On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 4:15 PM, Anonymous Person <anonymousperson90@in.com> wrote:

I know it is dead, because I have tried to do it, and I can assure you it is dead.

I had a similar experience. When I decided to publish a large collection (30gb) of previously paywalled (but public domain) JSTOR documents[1] I initially planned to do so anonymouslyb simply to mitigate the risk of harassment via the courts. Ultimately, after more consideration I decided to publish with my name attached and I think it made more of an impact because I did so (even though quite a few journalists reported it as though it were a pseudonym)b though if I didn't have even the prospect that I could publish anonymously I can't say for sure that I would have started down that road at all. I perused anonymous publication for some days prior to deciding to not publish anonymously and I encountered many of the same issues that Anonymous Person above named at every juncture I hit roadblocksb though in my case I already had bitcoins, but I couldn't find anyone to take them in exchange for actually anonymous hosting especially without access to freenode. If I'd wanted to emit a few bytes of text fineb but large amount of data, no. It's also the case that non-text documents can trivially break your anonymityb overtly in the case of things like pdf or exif metadata, or more subtly through noise/defect fingerprints in images. I think I can fairly count myself among the most technically sophisticated parties, and yet even I'm not confident that I could successfully publish anything but simple text anonymously. The related problems span even further than just the anonymity part of it. Even once I'd decided to be non-anonymous I needed hosting that wouldn't just take the material down (for weeks, if not forever) at the first bogus DMCA claim (or even in advance of a claim because the publication was 'edgy'). I ended up using the pirate bayb which turned out pretty well, though there were some issues where discussion of my release was silently suppressed on sites such as facebook because they were hiding messages with links to the pirate bay, and it was blocked on some corporate networks that utilized commercial filtering. So I think that the problems for anonymous publication on the Internet are actually a subset of a greater problem that there is little independence and autonomy in access to publishing online. You can't _effectively_ publish online without the help of other people, and they're not very interested in helping anonymous people, presumably because the ratio of trouble to profit isn't good enough. About the only solutions I can see are: (1) Provide stronger abuse resistant nymservices so that things like freenode don't have to block anonymous parties, thus facilitating person to person interactions. (2) Improve the security and useability of things like freenet and hidden services, so that they are usable for publication directly and provide strong anonymity. I'm disappointed to see some of the naysaying in this thread. It really is hard to publish anything more than short text messages anonymously, at least if you care about the anonymity not being broken and you want to reach a fairly large audience. [1] https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/ _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE