OnionShare makes it easy to publish anonymous, uncensorable websites
micahflee.com
micahflee.com
It would definitely be interesting to actually come up with some estimates of how much was being spent in aggregate bandwidth costs, say, 7 years ago, and compare it with what is being spent at present, and see if it matches what would be expected with 'normal user growth' although normal user growth for a relatively niche project like this would be pretty hard to quantify.
(based on my understanding of post-9/11 reality)
Most countries allow anyone to setup a company and operate servers. Any government organization with a small amount of resources can setup a front company and turn on a server.
I'll try to find a source when I'm off mobile.
https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en#MyFa...
Of course, a malicious relay operator that wanted to increase its chances of being used as both the entry and exit nodes in a single path (and thereby easily being able to correlate traffic between its origin and destination) could add a lot of nodes and not own up to their relationship.
Some people in the Tor community try to watch for relay-creation behavior that they consider suspicious. A common example is a large number of new relays that appear within a short period of time with similar characteristics and don't declare common ownership.
Edit: one of the main tools for this is OrNetRadar, which seems to primarily use the autonomous system number in which the relays are located, as well as the timing of their creation: https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetRadar/
In this case, the relays can be given a flag like BadExit by the Tor developers, which will stop any Tor client from selecting those relays as exit nodes in a path. However, a sufficiently malicious attacker could add a lot of network capacity in a way that isn't recognizably associated as belonging to the same entity, for example by adding nodes in different data centers, with different speeds, with different software environments, and not all coming online at the same moment. In that case, there wouldn't be a way to easily infer that these nodes are associated with the same operator.
As someone has said elsewhere in this thread, there's still the hope that if different organizations add network capacity with malicious intent, they tend to undermine one another's chances of succeeding, at least as long as they aren't directly colluding (because the basic security goal in Tor is that clients choose paths whose constituent relays don't share information with one another).
https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#ChoosePathL...
If you're using public Tor nodes, as opposed to bridges, it's not really feasible to prevent nodes from knowing whether they're being used as middle nodes (they can just check whether the previous node corresponds to another node in the public directory consensus).
Experiment A: fire up a baunch of nodes one way, see how many are marked as BadExit; experiment B: vary the way you fire up on one variable (time-delay, node server Os etc.), measure, repeat
By contrast, being marked as a BadExit due to tampering with content can be due to tests whose exact nature isn't disclosed and changes over time, and it doesn't happen instantly, so it might be hard for an individual deliberately malicious exit to deduce which action it took that resulted in the BadExit flag.
Determining whether nodes are secretly colluding (or, equivalently for some purposes, whether their communications can be closely observed by the same adversary!) is a mostly unsolvable problem, and that's an important limitation for Tor's security. There have been some papers that do a statistical analysis about the probability of an individual adversary winning against an individual user, given some assumptions about that adversary's capabilities (what fraction of nodes the adversary controls or observes). Tor has changed its path selection algorithms a bit based on ideas from these papers.
[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/family:38A42B8...
In short, my reply was: maybe it's not illegal but you might suffer quit a bit by the time it's all cleared.
This is one of those cases where often the question is not whether your actions are legal, the question is whether you can afford the time and resource required, and in some cases take on the potential reputational risk, to successfully defend yourself against someone (commercial, law enforcement, political, ...) who says they aren't and tries to make you stop.
Also I’ve convinced my company to run nodes with their VPS credit. 6 nodes, 30GB per day per node. It costs them 30$.
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/786926E8C497A...
On the OpenBazaar project we're experimenting with a centralized IPNS record server that is used to provide a fast response while a real IPNS lookup is done in the background to ensure we're not censoring.
Because records are signed the only thing we could do is censor newer IPNS records and serve old ones, but then nodes just revert back to the slower-to-update records like they had before.
As you mentioned, I've also found IPFS to be fragile, particularly in that it is unlikely for stuff to stay up reliably, as ironic as that is. If I'm trying to host a website with not too much traffic (nobody else replicating), I have to keep my computer online or it will become inaccessible.
