- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: [liberationtech] dark mail alliance
by phreedom＠yandex.ru 07 Nov '13

07 Nov '13

On Monday, November 04, 2013 01:17:49 PM Jonathan Wilkes wrote: > On 11/04/2013 05:28 AM, phreedom(a)yandex.ru wrote: > > On Sunday, November 03, 2013 04:06:11 PM Bill Woodcock wrote: > >>> On Nov 3, 2013, at 3:30, "phreedom(a)yandex.ru" <phreedom(a)yandex.ru> > >>> wrote: > >>> > >>> I don't see how "pasting over" a QR code in a way that's not easily > >>> detectable is somehow harder than pasting over a domain/email, or > >>> printing a real-looking fake ad and pasting it over the real one. > >> > >> A QR code is already isolated in an opaque white square. It's single > >> color, and moreover, that color is black. And it's smaller than a > >> billboard. > >> > >> By contrast, a textual URL or email address will be in a specific > >> typeface, > >> probably matched to the rest of the billboard. It's also likely > >> size-matched to other text. Most importantly, it's likely printed right > >> over a patterned and colored background. > >> > >> While you're correct that you can address, to some degree, all of those > >> issues by wheatpasting over the entire billboard, provided you're at > >> least > >> as competent a visual designer as the person who executed the original > >> ad, > >> which is easier to print and transport? A full-color billboard, or a > >> black-on-white sheet of tabloid-sized paper? > >> > >> To put this all in more practical terms, since these issues were not > >> apparent to you, you're a less-skilled visual designer than anyone who > >> would be paid to produce an advertisement. Therefore, you would not be > >> capable of covertly coopting their advertisement. Yet you'd still be > >> perfectly capable of successfully pasting over their QR code without > >> anyone > >> being the wiser. > > > > I can't talk about others, but I'd be quite suspicious if I saw a second > > layer of paper exactly where the qr code is located. If such attacks > > gained momentum, I guess people would be more careful. > > Now you are climbing up on a billboard and inspecting the QR code > personally as a way to prove human readable addresses are a solution > looking for a problem? Can you name a specific attack which actually happened, and which involved altering an ad url in any way or posting a fake physical ad? Are we talking about something that actually exists? It's not like an ad by microsoft can't point to a legitimately-looking domain name which isn't microsoft.com eg getthefacts.com > You already mentioned the idea of domain names that aren't "as > widely-known" as others. "Widely-known" is a feature-- that feature > doesn't exist with QR codes so you clearly understand the issue. I'm not > saying that issue cannot be solved, nor that the current domain name > system is immune to exploits. But if you don't understand the benefits > of human readable addresses you're likely to end up with a less secure > system to replace it. I understand also that: * these benefits exist for maybe top 100 domains * it's usual for well-known entities to use campaign-specific domain names * even if you know the entity name to be $NAME, the domain can still be $NAME.com, $NAME.org, $NAME-project.org, get$NAME.com etc The "security" of physical ads is pretty much about the cost/benefit, and that's why we don't see such attacks in the first place. > (Especially when the smartphones people must use > to read the QR code in the first place are almost all locked down and > not under the user's own control.) There are gateways like tor2web.org and onion.to, and these can be encoded into the QR code for compatibility purposes since there's 1:1 mapping beween darknet and gateway urls. For all practical purposes, the DNS replacement is already available in the form of tor hidden services, tested and known to be quite reliable. The status-quo is: 1) you pay money to get a DNS record which: a) can be revoked at will by a number of entities b) requires you to identify yourself, unless you're willing to play spy games(and noone know for how much longer the loopholes will exist, see (a)) c) requires you to be able to pay, which may exclude "children" who can't get the bank account/card, residents of sanctioned countries. 2) you get a ssl cert, with MITM-by-advanced-adversary as an inherent "security feature". This also may come with random and potentially ridiculous hops to jump thru, the list is subject to change 3) wait for hours/days for payments to complete and records to propagate. Tor hidden service: 1) add 2 lines to torrc, or use vidalia to do the same 2) grab the service address from tor's dir 3) the service goes online in 5-10 minutes, with encryption and authentication always on. HTTP gateway is available for legacy platforms. Bookmarking and address book features are widely available thus making the appearance of the url itself not that important. Both client and service can opt to drop their half of the circuit, which turns it into a more or less direct tcp connection, with nat traversal capabilities. Yes there are caveats, yes tor devs are spending their effort on making tor hide users, rather than optimizing "we don't want no anonymity" use cases, but the foundation is solid. The only known issue that bothers me is that tor doesn't let you keep the root keys for the service offline. A 2-level setup would be really nice, tor devs. pretty please? For all I care, the solution has been available for several years. It works well, but I'm afraid that getting it adopted would require the current gatekeepers to step up abuses by a couple orders of magnitude. -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu.

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Re: latest Snowden docs show NSA intercepts all Google and Yahoo DC-to-DC traffic
by Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

On Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:50:06 +0900, Masataka Ohta said: > Valdis.Kletnieks(a)vt.edu wrote: > > >>> How do you intend to *find* the agents > >>> who were hired at a government agency's under-the-table request that > >>> never had a written record that the company had access to? > >> > >> By memories of those who are at the table. > Hint: I'm not talking about a way to have perfect security. I'm talking > about possible/good/recommended approach to improve the security without > witch hunting. You still haven't explained how "the memories of those who are at the table" help, when the NSA plant has very good reasons to say they're not an NSA plant, and you haven't explained how you can show they *are* a plant.

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[liberationtech] How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
by Yosem Companys 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? by Richard Stallman A version of this article was first published in Wired in October 2013. The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use. Using free/libre software, as I've advocated for 30 years, is the first step in taking control of our digital lives. We can't trust nonfree software; the NSA uses and even createssecurity weaknesses in nonfree software to invade our own computers and routers. Free software gives us control of our own computers, but that won't protect our privacy once we set foot on the Internet. Bipartisan legislation to “curtail the domestic surveillance powers” in the U.S. is being drawn up, but it relies on limiting the government's use of our virtual dossiers. That won't suffice to protect whistleblowers if “catching the whistleblower” is grounds for access sufficient to identify him or her. We need to go further. Thanks to Edward Snowden's disclosures, we know that the current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. The repeated harassment and prosecution of dissidents, sources, and journalists provides confirmation. We need to reduce the level of general surveillance, but how far? Where exactly is the maximum tolerable level of surveillance, beyond which it becomes oppressive? That happens when surveillance interferes with the functioning of democracy: when whistleblowers (such as Snowden) are likely to be caught. The Upper Limit on Surveillance in a Democracy If whistleblowers don't dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred of effective control over our government and institutions. That's why surveillance that enables the state to find out who has talked with a reporter is too much surveillance—too much for democracy to endure. An unnamed U.S. government official ominously told journalists in 2011 that the U.S. would not subpoena reporters because “We know who you're talking to.” Sometimesjournalists' phone call records are subpoenaed to find this out, but Snowden has shown us that in effect they subpoena all the phone call records of everyone in the U.S., all the time. Opposition and dissident activities need to keep secrets from states that are willing to play dirty tricks on them. The ACLU has demonstrated the U.S. government's systematic practice of infiltrating peaceful dissident groups on the pretext that there might be terrorists among them. The point at which surveillance is too much is the point at which the state can find who spoke to a known journalist or a known dissident. Information, Once Collected, Will Be Misused When people recognize that the level of general surveillance is too high, the first response is to propose limits on access to the accumulated data. That sounds nice, but it won't fix the problem, not even slightly, even supposing that the government obeys the rules. (The NSA has misled the FISA court, which said it was unable to effectively hold the NSA accountable.) Suspicion of a crime will be grounds for access, so once a whistleblower is accused of “espionage,” finding the “spy” will provide an excuse to access the accumulated material. The state's surveillance staff will misuse the data for personal reasons too. Some NSA agents used U.S. surveillance systems to track their lovers—past, present, or wished-for—in a practice called “LOVEINT.” The NSA says it has caught and punished this a few times; we don't know how many other times it wasn't caught. But these events shouldn't surprise us, because police have long used their access to driver's license records to track down someone attractive, a practice known as “running a plate for a date.” Surveillance data will always be used for other purposes, even if this is prohibited. Once the data has been accumulated and the state has the possibility of access to it, it canmisuse that data in dreadful ways. Total surveillance plus vague law provides an opening for a massive fishing expedition against any desired target. To make journalism and democracy safe, we must limit the accumulation of data that is easily accessible to the state. Robust Protection for Privacy Must Be Technical The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations propose a set of legal principles designed to prevent the abuses of massive surveillance. These principles include, crucially, explicit legal protection for whistleblowers; as a consequence, they would be adequate for protecting democratic freedoms—if adopted completely and enforced without exception forever. However, such legal protections are precarious: as recent history shows, they can be repealed (as in the FISA Amendments Act), suspended, or ignored. Meanwhile, demagogues will cite the usual excuses as grounds for total surveillance; any terrorist attack, even one that kills just a handful of people, will give them an opportunity. If limits on access to the data are set aside, it will be as if they had never existed: years worth of dossiers would suddenly become available for misuse by the state and its agents and, if collected by companies, for their private misuse as well. If, however, we stop the collection of dossiers on everyone, those dossiers won't exist, and there will be no way to compile them retroactively. A new illiberal regime would have to implement surveillance afresh, and it would only collect data starting at that date. As for suspending or momentarily ignoring this law, the idea would hardly make sense. We Must Design Every System for Privacy If we don't want a total surveillance society, we must consider surveillance a kind of social pollution, and limit the surveillance impact of each new digital system just as we limit the environmental impact of physical construction. For example: “Smart” meters for electricity are touted for sending the power company moment-by-moment data about each customer's electric usage, including how usage compares with users in general. This is implemented based on general surveillance, but does not require any surveillance. It would be easy for the power company to calculate the average usage in a residential neighborhood by dividing the total usage by the number of subscribers, and send that to the meters. Each customer's meter could compare her usage, over any desired period of time, with the average usage pattern for that period. The same benefit, with no surveillance! We need to design such privacy into all our digital systems. Remedy for Collecting Data: Leaving It Dispersed One way to make monitoring safe for privacy is to keep the data dispersed and inconvenient to access. Old-fashioned security cameras were no threat to privacy. The recording was stored on the premises, and kept for a few weeks at most. Because of the inconvenience of accessing these recordings, it was never done massively; they were accessed only in the places where someone reported a crime. It would not be feasible to physically collect millions of tapes every day and watch them or copy them. Nowadays, security cameras have become surveillance cameras: they are connected to the Internet so recordings can be collected in a data center and saved forever. This is already dangerous, but it is going to get worse. Advances in face recognition may bring the day when suspected journalists can be tracked on the street all the time to see who they talk with. Internet-connected cameras often have lousy digital security themselves, so anyone could watch what the camera sees. To restore privacy, we should ban the use of Internet-connected cameras aimed where and when the public is admitted, except when carried by people. Everyone must be free to post photos and video recordings occasionally, but the systematic accumulation of such data on the Internet must be limited. Remedy for Internet Commerce Surveillance Most data collection comes from people's own digital activities. Usually the data is collected first by companies. But when it comes to the threat to privacy and democracy, it makes no difference whether surveillance is done directly by the state or farmed out to a business, because the data that the companies