Privacy Respecting Services and Software | Hacker News Reader

Privacy Respecting Services and Software

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26 pointsnikivi19 comments

Under "Browsers" Tor browser is listed as an alternative to "You are the product".

I'd like to take a shot at a quick counter-argument:

1. Tor gets money by delivering a workable privacy overlay to organizations that fund it for such a purpose. The largest funder is the U.S. government.

2. To operate properly, Tor needs a relatively large anonymity pool.

3. The Tor service itself-- while still certainly useful (esp. its hidden services, even for purposes that don't require anonymity)-- doesn't generate a large enough anonymity pool.

4. Tor Browser Bundle adds to the anonymity pool by making the Tor service usable to a much wider audience of non-technical users.

5. To actually attract such users, Tor Browser Bundle must allow Javascript by default so that sites do not "appear broken" by non-technical users who don't understand the intricacies of a low latency privacy overlay.

6. The set of TBB users who view sites with Javascript on by default are subject to a wide variety of de-anonymization attacks which, while generally not trivial nor cheap, put them at greater risk than users who are not using Tor with a browser frontend.

7. Either the U.S. government funds Tor with the intent to use it with a browser frontend, or they fund it for use without a browser frontend. If they fund it in order to leverage the Tor service without needing the browser frontend, then congratulations! You-- the non-technical TBB user-- are the product.

What do you think?

When did Tor Browser start enabling JS by default? It was blocked by noscript by default for me, when I started using it years ago, and that was still the case the last time I installed a new workstation OS, earlier this year.

I use TBB for about 20% of my browsing, a habit that I cultivated while traveling and working overseas. Now, with all the crazy identity politics going on at the major data companies, I think that anonymity is becoming much more important for the general public.

Thank you for playing devil's advocate. The fact that the project is funded by the US govt is certainly concerning, no doubt about that. I can only hope that their motive is just to enable their own agents to operate online without being identified, profiled and social-graphed by the private sector.

> When did Tor Browser start enabling JS by default? It was blocked by noscript by default for me, when I started using it years ago, and that was still the case the last time I installed a new workstation OS, earlier this year.

You sure about that?

https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#TBBJavaScriptEna...

The Tor project has always been funded by the US Gov, probably since they started the entire project in the first place. They do have some interest in keeping it airtight.

I don't understand why Telegram is categorized as "You are the product" there. In particular, I thought the most prominent criticisms of Telegram (including those linked to on this page) were related to engineering rather than to its business model or privacy practices.

IMO, requiring a mobile number is grounds for disqualification, because it strongly identifies a person, and can be abused quite badly. Telegram demands a mobile number, even though it does not need to place calls. Check out Wire for an alternative.

http://wire.com/

Signal does the exact same thing.

It was put there due to its questionable implementation of its own crypto. However you are right that the messenger is marketed as secure and safe.

Will you be adding Wire to the list?

https://www.trustedsec.com/2016/12/wire-messenger-new-compet...

I tried setting up a usable mastadon and distopia account, not only are the interfaces shit, but during my signup I had 0 explanation about the process (where's the FAQ and blog posts explaining stuff?).

Also, during the sign-up, both Mastadon and Distopia give me a list of instances , but close to Zero information about the instances, so after some failed google searches i just randomly picked one and was dumped into shitty web UI with no information whatsoever.

In the end I had a bunch of unanswered questions (how do i link instances, or do i have to do a seperate sign up for each one?), so i just gave up.

It's pertinent to add that this lack of documentation is recurrent in a lot of FLOSS projects. I don't think that software like linux and mastadon and distopia need to be simplified, they just need people who are good at explaining stuff to spend more time doing just that. Instead, projects geared to the lay user like ubuntu and distopia think pretty UI and graphics are what drive traffic. I wholeheartedly disagree.

What makes for a rewarding User-Experience is first and foremost getting shit done (aka challenge/reward), not the resolution of the feedback sprite or the trendiness of your color-scheme/layout.

and, so, to drive user adoption you aren't required as a rule to shorten the time-to-accomplish-distance between the two elements of the first challenge / reward, there is such thing as making it too easy, as growth / prowess also drive adoption. Instead, look to creating a clear path to accomplish the first few tasks, that is, those tasks that pretty much every user will want to do to early on "get in the game."

Why even host this in Github if it's just going to be a single .md file linking to a medium post.

Seems excessive with no actual information presented

Hosting it on GitHub means other people can fork it and add to the list. Thus the content grows in quality with contributions.

Copy and paste works great too!

This is a stupid use of github, it's a hammer looking for nails. If you want to make a change to a single text file, just copy it.

I think the main goal is to receive pull requests in order to curate the list. This would not work by copy and paste.

"Notes" wasn't a category listed, but check out Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org) if you're looking for a privacy-respecting notes app. This is an open-source project I work on. It's an encrypted alternative to Evernote.

Never heard of the Brave browser before. Anyone knows if it's really ok ?

Brave was founded by Brendan Eich, as his next thing after departing Mozilla. Many of us may not agree with his views on marriage equality (or at least his past actions), but I believe over the years he has demonstrated a strong commitment to online privacy.

Personally, I'm glad someone is trying to figure out how websites can derive revenue through privacy-respecting microtransactions instead of the current ad model, and I hope they can make it work.

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