IIUC, it's onion-routing request traffic to your computer, but your computer is still acting as the sole server of the website. Turning off your machine gives incoming requests nowhere to resolve to.
Well, it's kinda inevitable with these systems, since there's limited available space. Freenet lets you "insert" data into the network (copy to other nodes) and disconnect your computer, but if nobody requests that data, it'll also eventually disappear from every node.
Currently, it connects to bootstrap nodes and tries to discover peers asynchronously. Obviously, it doesn't handshake with the bootstrap nodes in time for it to start discovering peers so it waits another 1-5 minutes depending on the setting to try discovering again.
Startup usually takes a few minutes due to this trivial problem and an issue has been open for it since May: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/5953
I do have a question though on the immutability, how do you address problems where people contribute harmful content, such as revenge porn pictures, or doxing someone? If the content is immutable, it means these things would always exist and never be removable? Is there any moderation that can stop this kind of stuff?
Just wondering, I still like the idea, it's just a question I have been thinking about.
For example, if bad person A adds something illegal to a node they host on IPFS, then person B can legally compel them to stop providing that content (ex by suing them). While the id-->content mapping would still be immutable, the content can no longer be found/viewed because bad person A is no longer hosting it. There is no "automatic persistence" in the IPFS network, so only nodes that choose to host a piece of content will become providers (aka no automatic process will keep bad content around if all hosts have taken it down).
Fundamentally, the spec are good. These guys might not have the most mature development practices but it's a completely different category than tor. The project are broken down in a very [theoretically] elegant way and one project that truely exemplifies this is IPLD: https://github.com/ipld/specs
IPLD (among other protocol labs projects) is applicable to so much more than just IPFS!
My understanding is that it is not possible for Tor nodes to block (or even know about) what you are accessing.
A node in an earlier position in a circuit can't know the ultimate destination of the circuit, or the content exchanged over it, although it could in theory blacklist individual nodes as a next hop (which doesn't typically really accomplish anything for content-blocking purposes, and could also be detected if it were a pervasive practice).
I think in HSv2 (the old hidden services protocol) there were a number of different opportunities for relays to selectively disrupt hidden service connections, while in HSv3 (the new revision) there are fewer.
A difference between Tor and IPFS in regard to what you're mentioning above is that in Tor, a specific entity (a specific clearnet or hidden service site operator) has to continue actively hosting a resource in order for it to remain accessible at its original location, while in IPFS, it's more like that there need to be some participants who haven't actively declined to host it, but they don't have to be the same as the original publisher.
If it is used by political or marginalized communities, then this project is also not useful. It does not have the support or attention required to enable it to be secure enough like the TOR project does. This application opens up legitimate users to incredible risk.
If I were a dissident, I would take my time and do the research required to set up a system like this in the correct way. This project may give people a sense of false security.
Similarly, we should ban sharing information on hacking/security because bad people might use it, and require that all communications be visible to the government to prevent abuse.
It is much the same as arguments that there should be gun training required to purchase a firearm. Adding friction to a process sometimes provides positive benefits.
The argument being made, as far as I can tell, is that this tool will make doing bad things easier, and thus this tool should not be made. As any tool to resist censorship will also enable said bad things, I do not find this to be a valid concern. (And since some governments would list censorship resistance itself as one of those bad things, this is always going to be true)
> It is much the same as arguments that there should be gun training required to purchase a firearm.
I think the tech equivalent to this would be mandating a "don't sexually exploit children" class before allowing purchase of a computer. (As you might guess, I'm not a fan)
> Adding friction to a process sometimes provides positive benefits.
Sure, but you have to make sure the collateral damage is minimized AND that you're actually catching the offending segment of the population. Mandating gun training before purchase is actually a great comparison here - the vast majority of gun crime in the US is committed with illegally acquired weapons (which would be unaffected by the mandate), just like I imagine that the majority of CSE imagery shared on the internet uses something more robust than OnionShare. So in both cases you'd have high collateral damage with minimal impact to the population you actually care about affecting...