collect is systematically available to the state. The NSA, through PRISM, has gotten into the databases of many large Internet corporations. AT&T has saved all its phone call records since 1987 and makes them available to the DEA to search on request. Strictly speaking, the U.S. government does not possess that data, but in practical terms it may as well possess it. The goal of making journalism and democracy safe therefore requires that we reduce the data collected about people by any organization, not just by the state. We must redesign digital systems so that they do not accumulate data about their users. If they need digital data about our transactions, they should not be allowed to keep them more than a short time beyond what is inherently necessary for their dealings with us. One of the motives for the current level of surveillance of the Internet is that sites are financed through advertising based on tracking users' activities and propensities. This converts a mere annoyance—advertising that we can learn to ignore—into a surveillance system that harms us whether we know it or not. Purchases over the Internet also track their users. And we are all aware that “privacy policies” are more excuses to violate privacy than commitments to uphold it. We could correct both problems by adopting a system of anonymous payments—anonymous for the payer, that is. (We don't want the payee to dodge taxes.) Bitcoin is not anonymous, but technology for digital cash was first developed 25 years ago; we need only suitable business arrangements, and for the state not to obstruct them. A further threat from sites' collection of personal data is that security breakers might get in, take it, and misuse it. This includes customers' credit card details. An anonymous payment system would end this danger: a security hole in the site can't hurt you if the site knows nothing about you. Remedy for Travel Surveillance We must convert digital toll collection to anonymous payment (using digital cash, for instance). License-plate recognition systems recognize all license plates, and the data can be kept indefinitely; they should be required by law to notice and record only those license numbers that are on a list of cars sought by court orders. A less secure alternative would record all cars locally but only for a few days, and not make the full data available over the Internet; access to the data should be limited to searching for a list of court-ordered license-numbers. The U.S. “no-fly” list must be abolished because it is punishment without trial. It is acceptable to have a list of people whose person and luggage will be searched with extra care, and anonymous passengers on domestic flights could be treated as if they were on this list. It is also acceptable to bar non-citizens, if they are not permitted to enter the country at all, from boarding flights to the country. This ought to be enough for all legitimate purposes. Many mass transit systems use some kind of smart cards or RFIDs for payment. These systems accumulate personal data: if you once make the mistake of paying with anything but cash, they associate the card permanently with your name. Furthermore, they record all travel associated with each card. Together they amount to massive surveillance. This data collection must be reduced. Navigation services do surveillance: the user's computer tells the map service the user's location and where the user wants to go; then the server determines the route and sends it back to the user's computer, which displays it. Nowadays, the server probably records the user's locations, since there is nothing to prevent it. This surveillance is not inherently necessary, and redesign could avoid it: free/libre software in the user's computer could download map data for the pertinent regions (if not downloaded previously), compute the route, and display it, without ever telling anyone where the user is or wants to go. Systems for borrowing bicycles, etc., can be designed so that the borrower's identity is known only inside the station where the item was borrowed. Borrowing would inform all stations that the item is “out,” so when the user returns it at any station (in general, a different one), that station will know where and when that item was borrowed. It will inform the other station that the item is no longer “out.” It will also calculate the user's bill, and send it (after waiting some random number of minutes) to headquarters along a ring of stations, so that headquarters would not find out which station the bill came from. Once this is done, the return station would forget all about the transaction. If an item remains “out” for too long, the station where it was borrowed can inform headquarters; in that case, it could send the borrower's identity immediately. Remedy for Communications Dossiers Internet service providers and telephone companies keep extensive data on their users' contacts (browsing, phone calls, etc). With mobile phones, they also record the user's physical location. They keep these dossiers for a long time: over 30 years, in the case of AT&T. Soon they will even record the user's body activities. It appears that the NSA collects cell phone location data in bulk. Unmonitored communication is impossible where systems create such dossiers. So it should be illegal to create or keep them. ISPs and phone companies must not be allowed to keep this information for very long, in the absence of a court order to surveil a certain party. This solution is not entirely satisfactory, because it won't physically stop the government from collecting all the information immediately as it is generated—which is what theU.S. does with some or all phone companies. We would have to rely on prohibiting that by law. However, that would be better than the current situation, where the relevant law (the PATRIOT Act) does not clearly prohibit the practice. In addition, if the government did resume this sort of surveillance, it would not get data about everyone's phone calls made prior to that time. But Some Surveillance Is Necessary For the state to find criminals, it needs to be able to investigate specific crimes, or specific suspected planned crimes, under a court order. With the Internet, the power to tap phone conversations would naturally extend to the power to tap Internet connections. This power is easy to abuse for political reasons, but it is also necessary. Fortunately, this won't make it possible to find whistleblowers after the fact. Individuals with special state-granted power, such as police, forfeit their right to privacy and must be monitored. (In fact, police have their own jargon term for perjury, “testilying,” since they do it so frequently, particularly about protesters and photographers.) One city in California that required police to wear video cameras all the time found their use of force fell by 60%. The ACLU is in favor of this. Corporations are not people, and not entitled to human rights. It is legitimate to require businesses to publish the details of processes that might cause chemical, biological, nuclear, fiscal, computational (e.g., DRM) or political (e.g., lobbying) hazards to society, to whatever level is needed for public well-being. The danger of these operations (consider the BP oil spill, the Fukushima meltdowns, and the 2008 fiscal crisis) dwarfs that of terrorism. However, journalism must be protected from surveillance even when it is carried out as part of a business. ________________________________ Digital technology has brought about a tremendous increase in the level of surveillance of our movements, actions, and communications. It is far more than we experienced in the 1990s, and far more than people behind the Iron Curtain experienced in the 1980s, and would still be far more even with additional legal limits on state use of the accumulated data. Unless we believe that our free countries previously suffered from a grave surveillance deficit, and ought to be surveilled more than the Soviet Union and East Germany were, we must reverse this increase. That requires stopping the accumulation of big data about people. Copyright 2013 Richard Stallman Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu.

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[IP] How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
by Eugen Leitl 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

----- Forwarded message from David Farber <farber(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2013 11:32:21 -0500 From: David Farber <farber(a)gmail.com> To: ip <ip(a)listbox.com> Subject: [IP] How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation Message-Id: <BFDB3058-C627-42F5-A998-D6CFCEC16929(a)gmail.com> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1816) Reply-To: dave(a)farber.net [ I would like to hear comments on this djf] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? by Richard Stallman A version of this article was first published in Wired in October 2013. The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use. Using free/libre software, as I've advocated for 30 years, is the first step in taking control of our digital lives. We can't trust nonfree software; the NSA uses and even creates security weaknesses in nonfree software to invade our own computers and routers. Free software gives us control of our own computers, but that won't protect our privacy once we set foot on the Internet. Bipartisan legislation to “curtail the domestic surveillance powers” in the U.S. is being drawn up, but it relies on limiting the government's use of our virtual dossiers. That won't suffice to protect whistleblowers if “catching the whistleblower” is grounds for access sufficient to identify him or her. We need to go further. Thanks to Edward Snowden's disclosures, we know that the current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. The repeated harassment and prosecution of dissidents, sources, and journalists provides confirmation. We need to reduce the level of general surveillance, but how far? Where exactly is the maximum tolerable level of surveillance, beyond which it becomes oppressive? That happens when surveillance interferes with the functioning of democracy: when whistleblowers (such as Snowden) are likely to be caught. The Upper Limit on Surveillance in a Democracy If whistleblowers don't dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred of effective control over our government and institutions. That's why surveillance that enables the state to find out who has talked with a reporter is too much surveillance—too much for democracy to endure. An unnamed U.S. government official ominously told journalists in 2011 that the U.S. would not subpoena reporters because “We know who you're talking to.” Sometimes journalists' phone call records are subpoenaed to find this out, but Snowden has shown us that in effect they subpoena all the phone call records of everyone in the U.S., all the time. Opposition and dissident activities need to keep secrets from states that are willing to play dirty tricks on them. The ACLU has demonstrated the U.S. government's systematic practice of infiltrating peaceful dissident groups on the pretext that there might be terrorists among them. The point at which surveillance is too much is the point at which the state can find who spoke to a known journalist or a known dissident. Information, Once Collected, Will Be Misused When people recognize that the level of general surveillance is too high, the first response is to propose limits on access to the accumulated data. That sounds nice, but it won't fix the problem, not even slightly, even supposing that the government obeys the rules. (The NSA has misled the FISA court, which said it was unable to effectively hold the NSA accountable.) Suspicion of a crime will be grounds for access, so once a whistleblower is accused of “espionage,” finding the “spy” will provide an excuse to access the accumulated material. The state's surveillance staff will misuse the data for personal reasons too. Some NSA agents used U.S. surveillance systems to track their lovers—past, present, or wished-for—in a practice called “LOVEINT.” The NSA says it has caught and punished this a few times; we don't know how many other times it wasn't caught. But these events shouldn't surprise us, because police have long used their access to driver's license records to track down someone attractive, a practice known as “running a plate for a date.” Surveillance data will always be used for other purposes, even if this is prohibited. Once the data has been accumulated and the state has the possibility of access to it, it can misuse that data in dreadful ways. Total surveillance plus vague law provides an opening for a massive fishing expedition against any desired target. To make journalism and democracy safe, we must limit the accumulation of data that is easily accessible to the state. Robust Protection for Privacy Must Be Technical The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations propose a set of legal principles designed to prevent the abuses of massive surveillance. These principles include, crucially, explicit legal protection for whistleblowers; as a consequence, they would be adequate for protecting democratic freedoms—if adopted completely and enforced without exception forever. However, such legal protections are precarious: as recent history shows, they can be repealed (as in the FISA Amendments Act), suspended, or ignored. Meanwhile, demagogues will cite the usual excuses as grounds for total surveillance; any terrorist attack, even one that kills just a handful of people, will give them an opportunity. If limits on access to the data are set aside, it will be as if they had never existed: years worth of dossiers would suddenly become available for misuse by the state and its agents and, if collected by companies, for their private misuse as well. If, however, we stop the collection of dossiers on everyone, those dossiers won't exist, and there will be no way to compile them retroactively. A new illiberal regime would have to implement surveillance afresh, and it would only collect data starting at that date. As for suspending or momentarily ignoring this law, the idea would hardly make sense. We Must Design Every System for Privacy If we don't want a total surveillance society, we must consider surveillance a kind of social pollution, and limit the surveillance impact of each new digital system just as we limit the environmental impact of physical construction. For example: “Smart” meters for electricity are touted for sending the power company moment-by-moment data about each customer's electric usage, including how usage compares with users in general. This is implemented based on general surveillance, but does not require any surveillance. It would be easy for the power company to calculate the average usage in a residential neighborhood by dividing the total usage by the number of subscribers, and send that to the meters. Each customer's meter could compare her usage, over any desired period of time, with the average usage pattern for that period. The same benefit, with no surveillance! We need to design such privacy into all our digital systems. Remedy for Collecting Data: Leaving It Dispersed One way to make monitoring safe for privacy is to keep the data dispersed and inconvenient to access. Old-fashioned security cameras were no threat to privacy. The recording was stored on the premises, and kept for a few weeks at most. Because of the inconvenience of accessing these recordings, it was never done massively; they were accessed only in the places where someone reported a crime. It would not be feasible to physically collect millions of tapes every day and watch them or copy them. Nowadays, security cameras have become surveillance cameras: they are connected to the Internet so recordings can be collected in a data center and saved forever. This is already dangerous, but it is going to get worse. Advances in face recognition may bring the day when suspected journalists can be tracked on the street all the time to see who they talk with. Internet-connected cameras often have lousy digital security themselves, so anyone could watch what the camera sees. To restore privacy, we should ban the use of Internet-connected cameras aimed where and when the public is admitted, except when carried by people. Everyone must be free to post photos and video recordings occasionally, but the systematic accumulation of such data on the Internet must be limited. Remedy for Internet Commerce Surveillance Most data collection comes from people's own digital activities. Usually the data is