Fwd: [liberationtech] Addressing Imbalances in Communications via Cryptographic Redaction
Forwarding Brian's message with much love and migraine. The love is for you and the migraine, unfortunately, is mine. :(( The pain is being so annoying, strong and constant I was remembering a movie named "Scanners": # https://youtu.be/d6GNs6MthtU # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners Have a great weekend, dear all! <3 Ceci, feeling like Psyduck, but without the powers... Meh! :(( PS: - https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Psyduck_(Pok%C3%A9mon) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Brian Dickens <brian@hostilefork.com> Date: Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 3:58 PM Subject: [liberationtech] Addressing Imbalances in Communications via Cryptographic Redaction To: liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu Hello Liberation Tech, I've made something which I think is a "liberation" kind of technology... a way of communicating that is (in my mind) a game-changer. It's more a shift in a way of thinking than so much a specific piece of software, kind of like "wiki" is. Nevertheless, there is an implementation, and I think a pretty good one. The concept is a HTML5 "jQuery" widget you can put on web forms (any number of them) which gives the author a redaction pen, to mark out sensitive portions. The sensitive portions are never sent to the server, but the rest of it can be. Then a certificate is generated allowing selective revelation to which parties you wish. There's explanation and a video on my site: http://blackhighlighter.hostilefork.com And a live demo hosted by Heroku: http://blackhighlighter.org I've written quite a bit about it already. But to sum it up, the idea is to "flip the inbox"...so that when you send a message the buck doesn't necessarily stop with the recipient. It sits--publicly searchable--with as much information in it protected as you wanted. You can't change what's in the protected portions after-the-fact, but you can give it to parties that you want; and the message can be repeated on as many servers as necessary, with no requirement to trust the server in order to verify missing portions if you have a certificate. Despite these different "views" on the information, it's a single trackable unit of communication with the same ID throughout its lifetime. I'm not generally a web developer (I used to write compilers for Microsoft Research) so learning enough JavaScript and Node.JS to do this was not my idea of "fun". But I am pretty serious about this. The more I look at how many potential failures there are in communication--whether it be spam filtering, or "ghosting"/"hellbanning", or just the recipient being unaccountable such that the right person to read your message doesn't have the chance to find it even if they wanted to... the more I feel Blackhighlighter is needed. Please feel free to write me or call me (# on my site)...or forward this to any potentially interested parties. If I don't get back to you, publish your message on Blackhighlighter and maybe someone else will ask who you are and seek out how to contact you to get any information you marked out. :-) Best, Brian
participants (1)
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Cecilia Tanaka