The majority is shared on normal social media and Bittorrent, although the worst is shared on dark web sites of the same robustness as OnionShare.
> The majority is shared on normal social media and Bittorrent, although the worst is shared on dark web sites of the same robustness as OnionShare.
By what measure?
What? No, far from it. Bittorrent is pretty clean regarding illegal material (excluding piracy ofc) - which makes sense, after all you leak you ip address and the torrent that you are downloading to the whole network (if you have DHT enabled) and/or to your tracker, plus your ISP can see what you are sending and receiving (while there is a standard for encrypted transmission in bittorrent I do not think that it is widely used). What do you consider as "CSE" anyway? Would a picture of a girl at the beach be considered a "CSE"? If so you might find such torrents (I wouldn't know), but I think that calling it "CSE" is dishonest.
The definition of IIOC is provided by the Home Office and split into three categories. Ultimately it is decided by a jury although the categorisation is rarely contested.
A victimless crime.
> or other illegal content
Such as for a chinese citizen to post criticism of the party.
> The reduction of friction to host material online in a completely anonymous way only enables adverse actions like the sharing of CP or other illegal content
More like "only enables the less tech-savy and saves time from the more tech literate", I do not see how it correlates with the sharing of illegal material.
> It does not have the support or attention required to enable it to be secure enough like the TOR project does
It is a front-end for tor basically, it inherits its security properties. Moreover just because a project is made by one person it does not mean that it is any less secure. Consider libsodium/nacl/monocypher vs most other crypto libraries for example. Also, by the same logic it would not be of use to these that share CP because "It does not have the support or attention required to enable it to be secure enough like the TOR project does", it's not like people that share CP need any less security than a dissident in china.
> legitimate users
This implies that these who share illegal content are not legitimate users. Please be more clear with your terminology, usually illegitimate users are people such as spammers and attackers.
> A victimless crime.
Most certainly not. A lot of victims that were exploited in the production of child porn have to live with the knowledge that for the rest of their life that material will be out there, viewed by every dirty slimy degenerate wanting to do so. It's also one of the reasons a lot of them commit suicide. The fact that the justice system makes even viewing this material illegal is not for nothing, but comes from a proper understanding of how child porn victimizes people.
Good thing, sharing existing CP is not the same as exploiting people to create CP.
> by every dirty slimy degenerate wanting to do so
You are aware that you managed to insult even the people who want to but refuse to watch CP for moral reasons, right? You are basically calling a group of people with a certain attraction that they themselves can't change as "dirty slimy degenerate"s.
> It's also one of the reasons a lot of them commit suicide
I honestly doubt that, but if we assume that was indeed the case, shouldn't the authorities simply not inform them that their pictures/videos are being distributed online? Even then though, I still can't see this as a reason to illegalise it. Should we also make rejections(from jobs/relationships/etc) illegal because some of the people who receive said rejection commit suicide?
Also, I find it dishonest of you not to consider the people who have been unjustly jailed if not for distributing at least for possession of CP, some of which have committed suicide.
> The fact that the justice system makes even viewing this material illegal is not for nothing, but comes from a proper understanding of how child porn victimizes people.
Just like how the justice system in most countries until recently illegalised homosexuality and sex before marriage, right? There are many unjust laws, especially in the area of personal freedoms/victimless crimes (growing weed, owning cocaine, sending a nude picture of yourself from when you were underaged, etc)/copyright (piracy/unauthorised modification/breaking drm).
> Good thing, sharing existing CP is not the same as exploiting people to create CP.
No it isn't the same thing. Sharing child porn is victimizing people though, it is victimizing the people that are abused in that material.
> > by every dirty slimy degenerate wanting to do so
> You are aware that you managed to insult even the people who want to but refuse to watch CP for moral reasons, right? You are basically calling a group of people with a certain attraction that they themselves can't change as "dirty slimy degenerate"s.
