back to the server. The server receieves all of those from the originating user before approving the onion packet. The only think attackers of the system could try to do is attempt to DDOS users of the system. This is prevented inherently by it being known at all types all users logged into the system ( this is public knowledge in the system ). Communication is only allowed from valid behaving users.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  If your laws are being ignored by institutions in power, you have bigger problems, and you can't code your way out of each one fast enough.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. So you intent of fixing just a small point of the whole mess (the surveillance thing) and not the overall mess (bad governments, something that affects 100% of our life and countries)? Not to mention there is nothing to fix this way. Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time.
  - rolux 13y ago
    No, I'm just saying that working technology (like general purpose computers as affordable consumer goods) may be harder to ignore than "the voice of the people". (In Philosophy, you'd call this position "materialist", I assume.)
  - bigiain 13y ago
    "Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time." I think that genie is well out-of-the-bottle. Did you see the article recently about installing linux on the microcontroller on a hard disk controller board? There's no end of "consumer electronics" that have "general purpose computers" inside them. Hell, I'm helping out some people deploying christmas lights with a half-gigahertz ARM Linux board with wifi as a controller. (hardware details here: http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-open-source/ http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-op... if you're curious). They've shipped over a million RaspberryPi's in the last 16 months - they're mostly still going to be useable in 20 years time, and between now and then pretty much every toy,appliance,car,tv,phone,coffeemachine,whatever is going to contain something capable of running linux...
    - raintrees 13y ago
      Fertile ground for David Suarez' Daemon...
- mcv 13y ago
  You need to fix both of course. The broken political situation needs to be fixed, but communication protocols need to be improved too. And of course, as long as the current political situation in the US lasts, cloud services in the US cannot be trusted. Run your own server, or use a server abroad.
- ordinary 13y ago
  Popular movements have accomplished incredible things over the centuries, and almost none (I'm hedging, I want to say there were none at all) of them were achieved by ticking a box on a voting form. The level of repression in the West today, while certainly not at its lowest point ever, is still lower than it's been for much of the past century. It's easy to feel helpless and isolated, to feel like you can't do anything because the government is so big and you're so small. Realise that this feeling of helplessness is not based in reality. It is fostered; not by some kind of global conspiracy between government and business, but because it serves the interests of powerful people and institutions everywhere. There is no need for them to cooperate, for them to get together in shady backrooms to decide how next to disempower you. Their interests just happen to align. But that isolation is not something you're forced into. You can break free. It's not easy, but if people suffering under military dictatorships can do it, then in our (still) relatively free society, we can do it too. Anyone who feels like this should read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I'm rereading it these days (relistening, actually), and while it's certainly not perfect, you'll get a lot out of the shift in viewpoint.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  I think we need to press hard on all the above (and below). Code, vote, protest, move money, organize people, &c.

Torn 13y ago

For anyone looking for the sort of topics the Guardian can no-longer report on, and the dangers all reporters now face: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...

zenocon 13y ago

> It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols How about new government - one that isn't broken and tramples on all of our civil liberties? The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex

Torn 13y ago
> The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex Yeah that'll happen
fluidcruft 13y ago
BRB building cover for drone attacks.
chii 13y ago
in order to dismantle the MIC, you first need equivelent or better millitary power. How else do you do it?