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Comment by hellojesus | Hacker News Reader

If CAs start to get backdoored, people can operate a la web of trust or other asymmetric protocol where the public key is posted on a public board and the server can verify its ownership of the private key without a third party other than the public notice. More work but should be doable.

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They won’t be able to operate that over public networks in China, because the routers will drop their packets.

You’d need to roll your own mesh network — definitely doable in local areas but the question is how to connect them over wider distances without going through the Great Firewall. Satellites?

There are methods to bypass the Chinese Firewall though. the issue is getting people to use them.

How can people use them for long if they get a knock on the door, from authorities who noticed an anomaly?

What anomalies are they looking for? There are protocols that make traffic look like something mundane.

Have you seen what classifier AI can do?

Go make a protocol that fools all the AIs from every angle, that are scanning 24/7. They can get you on the metadata pattern alone, nevermind even the content.

I suppose you could use stenography or something to embed chats in pictures that are client-side scanned.

I use grapheneos and can create storage scopes so that the scanning app would only have access to files I deliberately allow.

Doesn't solve traffic analysis. Maybe some more advanced methods that encrypt over https could work.

Unless a lot of people are using it, they’ll just go after anyone who is doing suspicious things like using grapheneos

Yes, but in what way? Short of the outlaw of general computing, what could they possibly do to stop it?

We already have this - it's called Tor and I2P.

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