I didn't mean to insult those people. I like however how you've turned this around from the victims of child porn on to the victims of a comment on HN. And it's absolutely not a fact that people that suffer from an attraction to children can't change that. Some cases seem induced by excessive porn viewing and revert when those people stop doing so for a couple of months. Though there are also people who seem to be incurable.
> > It's also one of the reasons a lot of them commit suicide
> I honestly doubt that, but if we assume that was indeed the case, shouldn't the authorities simply not inform them that their pictures/videos are being distributed online?
This idea is laughable. Do you honestly believe just not telling the victims the material is out there will convince them the material isn't out there?
> Even then though, I still can't see this as a reason to illegalise it. Should we also make rejections(from jobs/relationships/etc) illegal because some of the people who receive said rejection commit suicide?
This is a straw man, I didn't cite the suicides as a reason to make child porn illegal. It's is part of the picture though.
> Also, I find it dishonest of you not to consider the people who have been unjustly jailed if not for distributing at least for possession of CP, some of which have committed suicide.
Oh yeah, how dishonest of me not to consider people punished for possessing child porn. Do you hear yourself?
> > The fact that the justice system makes even viewing this material illegal is not for nothing, but comes from a proper understanding of how child porn victimizes people.
> Just like how the justice system in most countries until recently illegalised homosexuality and sex before marriage, right?
No, this is absolutely not the same thing. Straw man again. Practicing homosexuality doesn't victimize people. Sex before marriage doesn't victimize people. Watching child porn does victimize people, namely the ones being exploited.
And about your last point: FBI and other people who investigate it absolutely do watch CP. Again - who is the victim in this specific case? Does children somehow not victimized when "good" people watch CP?
A lot of these sites only tend to stay up for a year or two before they get shutdown or get skittish, so keeping it up for a year is very significant and aids in the proliferation of this content.
They also deliberately circulated quite a few relatively uncirculated images to try to gain their trust after they took over the site.
I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with your viewpoints, but your logic here seems weird. In that particular case, nothing would ever convince them that people aren't looking at it, even if they weren't.
You can never really tell if someone is or isn't doing something on the internet, especially with the proliferation of strong encryption.
This may also seem morally wrong, so to speak, but the consequences for such are exactly the same as if you were to watch someone getting whipped and violently raped. There isn't really an incentive to go for anything "less bad", especially considering it is an innate attraction you can never get rid of.
In some states, the sentences for outright molesting dozens of kids is lighter than looking at some images or videos on your computer. It is ludicrous and it is almost as if the state cares more about "Out of sight, out of mind" than anything else.
They're even throwing people in prison for looking at cartoons or having the wrong books.
The question at the end of the day is... What exactly are people supposed to do then? Commit suicide? Perhaps genocide 0.1% to 1% of the population who have these "wrong thoughts"? The paranoia has gotten so bad that some viruses even plant CP on your computer.
From all my history in computer security, conferences and just picking up trends in what criminals do, the most common channel for sharing CP should be, as an educated guess: Plain text email. A smartphone, a camera app and the email app that is already installed, as an educated guess, is the tool of choice for the wast majority of cases. For the remaining portion we got people who do not take most friction-less method, and here I doubt OnionShare will cause any change in the availability of CP.
A bit of a tell is that during the crypto wars there were officials that forbode that there would be an explosion of CP if free encryption was allowed. CP and nuclear proliferation was the standing bet between Eben Moglen and Phil Zimmermann on what the opposite side would first bring up, and I think its fair to say that neither issue occurred after Phil Zimmermann won.
Taking a perspective from behavior science, CP production and sharing is unlikely to be a rational decision where risk and reward is fairly balanced. As an example I would predict that increased jail sentences does not actually reduce the crime rate, nor would turning a very hard tool into only slightly hard to use tool. Effective measures would have to either address the emotional state of the person right before the crime, or implement catching mechanism in the tools with lowest friction like email and email replacements like chat.
They aren't decentralized, though; some people are running YaCy (a decentralized search engine) over Tor to create a decentralized index of onion sites: http://wiki.yacy.net/index.php/En:YaCy-Tor
Should we just ban the internet as a whole?