collected first by companies. But when it comes to the threat to privacy and democracy, it makes no difference whether surveillance is done directly by the state or farmed out to a business, because the data that the companies collect is systematically available to the state. The NSA, through PRISM, has gotten into the databases of many large Internet corporations. AT&T has saved all its phone call records since 1987 and makes them available to the DEA to search on request. Strictly speaking, the U.S. government does not possess that data, but in practical terms it may as well possess it. The goal of making journalism and democracy safe therefore requires that we reduce the data collected about people by any organization, not just by the state. We must redesign digital systems so that they do not accumulate data about their users. If they need digital data about our transactions, they should not be allowed to keep them more than a short time beyond what is inherently necessary for their dealings with us. One of the motives for the current level of surveillance of the Internet is that sites are financed through advertising based on tracking users' activities and propensities. This converts a mere annoyance—advertising that we can learn to ignore—into a surveillance system that harms us whether we know it or not. Purchases over the Internet also track their users. And we are all aware that “privacy policies” are more excuses to violate privacy than commitments to uphold it. We could correct both problems by adopting a system of anonymous payments—anonymous for the payer, that is. (We don't want the payee to dodge taxes.) Bitcoin is not anonymous, but technology for digital cash was first developed 25 years ago; we need only suitable business arrangements, and for the state not to obstruct them. A further threat from sites' collection of personal data is that security breakers might get in, take it, and misuse it. This includes customers' credit card details. An anonymous payment system would end this danger: a security hole in the site can't hurt you if the site knows nothing about you. Remedy for Travel Surveillance We must convert digital toll collection to anonymous payment (using digital cash, for instance). License-plate recognition systems recognize all license plates, and the data can be kept indefinitely; they should be required by law to notice and record only those license numbers that are on a list of cars sought by court orders. A less secure alternative would record all cars locally but only for a few days, and not make the full data available over the Internet; access to the data should be limited to searching for a list of court-ordered license-numbers. The U.S. “no-fly” list must be abolished because it is punishment without trial. It is acceptable to have a list of people whose person and luggage will be searched with extra care, and anonymous passengers on domestic flights could be treated as if they were on this list. It is also acceptable to bar non-citizens, if they are not permitted to enter the country at all, from boarding flights to the country. This ought to be enough for all legitimate purposes. Many mass transit systems use some kind of smart cards or RFIDs for payment. These systems accumulate personal data: if you once make the mistake of paying with anything but cash, they associate the card permanently with your name. Furthermore, they record all travel associated with each card. Together they amount to massive surveillance. This data collection must be reduced. Navigation services do surveillance: the user's computer tells the map service the user's location and where the user wants to go; then the server determines the route and sends it back to the user's computer, which displays it. Nowadays, the server probably records the user's locations, since there is nothing to prevent it. This surveillance is not inherently necessary, and redesign could avoid it: free/libre software in the user's computer could download map data for the pertinent regions (if not downloaded previously), compute the route, and display it, without ever telling anyone where the user is or wants to go. Systems for borrowing bicycles, etc., can be designed so that the borrower's identity is known only inside the station where the item was borrowed. Borrowing would inform all stations that the item is “out,” so when the user returns it at any station (in general, a different one), that station will know where and when that item was borrowed. It will inform the other station that the item is no longer “out.” It will also calculate the user's bill, and send it (after waiting some random number of minutes) to headquarters along a ring of stations, so that headquarters would not find out which station the bill came from. Once this is done, the return station would forget all about the transaction. If an item remains “out” for too long, the station where it was borrowed can inform headquarters; in that case, it could send the borrower's identity immediately. Remedy for Communications Dossiers Internet service providers and telephone companies keep extensive data on their users' contacts (browsing, phone calls, etc). With mobile phones, they also record the user's physical location. They keep these dossiers for a long time: over 30 years, in the case of AT&T. Soon they will even record the user's body activities. It appears that the NSA collects cell phone location data in bulk. Unmonitored communication is impossible where systems create such dossiers. So it should be illegal to create or keep them. ISPs and phone companies must not be allowed to keep this information for very long, in the absence of a court order to surveil a certain party. This solution is not entirely satisfactory, because it won't physically stop the government from collecting all the information immediately as it is generated—which is what the U.S. does with some or all phone companies. We would have to rely on prohibiting that by law. However, that would be better than the current situation, where the relevant law (the PATRIOT Act) does not clearly prohibit the practice. In addition, if the government did resume this sort of surveillance, it would not get data about everyone's phone calls made prior to that time. But Some Surveillance Is Necessary For the state to find criminals, it needs to be able to investigate specific crimes, or specific suspected planned crimes, under a court order. With the Internet, the power to tap phone conversations would naturally extend to the power to tap Internet connections. This power is easy to abuse for political reasons, but it is also necessary. Fortunately, this won't make it possible to find whistleblowers after the fact. Individuals with special state-granted power, such as police, forfeit their right to privacy and must be monitored. (In fact, police have their own jargon term for perjury, “testilying,” since they do it so frequently, particularly about protesters and photographers.) One city in California that required police to wear video cameras all the time found their use of force fell by 60%. The ACLU is in favor of this. Corporations are not people, and not entitled to human rights. It is legitimate to require businesses to publish the details of processes that might cause chemical, biological, nuclear, fiscal, computational (e.g., DRM) or political (e.g., lobbying) hazards to society, to whatever level is needed for public well-being. The danger of these operations (consider the BP oil spill, the Fukushima meltdowns, and the 2008 fiscal crisis) dwarfs that of terrorism. However, journalism must be protected from surveillance even when it is carried out as part of a business. Digital technology has brought about a tremendous increase in the level of surveillance of our movements, actions, and communications. It is far more than we experienced in the 1990s, and far more than people behind the Iron Curtain experienced in the 1980s, and would still be far more even with additional legal limits on state use of the accumulated data. Unless we believe that our free countries previously suffered from a grave surveillance deficit, and ought to be surveilled more than the Soviet Union and East Germany were, we must reverse this increase. That requires stopping the accumulation of big data about people. Copyright 2013 Richard Stallman Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/25094221-ddf8422b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message -----

