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

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 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."

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Tyler Durden 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

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 1:05 PM, Tyler Durden 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