I understand the sentiment, but I hard disagree with it. Especially because this tool (and similar to it) can be used for good, and might be necessary in the future.
Try to see the glass half-full.
Edit: also, ISPs can sell your browsing information now: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/04/isps-can...
One answer is that you might someday like to say something which some other party would have a problem with.
We might say that if you truly believe in what you're saying, the principled course would be to say your piece and let the other party be upset. But if the other party has a lot of power (for example a parent, an employer, a university, a government official, etc) they can threaten retribution for your words. If the threat is serious enough, you will likely decide not to speak.
The ability to say things anonymously removes the threat of retribution. It helps people speak who otherwise wouldn't, increasing the range of perspectives and information the rest of us have access to. This doesn't mean that it's beneficial in every single case, but on balance it's a social good - in fact, it's a necessary component of a free society.
The Navy didn't Tor for criminals, so obviously there is a use case beyond that.
One of the contractors who wrote the software later open sourced it.
Also, not everything that is illegal should be illegal. Civil disobedience is impossible in a monitored society.
That's not saying that on balance this shouldn't exist. There are of course good uses of technology like this. But I'd at least like to see builders grappling with that balance. Especially given recent prominent reporting around this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
Dark sites of all types still continue to run uninhibited for the most part. From my readings, the major or at least known/researched security holes have been plugged already by the developers, and the rest of convictions have happened because of user error, not the technology involved.
If memory serves me correctly, one particular pedophile abuser was caught after years of being investigated because he was identified through skin marks (I want to say it was freckles on his hand, though I don't recall the exact details of the article) that led investigators to him, not anything technological.
I'm a proponent of total anonymity online because it allows for whistleblowers to leak information that is untraceable to them (again, without consideration of human error). In the case of Wikileaks, for example, even though they weren't on an anonymous network, it still led to the largest classified information leaks known, from NSA tools to national and international communications between heads of states, diplomats and everyone in between. The general consensus was that it was a good thing. I don't necessarily agree with that, but one can't discount its value.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/13/shining-a-li...
From what I recall, most of these TOR sites are only taken offline because of some server misconfiguration or some other opsec weakness in the people who run these sites.
Seems a bit disingenuous to do this.
Why not sell drugs as a cop to arrest people for buying them... er wait... they do that too.
I agree with you that selling a dimebag to a teenager to bust them is shitty and shouldn't be done. But there's a world of difference between busting kids for weed and catching pedophiles. If they're taking these people off the streets I really do not care if they're "disingenuous" to get them.
When you let the rules slip eventually that slippage will be used against you.
History shows this...
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
If you think that running a sting operation to catch pedophiles is going to lead to a Third Reich-esque roundup and extermination of minorities I really don't even know what to say.
The patriot act and the revoking of rights without due process was sold as something to fight terrorists. Now we have common street criminals being charged as street terrorists to circumvent due process.
It simply is fact that govt is the most serious threat to citizens. This is why the constitution was created and the nation was architected as a constitutionally bound republic.
This tripe of "think of the children" has always been used to get more power by govts and will continue to happen.
I suggest an alternative: how about judging people by the harm that they have committed to others rather than their race, attraction, opinions, etc?
If we allow the FBI to distribute child pornography, under this rubric we are basically allowing them to commit child abuse. We allow law enforcement to commit some acts -- like buying or attempting to sell illegal drugs -- which would normally be crimes. But we would find acts of actual harm to innocents by law enforcement abhorrent. For example, if an FBI agent posed as a hitman online and then actually committed the contracted murders, that would be abhorrent and not a legitimate law-enforcement use.
Either distributing CP is child abuse or it isn't. If it is, the FBI shouldn't be doing it irrespective of how many criminals they may catch by doing so, because they are further victimizing innocents. If it isn't, that calls into question the basis on which distribution of CP is exempted from First Amendment protection.
Oh wait, I forgot. Different rules apply to those in power.