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[IP] Why The Deep Web Has Washington Worried | TIME.com
by Eugen Leitl 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

----- Forwarded message from David Farber <farber(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2013 11:28:54 -0500 From: David Farber <farber(a)gmail.com> To: ip <ip(a)listbox.com> Subject: [IP] Why The Deep Web Has Washington Worried | TIME.com Message-Id: <20C7D1B2-B0E0-4D39-9854-CDF2AA1EC3EA(a)gmail.com> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1816) Reply-To: dave(a)farber.net http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/31/the-deep-web-has-washington-worried/ Why The Deep Web Has Washington Worried >From online drug bazaars to virtual currency tax shelters, the growing anonymous web has many corners of Washington concerned Washington has no idea what to make of the Dread Pirate Roberts. As Lev Grossman and I write in this week’s cover story, the Dread Pirate Roberts allegedly ran the Silk Road, the world’s most successful online drug bazaar, until the feds caught him earlier this month. His real name, according to a 39-page federal complaint against him, is Ross Ulbricht, 29. He supposedly took the pseudonym from a character in the movie and book, The Princess Bride. In the Silk Road, DPR, as his followers called him, created a business model for anyone wanting to sell illicit items online using free encryption software called Tor and the virtually anonymous crypto-currency Bitcoin. Though the feds have taken Silk Road offline, there are plenty of folks lining up to be the next Dread Pirate Roberts. Lev and I examine the greater implications of the Deep Web, the massive and growing anonymous area of the Internet. But from the perspective of lawmakers and law enforcement in Washington, Silk Road presents a double conundrum. It’s a blueprint for criminals the world over at a time when FBI resources are stretched thin and political will to empower government snooping has cratered. And it has created a regulatory headache in figuring how to deal with whole new currencies, tax havens and virtual online markets. While Tor is used by everyone from law enforcement to Syrian dissidents to protect valuable information, it is a double-edged sword. Many experts warn that groups ranging from the Russian mafia to international drug cartels are looking closely at the lessons learned from the Silk Road. It took the FBI more than two years of investigative work to find Ulbricht. They don’t have the resources to compete with Silicon Valley in hiring, or the tools—a long-hoped for modernization of the law governing online wiretapping is on ice in Congress thanks to Edward Snowden. ( Developing technology to fight the Deep Web, or the anonymous non-searchable web, “is not adequately funded—it’s nowhere near adequately funded,” says Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI’s technology division and now on the advisory board Subsentio, which helps companies comply with online warranted wiretaps. “Historically it was well funded, but recently especially with sequestration, it’s been hard hit. It’s always been a difficult thing to build cost benefit analysis for. How much money should you spend building a technology you may not use for a year, if ever?” Chester Wisnieski, a senior information technology security adviser at Sophos, adds that the FBI doesn’t have enough trained staff. “If you look at the FBI—how many agents do they have in cyber? Less than 200,” he said. “There’s been a very fast shift of traditional crimes moving online and don’t have skilled agents to deal with it.” The policy problem is compounded by Bitcoin, which represents another set of jurisdictional tangles for Washington. The Senate Homeland Security Committee, officials tell TIME, plans on holding hearings on Bitcoin within the month. The committee sent letters to nine federal agencies in July asking for their thoughts on Bitcoins and other virtual currencies in the hopes of developing a holistic approach to the so-called cryptocurrency that neither stifles the currency’s potential nor enables criminals to abuse it. “As with all emerging technologies, the federal government must make sure that potential threats and risks are dealt with swiftly,” Committee Chairman Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat, and the committee’s top Republican, Tom Coburn, wrote in the letters. “However, we must also ensure that rash or uninformed actions don’t stifle a potentially valuable technology.” Bitcoin can be a force for good. “We’ve grown used to the idea that virtual transactions should be tracked because they can be; whereas Bitcoin brings anonymity back into online commerce,” says Sasha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. “It’s amazing how scary this notion is to law enforcement. But I see it as akin to trade in gold, cash transactions, and barter: not something to be feared, but simply another useful tool for commerce.” And yet, virtual currencies have a complex past. In recent years, Liberty Reserve and e-Gold both ran afoul of the law, mostly for money laundering. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized funds from the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, in May charging that the company was operating an unlicensed money transmitting service. Mt. Gox has since moved to put names to Bitcoin transfers and register with federal and state governments. There is about $2 billion Bitcoin in existence today. Authorities say Silk Road transactions amounted to $1.2 billion in Bitcoin. Indeed, regulators have already taken an active interest in Bitcoin. The Senate Finance Committee is looking at language to regulate virtual currencies its tax code overhaul. They’re also considering giving the IRS more money to track virtual tax havens, Senate sources tell TIME. A Government Accountability Office report in June warned that virtual currencies like Bitcoin could be abused as tax havens. New York Financial Services Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky sent subpoenas to 22 Bitcoin businesses this summer saying it was considering new regulatory guidance on virtual currencies. “If virtual currencies remain a virtual Wild west for narcotraffickers and other criminals,” he said announcing the subpoenas, “that would not only threaten our country’s national security, but also the very existence of the virtual currency industry as a legitimate business enterprise.” A Commodities Futures Trading Commissioner said his agency is looking into regulating Bitcoins as a commodity. And Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network put out guidance in March saying Bitcoin brokers would have to follow wire service regulations—a potentially onerous requirement as each wire service must register state by state. All of this means that no one is quite sure how to handle bitcoin: is it a currency? A bond? A commodity? Should dealers be regulated like wire services or brokers? Should profits be taxed as capital gains? Few in Washington have even begun to consider these questions, and yet given the rapid growth of Bitcoin, the Deep Web and websites like the Silk Road they will surely be forced to soon. Internet users are increasingly looking for anonymity as their preferences and personal information are tracked and traded like pork belly futures. For many, the Deep Web represents a haven from those prying eyes. But, as in real life, when there’s anonymity, there are dark alleys where people will abuse it. In the physical world, should we choose it, we can live a cash-based anonymous existence. Should we be able to do so online, even if it means anyone can buy drugs, fake IDs or illicit weapons as well? These are the questions Washington must grapple with as it looks at how to regulate cyrpotcurrencies and police the Deep Web. Click here to join TIME for as little as $2.99 to read Lev Grossman and Jay Newton-Small’s full cover story on the Deep Web. ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/25094221-ddf8422b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message -----

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code & diagrams (urls)
by brian carroll 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

w h i t e s p a c e Codebases: Millions of lines of code (via digg.com) http://dailyinfographic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/1276_lines_of_code2.… Cipher Mysteries (via zero) The latest news, views, research and reviews on uncracked historical ciphers… http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2010/07/18/a-beautiful-infinity Language of Flowers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers "The language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, is a means of cryptological communication through the use or arrangement of flowers. Meaning has been attributed to flowers for thousands of years, and some form of floriography has been practiced in traditional cultures throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Plants and flowers are used as symbols in the Hebrew Bible—particularly of love and lovers in the Song of Songs,[1] as an emblem for the Israelite people[2] and for the coming Messiah[3]—and of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.[4] In Western Culture, William Shakespeare ascribed emblematic meanings to flowers, especially in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." // has me wondering what could be done with this, perhaps RNG // as if reverse crystal ball, if futuristic sensors added much moreso Little bublcam places life in spherical perspective http://phys.org/news/2013-11-bublcam-life-spherical-perspective.html ASCII Flow Diagram Tool website http://www.asciiflow.com/#Draw Codebases: Millions of lines of code (via digg.com) http://dailyinfographic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/1276_lines_of_code2.… Cipher Mysteries (via zero) The latest news, views, research and reviews on uncracked historical ciphers… http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2010/07/18/a-beautiful-infinity Language of Flowers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers "The language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, is a means of cryptological communication through the use or arrangement of flowers. Meaning has been attributed to flowers for thousands of years, and some form of floriography has been practiced in traditional cultures throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Plants and flowers are used as symbols in the Hebrew Bible—particularly of love and lovers in the Song of Songs,[1] as an emblem for the Israelite people[2] and for the coming Messiah[3]—and of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.[4] In Western Culture, William Shakespeare ascribed emblematic meanings to flowers, especially in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." // has me wondering what could be done with this, perhaps RNG // as if reverse crystal ball, if futuristic sensors added much moreso Little bublcam places life in spherical perspective http://phys.org/news/2013-11-bublcam-life-spherical-perspective.html ASCII Flow Diagram Tool website http://www.asciiflow.com/#Draw ☥ ☭ ☪

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[liberationtech] Setting up your own app store with F-Droid
by Nathan of Guardian 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

Useful HOWTO and new tools package by Hans for anyone who needs to distribute their own Android software, outside of Google Play, using the excellent F-Droid.org project. Clarification from below: While the US and Google no longer restrict access from Iran, the Google Play service is still unfortunately filtered and blocked there, and is increasingly facing app-specific filtering in other parts of the world (Viber downloads for Saudi Arabia, etc.) Ultimately, this is about a need to decentralize app distribution, while doing everything we can to ensure software security and verification for end-users. More from Hans... "The Google Play Store is not available in all parts of the world, the US restricts its use in certain countries like Iran, and many countries block access to the Play Store, like China. Also, the Google Play Store tracks it users actions, reporting back to Google what apps have been installed and also run on the phone. Because of the NSA leaks, we’re seeing that governments are actively tapping into the raw data streams of Google, Yahoo, and others. So that means that the information that the Google Play Store sends back to Google is also intercepted by the NSA and other country’s agencies like it, and they in turn also share that information with other governments. Lastly, the Google Play Store is not free software, unlike the core of Android itself. It is proprietary software that Google entirely controls. F-Droid is a wonderful, free app store for Android. It is modeled after Debian or other GNU/Linux distros in that it has its own package repositories (repos) and build servers for all the apps that are part of the official OS. Like Debian and Ubuntu, you can also setup your own repos for anyone to use. Any free software can be added to the official F-Droid repos, where they are built and signed by the F-Droid server. This can be annoying because it means that your apps in F-Droid are signed by a different key than your apps in the Google Play Store. If you host your own F-Droid repo, then people can use F-Droid to install your own builds signed by your own signing key. This is a quick HOWTO for how to setup such a repository on a Debian or Ubuntu box." https://guardianproject.info/2013/11/05/setting-up-your-own-app-store-with-… -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu.

