OK, those remaining aged and frail cypherpunks can bash me for not being current... But are there TOR or other-based services that can (kinda) anonymize (for instance) twitter subscriptions? Of course, there could be something fancy that 2-way anonymizes twitter subscriptions within the TOR cloud, but I'm thinking something like that doesn't exist. It would be challenging (and possibly unsecure) for a service to sustainably retain the mapping between twitter subscriber and tweet feed. (Or perhaps that isn't necessary if some subset of tweetstreams are dumped into the cloudsomewhere and then a subscriber goes and gets the relevant ones periodically.*) A cheaper version would be to hide who actively signs up for a feed in a bigass cloud of fake subscriptions to a twitter feed. Of course, ONE of them will be the real subscriber, but the others won't, and it may be fairly tedious (as well as telling) for authorities within certain domains to go through and check each subscriber. -TD *: Come to think of it, there are plenty of web services that log specific tweet streams so that non-cellphone users can go get them. One could access such a service through TOR but then the push capability of tweets and text messages is lost, and also it may be hard to go through TOR with many (cheaper) mobile devices.
On Fri, 2011-01-14 at 21:47 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
OK, those remaining aged and frail cypherpunks can bash me for not being current...
But are there TOR or other-based services that can (kinda) anonymize (for instance) twitter subscriptions?
Twitter is accessible via Tor; they have done nothing to block it. Or am I misunderstanding your question? Unless you plan to follow protected accounts, you don't need to actually sign up for a Twitter account to keep up with anyone. Each Twitter account has an RSS feed for that account, which does not need authentication with a Twitter account to access. Interesting note: not that long ago, Twitter actually used your authentication info against you and obstructed attempts to read single tweets from accounts that had you blocked, and for a while even the entire feed of accounts blocking you. They have since given up their pathetic attempt to imitate Facebook's (dangerously overpowered, IMO) block function. -- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@speakeasy.net>
On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
OK, those remaining aged and frail cypherpunks can bash me for not being current...
But are there TOR or other-based services that can (kinda) anonymize (for instance) twitter subscriptions?
<http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/> ? -- silky http://dnoondt.wordpress.com/ (Noon Silk) | http://www.mirios.com.au:8081 > "Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy the joy of being this signature."
Cool. It'll be a bit before I can figure out whether this does what I'm looking for. Basically, the application is a deniable subscription to certain twitter feeds. In any event, looks interesting. -TD
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2011 14:09:15 +1100 Subject: Re: Question about (cypher)Twitter From: michaelslists@gmail.com To: camera_lumina@hotmail.com CC: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net
On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
OK, those remaining aged and frail cypherpunks can bash me for not being current...
But are there TOR or other-based services that can (kinda) anonymize (for instance) twitter subscriptions?
<http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/> ?
-- silky
http://dnoondt.wordpress.com/ (Noon Silk) | http://www.mirios.com.au:8081
"Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy the joy of being this signature."
Possibly this answers it. But it would require being able to send that RSS feed into the TOR cloud, which I will admit to not knowing if such is possible with minimal ScriptFu. Basically, what I'm wondering is, if someone gets ahold of a twitter distribution list, is it possible to create enough of a cloud so as to remove the possibility of authorities coming to visit the subscriber? -TD
Subject: Re: Question about (cypher)Twitter From: skquinn@speakeasy.net To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:13:10 -0600
On Fri, 2011-01-14 at 21:47 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
OK, those remaining aged and frail cypherpunks can bash me for not being current...
But are there TOR or other-based services that can (kinda) anonymize (for instance) twitter subscriptions?
Twitter is accessible via Tor; they have done nothing to block it. Or am I misunderstanding your question?
Unless you plan to follow protected accounts, you don't need to actually sign up for a Twitter account to keep up with anyone. Each Twitter account has an RSS feed for that account, which does not need authentication with a Twitter account to access.
Interesting note: not that long ago, Twitter actually used your authentication info against you and obstructed attempts to read single tweets from accounts that had you blocked, and for a while even the entire feed of accounts blocking you. They have since given up their pathetic attempt to imitate Facebook's (dangerously overpowered, IMO) block function.
-- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@speakeasy.net>
On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
Possibly this answers it. But it would require being able to send that RSS feed into the TOR cloud, which I will admit to not knowing if such is possible with minimal ScriptFu.
Basically, what I'm wondering is, if someone gets ahold of a twitter distribution list, is it possible to create enough of a cloud so as to remove the possibility of authorities coming to visit the subscriber?
I think this is trivially possible with, well, just the twitter rss feeds. But, with yahoo pipes you make *them* follow the rss feeds, and you watch the output of that. In that way, you aren't directly linked to them, yahoo is, and they'd need to follow the pipe and see who owns it/visits it. But if you make it public, it's visitable by anyone. And I don't think yahoo requires any personal info. Of course, the idea with the pipes is that you could forward the data around a bit, munge it, mix it in with some other services, perhaps encrypt or what-not. But I've not gone to town on what is available with them. Are you thinking specifically about the request for info on Wikileaks followers? If you just follow the public RSS of that twitter account (assuming it is public) surely they don't have any info on you, because you haven't had to join twitter to do that. I must admit, I don't have much of an idea of how twitter handles that stuff, as I haven't used it for a few years.
-TD
-- silky
Are you thinking specifically about the request for info on Wikileaks followers? If you just follow the public RSS of that twitter account (assuming it is public) surely they don't have any info on you, because you haven't had to join twitter to do that. I must admit, I don't have much of an idea of how twitter handles that stuff, as I haven't used it for a few years.
silky
Well, say for instance you're in Iran or Tunisia. You want to keep up with where protests are occuring or where the JBTs have recently been seen. BUT, said authorities somehow obtain a list of subscribers to that Twitter feed and go chase them down. If the tweets can somehow get routed into a TOR-ish cloud and then pass through some service located therein, it could be made impossible for the authorities to find where those Tweets are going. Of course, as twitter is an American company, you could argue that in Iran they would not be able to get ahold of a such a list. But consider it possible (through various means) for them to obtain such a list. That list, then, becomes veritable gold insofar as it lets the authorities know who a large number of troublemakers are. (Of course, this could never happen in the US where civil liberties are so highly respected.) RSS is OK, better than nothing, but in many situations (ie, with dumbphones or where conditions are rapidly changing), a pull model has some distinct disadvantages to twitter's push model. Or am I missing something? Seems both real time as well as anonymity are hard to do in this context. (I'm assuming that if a twitfeed is sent to an RSS-iator, then authorities could see that and then find who is subscribing to the RSS.) -TD
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 1:05 PM, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
RSS is OK, better than nothing, but in many situations (ie, with dumbphones or where conditions are rapidly changing), a pull model has some distinct disadvantages to twitter's push model. Or am I missing something? Seems both real time as well as anonymity are hard to do in this context. (I'm assuming that if a twitfeed is sent to an RSS-iator, then authorities could see that and then find who is subscribing to the RSS.)
Subscribing, though, only takes place on the readers side. That is, it's just as if you were visiting it anyway. So, just don't subscribe, and view it every so often. What you need, though, is some strategy that means if the attacker visits the same rss feed, then they don't get the same information. Or, the information they get is not useful to them. So, you need some sort of encoding yahoo pipe as well. But that's probably possible.
-TD
-- silky
participants (3)
-
Shawn K. Quinn -
silky -
Tyler Durden