If it was I wouldn't have a problem with it. The reality is, by running the sites, they are actively enabling what they consider harmful.
Consider other examples of police stings. When doing drugs, they often use actual drugs because the mere presence of drugs at a sting is not an issue. But when dealing with more dangerous material, they use fakes to ensure that people don't get hurt, and the times when they haven't used fakes it has been considered extremely bad and had people push for policies to change it.
In this particular case, the sites are not like drugs which are inherently harmless just by being present, but are far more dangerous material which results in significant harm to those the police allow to continue to be victimized.
Imagine if police ran a human trafficking front and actually kidnapped people, justifying it by saying they were working to get the guys running the whole thing. Would that be acceptable?
I think not.
If there's truly a guaranteed secure way of doing things, the government would act a lot quicker.
The sense of security in anonymity is not false as long as the dark web continues to proliferate its services.
Your conclusion is invalid without providing further proof. If you want counter-proof, just visit the dark web one of these days. it's as vibrant as ever.
They need other people to use it to be effective. They aren't going to shut it down until they have a replacement. They might even control >50% of the network.
even if you had some perfectly anonymous, uncensorable medium with zero security flaws, people would still make mistakes and get caught. it's never impossible for the state to catch someone, but it can certainly be too expensive to be worth it. this is a feature imo, not a bug. it should be expensive to investigate people.
This is correct.
However, the building blocks of circumvention technologies (et. al) and the building blocks of basic consumer Internet services and communications channels are indistinguishable.
You can't preemptively disable secure, covert communications and also provide rich, secure Internet services (such as banking, corporate email, etc.)
It is very much "Free Speech or Stone Age".[1]
[1] https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/06/free-speech-or...
Agreed. However, the building blocks of that authentication (and other security protocols involved) are the same building blocks used for covert communications.
The reality is everything can be misused.
Otherwise it literally just is information.
(It seems that the difference may be in what exactly we consider to be a privacy violation. I would say that in the child-pornography case, the victim's privacy has been destroyed the moment the pictures have been observed and recorded by the abuser, and further reproduction is not a privacy violation because there is no privacy in the pictures left to violate. Since Tor and co. have no impact on the ability of a child pornographer to make the initial recording, they are an unalloyed good for privacy.)
Is this honestly how you'd feel about footage of someone you know being raped?? It should not be illegal to distribute it...? Can you explain precisely what you think the law should be?
https://www.euractiv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/...
1) With a car without a VIN number / registration
2) With a car without a license plate
3) With no driver and no way to know who was controlling the car.
The point is, it’s not good to be able to commit serious crimes with zero risk of punishment.
The issue at debate is whether the gain from the legitimate (legal) use cases of technology like this outweigh the loss of making it easier for sex offenders / drug traffickers to more easily subvert authority.
In that example, there is legitimate argument that SSL encrypted connections to more good than harm (it makes logging into your online bank possible on public Wifi, along with 1000’s of other examples like it).
But I’ve still yet to see a clear argument for absolute internet anonymity for anything that would benefit the average person (yet, I can think of dozens of ways it harms people).
It’s very likely that I’m just not aware of the legitimate (practical) use cases of TOR.
anonymity doesn't make it impossible to be held accountable for your actions. people tend to (unintentionally) dox themselves without any outside help. what it does is make it a lot harder for law enforcement to catch people without specifically targeting them and investing resources.
I know you're an upstanding, respectable citizen who would never do anything illegal, but just think of privacy/anonymity as a hedge against that tiny chance that the government might actually make an unreasonable law.
On top of that, let's say that you do become a suspect of a crime you didn't commit. Every little shred of information that can be found is going to be used to paint a false narrative against you. Why would you want anybody to have ANY information on you at that point.
Surely you've heard of "the right to remain silent" and "pleading the 5th". Anonymity online is the internet version of that.
It's true that anonymity is a double-edged sword, but it's better than having no blade when one is wielded against you.
It makes internet banking possible, period. Cleartext banking, in any public Internet context, would be simply unworkable.