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[tor-talk] Tor Weekly News — November 6th, 2013
by dope457 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

======================================================================== Tor Weekly News November 6th, 2013 ======================================================================== Welcome to the nineteenth issue of Tor Weekly News, the weekly newsletter that covers what is happening in the up-to-date Tor community. Tails 0.21 is out ----------------- The Tails developers anounced the 34th release [1] of the live system based on Debian and Tor that preserves the privacy and anonymity of its users. The new version fixes two holes that gave too much power to the POSIX user running the desktop: Tor control port cannot be directly accessed anymore to disallow configuration changes and IP address retrieval, and the persistence settings now requires privileged access. On top of these specific changes, the release include security fixes [2] from the Firefox 17.0.10esr release and for a few other Debian packages. More visible improvements include the ability to persist printer settings, support for running from more SD card reader types, and a panel launcher for the password manager. For the curious, more details can be found in the full changelog [3]. As with every releases: be sure to upgrade! [1] https://tails.boum.org/news/version_0.21/ [2] https://tails.boum.org/security/Numerous_security_holes_in_0.20.1/ [3] https://git-tails.immerda.ch/tails/plain/debian/changelog New Tor Browser Bundles based on Firefox 17.0.10esr --------------------------------------------------- Erinn Clark released new versions of the Tor Browser Bundle [4] on November 1st. The previously “beta” bundles have moved to the “release candidate” stage and are almost identical to the stable ones, except for the version of the tor daemon. A couple of days later, David Fifield also released updated “pluggable transport“ bundles [5]. The new bundles include all security fixes from Firefox 17.0.10esr [6], and updated versions of libpng, NoScript and HTTPS Everywhere. It also contains a handful of improvements and fixes to the Tor Browser patches. Users of older version of the Tor Browser bundles should already have been reminded to upgrade by the notification system. Don't forget about it! This should be the last bundles based on the 17 branch of Firefox as it is going to be superseded by the 24 branch as the new long-term supported version in 6 weeks. Major progress has already been made by Mike Perry and Pearl Crescent to update the Tor Browser changes and review the new code base [7]. [4] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles-firefox-17010esr [5] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/pluggable-transports-bundles-2417-rc-1-pt1… [6] https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefoxESR.html#fire… [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~ff24-esr Monthly status reports for October 2013 --------------------------------------- The wave of regular monthly reports from Tor project members for the month of October has begun early this time to reach the tor-reports mailing-list: Damian Johnson [8], Linus Nordberg [9], Karsten Loesing [10], Philipp Winter [11], Ximin Luo [12], Lunar [13], Kelley Misata [14], Matt Pagan [15], Sherief Alaa [16], Nick Mathewson [17], Pearl Crescent [18], George Kadianakis [19], Colin Childs [20], Arlo Breault [21], and Sukhbir Singh [22]. [8] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-October/000367.html [9] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-October/000369.html [10] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-October/000370.html [11] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000371.html [12] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000372.html [13] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000373.html [14] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000374.html [15] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000375.html [16] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000376.html [17] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000377.html [18] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000378.html [19] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000379.html [20] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000380.html [21] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000381.html [22] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-November/000382.html Tor Help Desk Roundup --------------------- One person asked why the lock icon on the Tor Project's website was not outlined in green. Sites that use HTTPS can purchase different types of SSL certificates. Some certificate issuers offer certificates that supply ownership information, such as the physical address of the website operator, for a higher price. Sites that use these certificates get the lock icon by their URL outlined in green. The Tor Project adds protection to the validity of our SSL certificate a different way, by supplying our SSL certificate fingerprint on our FAQ page [23]. You can double check that fingerprint on any of the Tor Project's mirror pages as well [24]. One person wanted to known why a website they were visiting over Firefox was telling them that they were not using Tor, even though Vidalia told them that Tor was running. By default, the Tor Browser Bundle does not anonymize all the traffic on your computer. Only the traffic you send through the Tor Browser Bundle will be anonymized. If you have Firefox and the Tor Browser open at the same time, the traffic you send through Firefox will not be anonymous. Using Firefox and Tor Browser Bundle at the same time is not a great idea because the two interfaces are almost identical, and it is easy to get the two browsers mixed up, even if you know what you are doing. [23] https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#SSLcertfingerprint [24] https://torproject.org/getinvolved/mirrors.html.en Miscellaneous news ------------------ The third beta release of TorBirdy has been released [25] as version 0.1.2. Among several other fixes and improvements it restores proper usage of Tor when used with Thunderbird 24. Be sure to upgrade [26]! [25] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/torbirdy-012-our-third-beta-release [26] https://www.torproject.org/dist/torbirdy/torbirdy-0.1.2.xpi starlight reported [27] on running a Tor relays with the daemon compiled with the AddressSanitizer [28] memory error detector available since GCC 4.8 [27] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-October/003187.html [28] https://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/ Isis Lovecruft has sent two proposals [29] for improvements to BridgeDB. One is finished and addresses the switch to a “Distributed Database System and RDBMS”. The second is still in draft stage and “specifies a system for social distribution of the centrally-stored bridges within BridgeDB”. [29] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November/005713.html Karsten Loesing announced [30] the availability of a new tech report he wrote with Steven J. Murdoch, and Rob Jansen: “Evaluation of a libutp- based Tor Datagram Implementation” [31]. Be sure to have a look if you are interested in one of the “promising approach to overcome Tor’s performance-related problems”. [30] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-October/005700.html [31] https://research.torproject.org/techreports/libutp-2013-10-30.pdf SiNA Rabbani has been asking [32] for comments on two documents he wrote about how use cases and design of a “point-and-click” hidden service blogging tool, as part of the Cute Otter project [33]. [32] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-October/005703.html [33] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/wiki/org/sponsors/Otter… David Goulet released third rc of Torsocks 2.0.0 [34] with a lot of fixes and improvements. Available to download from GitHub [35] and also as Debian package from the experimental distribution [36]. [34] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November/005728.html [35] https://github.com/dgoulet/torsocks/archive/v2.0.0-rc3.tar.gz [36] http://packages.debian.org/experimental/torsocks Christian is working on a new round of improvements for Globe [37], a web application to learn about relays and bridges of the Tor network. The project seems close to be mature enough to replace Atlas [38] according to some. [37] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November/005725.html [38] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November/005735.html A discussion on the tor-relays mailing list prompted Roger Dingledine to ask about changing the current default exit policy [39] of the tor daemon. The current “restricted exit node” policy has been in place since 2003. As this has surprised some operators, switching the default policy to “middle node” is under consideration. [39] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-November/003240.html Upcoming events --------------- Nov 05-07 | 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security | Berlin, Germany | http://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2013/ | Dec 27-30 | Tor @ 30th Chaos Communication Congress | Hamburg, Germany | https://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/ This issue of Tor Weekly News has been assembled by Lunar, dope457, Matt Pagan, and Philipp Winter. Want to continue reading TWN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteers to watch the Tor community and report important news. Please see the project page [40], write down your name and subscribe to the team mailing list [41] if you want to get involved! [40] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews [41] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news-team -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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[Bitcoin-development] [ANN] High-speed Bitcoin Relay Network
by Matt Corallo 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

