Fwd: [liberationtech] Addressing Imbalances in Communications via Cryptographic Redaction

[Cecilia Tanaka]

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 at hostilefork.com>
Date: Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 3:58 PM
Subject: [liberationtech] Addressing Imbalances in Communications via
Cryptographic Redaction
To: liberationtech at 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