Absolute anonymity should be the default. There is no need to justify it. It's the government that needs to justify it's need to know stuff about specific persons.
If you commit, or attempt mass murder this way, you'll probably be caught due to the amount of resources a law enforcement agency will spend investigating such a crime. If you put up an anonymous website distributing child pornography, but you're not the one producing it, law enforcement will spend several orders of magnitude less resources investigating that crime.
- Should the layperson be allowed to own weapons-grade plutonium?
- How about being able to buy and cultivate your own anthrax cultures?
- Why shouldn't I be able to spray DDT when it's super effective?
Sure, a screwdriver is design to screw, just as fentanyl is designed to kill pain, but in the hands of a bad actors they can cause different levels of harm.
I'm not saying Onionshare is good or bad, just that you need to step back at look at any tool and consider the net potential impact if bad actors are able to exploit it.
You shouldn't limit smart people because some OEM is stupid and didn't think up an innovative use case when deciding and designing on the intended use of a product.
"I'm not saying Onionshare is good or bad, just that you need to step back at look at any tool and consider the net potential impact if bad actors are able to exploit it."
True, and that's why we must think very carefully before enacting laws that make this or that tool illegal just because some criminal found a destructive use for it; there are so many things potentially dangerous in the wrong hands that blindly banning them all would either be impossible or would bring us back to stone age.
I am not sure where Tor fits into that distinction, and I think that's the issue.
Aren't these the same thing to the technology? To someone labeled a criminal, the government doing so is an abusive government. To a government that considers itself right, those who don't follow the rules are criminals.
We each have our own personal views on what should and should not be allowed which we judge individual cases with, but technology does not have a sense of morality to make such judgment as to when the criminal is in the right and when the government is in the right.
I think people far too often try to humanize computer algorithms with notions of right and wrong. The technology to avoid and oppressive regime is the exact same technology that protects the horrible person from justice.
However, I don't think that's the case at all. We can see in the real world there are many ways to strike a balance between safety and privacy.
So how would this work online? "We have private chats, but the government can look into any of them at any time"? I suppose it depends on your definition of privacy ... are your chats still private if I'm unable to see them but your friendly neighborhood police department reads them?
1. Subversive technology becomes so ubiquitous and easy to use it's impossible to fight it. The government stops trying.
2. The government's control increases to the point of tyranny and people are no longer free.
I want the government to give up. Anything else will mean the destruction of the free internet and free computing we all enjoy today. I don't want a future where encryption is military use only because of laws that make it impossible to run code not signed by the government.
> But I'd at least like to see builders grappling with that balance.
There is no balance to be had. The internet contains the full spectrum of humanity. The very best and the very worst of humanity are both be found on the internet. The governments were oblivious for a while but now they want to narrow down the spectrum. As they impose laws and exercise control, the internet becomes safer but it also becomes less international and more regional. The flow of information is no longer free and unrestricted. The spectrum is narrowed down from both sides.
Sadly it will only get worse from here. I am happy to have enjoyed the internet while it was in its infancy, and I am sad that future generations will probably never experience it.
> Especially given recent prominent reporting around this:
Every article about encryption regulation is like this. Pedophiles and terrorists. Children in particular are the perfect political weapon. The exploitation of children provokes reactions in people that are so visceral they are ready to accept any law that would supposedly make it stop. Anything can be justified with these arguments and anyone who disagrees is labeled a pedophile apologist and instantly shunned.
This sounds like a good thing. It might come as a surprice but a lot of people in the sex offenders registry are there for victimless crimes (such as sending nude pictures of themselves when they were underage - consider https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/27/boy-15-made-sign-sex-offender... as an example of the >10 instances in news reports that I have read of such situation). The probation officer being unable to keep up with the technology that these people use will guarantee them similar levels of privacy that people like you and me have.
> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
Just an offtopic note, this site is painful to read (on the desktop at least). Whatever happened to simple text sites?