Recently, there has been a reasonable amount of discussion about the continued fragility of the public Bitcoin network on IRC and elsewhere (1). To this extent, I'm organizing a system of peering between nodes in the network by creating a system of high-speed relay nodes for miners and merchants/exchanges. This system will a) act as a fallback in the case that the public Bitcoin network encounters issues and b) decrease block propagation times between miners. It is NOT designed to in any way replace or decrease the need for the public Bitcoin P2P network. It is NOT any kind of attempt at centralization, and I still encourage interested parties to establish their own private peering agreements with large miners as needed. Currently the network consists of one specially-designed relay node, but I hope to bring more online in the coming days. This network is open to everyone via a few public relay nodes, but also will have nodes which are made available only to large miners and merchants/exchanges to mitigate the ability of malicious parties to DoS the network. To peer with the public relay nodes, simply select the closest region out of us-west (West Coast US), us-east (East Coast US), eu (Western Europe), au (Australia), or jpy (Japan) and add public.REGION.relay.mattcorallo.com to your addnode list. Note that since all of the relay nodes will relay between each other, you gain no latency advantage by peering with more than the closest node to you (and currently all the regions map to one node, so there they're redundant anyway). For each relay node, you can connect to either port 8334 or 8335. Connecting on port 8334 will relay only blocks, and port 8335 will relay both blocks and transactions. The relay nodes will request any transactions which appear in your invs no matter which port you connect to. Relay node details: * The relay nodes do some data verification to prevent DoS, but in order to keep relay fast, they do not fully verify the data they are relaying, thus YOU SHOULD NEVER mine a block building on top of a relayed block without fully checking it with your own bitcoin validator (as you would any other block relayed from the P2P network). * The relay nodes do not follow the standard inv-getdata-tx/block flow, but instead relay transactions/blocks immediately after they have done their cursory verification. They do keep some track of whether or not your nodes claim to have seen the transactions/blocks before relaying, but you may see transactions/blocks being sent which you already have and have not requested, if this is a problem for you due to bandwith issues, you should reconsider your bandwith constraints and/or are peering with too many nodes. * The relay nodes will all relay among themselves very quickly, so there is no advantage to peering with as many relay nodes as you can find, in fact, the increased incoming bandwidth during block relay spikes may result in higher latency for your nodes. * The relay nodes are NOT designed to ensure that you never miss data, and may fail to relay some transactions. Additionally, because the relay nodes do not respond to standard getdata requests, if you miss a relay and then reconnect, that data will not be sent again by the relay nodes. The relay nodes are NOT a replacement for having peers on the standard P2P network, they are only there to augment the existing P2P network. If you are a merchant/exchange/large miner/other important node operator and wish to gain access to additional domain names which map to relay nodes with fewer peers, please fill out the form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UL82QdcXXEhZwSHJAK04Sk_cWg4zLOu8a216nO7Mt8… You can find the source for the relay nodes at https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode If you have any comments/concerns/suggestions, please do not hesitate to email bitcoin-peering(a)mattcorallo.com Thanks, Matt (1) There has been extended discussion on #bitcoin-wizards as well as #bitcoin-dev of the very small number of active, listening nodes. Additionally, because many of those nodes are versions prior to 0.8.4, it seems very likely that maliciously creating network splits or at least drastically reducing the number of peers for most nodes would not be particularly challenging in the current network. Also, http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041… noted that they were able to single-handledly decrease the network-wide orphan rate by around 50% by improving network peering. Finally, you've all seen the recent discussion on malicious mining algorithms. Though those are not entirely prevented by reducing block propagation times, they can be significantly limited compared to the current, rather disjoint, network. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development

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[Bitcoin-development] we can all relax now
by kjj 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

One of the things that really gets me going is when someone devises a model, tests it against itself, and then pretends that they've learned something about the real world. Naturally, the Selfish Mining paper is exactly this sort of nonsense. Their model is one with no latency, and one where the attacker has total visibility across the network. An iterated FSM is not a suitable simulation of the bitcoin system. The bitcoin network does not have states, and to the extent that you can pretend that we do, you can't simulate transitions between them with static probabilities. The authors understand this deep down inside, even though they didn't work out the implications. They handwave the issue by assuming a total sybil attack, and in true academic spirit, they don't realize that the condition necessary for the attack is far, far worse than the attack itself. Greg said he'd like to run some simulations, and I'm thinking about it too. Unfortunately, he is busy all week, and I'm lazy (and also busy for most of tomorrow). If neither of us get to it first, I'm willing to pitch in 1 BTC as a bounty for building a general bitcoin network simulator framework. The simulator should be able to account for latency between nodes, and ideally within a node. It needs to be able to simulate an attacker that owns varying fractions of the network, and make decisions based only on what the attacker actually knows. It needs to be able to simulate this "attack" and should be generic enough to be easily modified for other crazy schemes. (Bounty offer is serious, but expires in one year [based on the earliest timestamp that my mail server puts on this email], and /may/ be subject to change if the price on any reputable exchange breaks 1000 USD per BTC in that period.) Basically, the lack of a decent network simulator is what allowed this paper to get press. If the author had been able to see the importance of the stuff he was ignoring, we wouldn't be wasting so much time correcting him (and sadly the reporters that have no way to check his claims). https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324413.msg3495663#msg3495663 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development

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