Even if you trust the American government, people in repressive regimes can still make use of this. This could enable a western news outlet to make itself accessible to those who are brainwashed by state media.
Trying to prevent "hate groups" from congregating or criminals from opening marketplaces doesn't usually work, either. It's the prohibition principle: if you ban the tech, criminals will use it, but an American NGO won't be able to reach those with censored internet.
You may not use it, but I don't see why your "being on board with it" ought to affect what others create.
I think an important point to make is that just because you trust the American government now, doesn't mean that this won't change in the future. Which is why the core tenets of free speech and privacy should be protected at all costs.
The time to set up uncensorable communications is before you're being censored. After, it's a lot harder to get traction.
To me, it implies that things you agree with and things you don't agree with cannot be censored. This seems like a prerequisite for a free society.
I found the reference to hate groups to be a much more effective argument, I think purely because everybody is so used to the kids/drugs/terror angle being overused and abused to chip away at liberties.
Surveillance-state dystopians take note.
The best way to address this is probably to make the resistant tools as easy and compelling as possible.
In any case, OP was visibly grappling with a tradeoff. The question is if there are compromises, i. e. methods to make such projects more useful for the good dissident, and less so for criminals.
One idea would be to restrict the types of files: video would seem to be more useful for illegal pornography than anti-government organisation. Please note: more useful. I'm not saying video is completely useless for good causes.
You could even make features dependent on the language used, or do some rudimentary geolocation. Or correlate directly with freedom: "if Wikipedia is not blocked, your upload speeds are severly limited".
None of these are perfect, and most are easily circumvented by people with a working compiler. But But they might help mitigate the possible misuses. Denying even the possibility is just lazy.
It is a place to find prespectives that are not allowed.
Reminds me of a star trek voyager show where bad thought has been outlawed so they have a black market for those type of thoughts. From the start there are people who want to express and someone who wants to stop them. This stops the person stopping them.
There are other ways to investigate or deradicalize fringe extremists. There is only one way to have free speech.
Think of our philosophy as starting a fire on purpose to prevent an out of control fire later. We know we've got a bunch of rowdy idiots here, and love them for it, but every once in a while they find an amazingly lazy way to grab power and shake things up a bit - like a randomization function.
I'm still hoping 5 years later all of them will forgot what was so important and go back to discussing Jennifer Lopez's butt.
/s
I could go on, but that's about where we are.
Just because the world's loudest whiners have decided that people disagreeing with them is censorship, doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate examples of actual censorship and oppression in the world.
There are plenty of countries where criticizing the government on social media results in prison, beatings or being disappeared. There are regimes that aren't above using a dissident's family members as collateral or for retribution.
¹ definition is subject to change depending on which entity is currently in power.
Conversely, any method for censoring hate groups will be used against dissidents.
I used to be anti-censorship, now I'm pro-censorship because let's face it, the dissidents are fucked regardless and the fascists (and worse) are the only ones who are going to get much use out of these tools. But technological solutions to social problems aren't going to work. The computer knows nothing about the meaning of the bytes it processes. They're all just ones and zeroes.
On the other hand where we already have free speech, I’m not a big fan of anonymous speech. Speech should be subject to the self censorship that comes from thinking about whether someone is hurt/offended/etc. Free speech means being free to say what you want without legal consequences, not without social consequences.
OnionShare is just a regular webserver (every visitor accesses the site by connecting to a single machine: yours), but it automatically only serves it behind Tor, for the same reasons as above.
The advantage of this seems to be mostly simplicity (both in implementation and in setting Tor and such up) and possibly speed of first download for lightly used sites.
The advantage of Zeronet is that more people can serve the site, even if the original machine is offline or overwhelmed.
Privacy means that nobody watches, so if you want to build tools for privacy, you'll always end up also enabling people to use them for illegal things. We (as Western societies) have mostly decided that general privacy is so valuable to citizens that we accept the collateral damage of crime being possible. I've not heard a lot of arguments against privacy in general, the arguments tend to be "I don't need privacy in this particular part of life, so it better be removed".