Comment by Homunculiheaded | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Homunculiheaded | Hacker News Reader

Homunculiheaded

"if a nation-state decides that somebody should not have privacy, then it will use whatever means available to prevent that privacy."

One thing a lot of these discussions miss is that the entire point of doing privacy and anonymity correctly is that you are never on a list of people that any particular nation state wants to deny privacy to. That your True Name (to borrow the idea from Vinge’s story of the same name) is never the target, is never even interesting.

I personally don't advocate a world where everything I do is encrypted and anonymized, I think that that is as unachievable and sacrificing as living an entirely private life. Use gmail, skype, facebook, twitter, send non-encrypted messages about christmas to your friends and family, etc.

But what we do need is an online equivalent of a private life as well. And people need to be educated in the tools and techniques that can make this possible when necessary. Use tor, hidden services, pgp, i2p etc Use completely different online identities, ways of speaking and never login to a HN account associated with your real identity from that private space. Create and participate in hidden online communities, but don’t center those communities around your real life family and friends (ie facebook-esque hidden service would be a very bad idea).

The idea is not to challenge, fight or oppose nation states with surveillance capabilities, that's a losing proposition; the idea is to create a space away from them.

It's like hygiene. A few hundred years back people weren't washing their hands and health was very bad. As soon as we understood the germ theory of disease, we learned hygiene and now we are much better.

With encryption and privacy it will be the same. People will need to learn new skills.

Unfortunately, what we need to do is as cumbersome as a surgeon prepping for operation - it takes too much care to make sure you don't mix things up. You never login into your Gmail on Tor, don't refer to your reddit user name on Gmail, etc.

Unless you already did, in which case you're toast. They already have years of data on your views and interests.

Could we make a browser extension that would compare all you do and force privacy for you? For example, if you mistakenly mention your anonymous identity in your official mail, to catch it before sending. It should have a list of forbidden things - keywords, user names, etc - and send watch people not to mix the pots. Take care to separate cookies between anonymous mode and public mode. I am sure such an extension would go 99% of the way to making your private online life private again.

I envision a whole suite of apps - browser, mail, messaging, file sharing - written with this goal in mind - to separately manage identities - private and public - based on the content of communication. Like spam filters, but applied to all our data leaks.

And if there's a backdoor on your hardware then they have access to all your plaintext before encryption ...

I can imagine a day when face to face communication gets really popular, even critical for some people.

I wonder if one day, 3d printing will be cheap enough so that one could go to the local hackerspace, Print print out chips, assemble the board/internal devices and be sure to be free from hardware backdoors?

This is feasible today. Although it takes a decent skill set. Open source communities like OpenCore.org have enough FPGA architecture to build your own RISC computer from scratch. I suspect as FPGA's become more popular and speeds improve the hacker community will move towards one-off computers they made themselves.

This coupled with your idea of 3d printing for casing is interesting.

Doesn't that just offload the backdoor potential to the FPGA rather than a CPU?

I was wondering about that too. So we're down to buying silicon wafers in the the mail, 3d printer or some set up to dope them using open source designs? Is this possible now?

I think it would be impossible, from a computer science standpoint, to create a backdoor in an FPGA that could compromise your own OS, in a general case. Perhaps, the computer that you use to program the chip could be compromised, to change the code that is put on the FPGA.

When I wrote that, I was under the assumption that people would use open-source CPU designs from OpenCore for convenience. With a little help from Xilinx and Altera, it wouldn't be too hard for a government to have the synthesizer detect when an OpenCore design is being used and surreptitiously put a backdoor in. I admit that it would be hard to write software to simultaneously detect a completely unique CPU design is being synthesized, figure out its instruction set and weaknesses, and finally create a hardware backdoor that could circumvent any software written for that device.

As always, there's a tradeoff between cost and security. How many hardware hackers are good enough (or motivated enough) to design their own brand new ISA and CPU design, then bootstrap a compiler and OS for their homemade CPU? Maybe 0.001% of the population, if that.

Well, I'd be down to try at somepoint, if I knew where to start. I feel like moving forward from now, in general, the future will require these skills in order to maintain some sovernty over onself.

I really admire your sober and well thought out proposal.

Implementing what you suggest is just such a lot of work. Certainly too much for me, when I weight up the odds I'll fall foul of Big Brother ( as an Oz living in London. Burma, Saudi, etc have clear problems )

I believe that if one comes on the radar of Big Brother, it is for boring mundane reasons like they don't like your politics, they don't like someone you communicate with or you're a lawyer representing someone they don't like.

There are clearly edge cases with serious consequences, such as a police chief fancies your wife and uses privilege to mess with you. But these are rare thank G-d, and one probably has a heads up that this is occurring.

In this context of very low probability consequences, how can I justify all the effort ??

At least using PGP or GPG for your emails isn't much effort. These tools are very easy to integrate into all of the common mail clients and some web services. The only "hard" part is to get your communication partners to use them as well.

The only "hard" part is to get your communication partners to use them as well.

Where ``hard'' means, ``really, really hard''.

Yes, but not in a technical sense. People think encryption is hard. They believe that they have to jump huge hurdles and will be confronted with an incredible learning curve in order to protect their privacy via encryption. The fact of the matter is, that this is simply a misconception. There's nothing hard about using PGP for instance. It integrates nicely almost everywhere the typical user would want to use it with. The process is already rather streamlined. Our job as those who know this is to educate those who don't in how to use encryption. Most people I've done this with so far said something like "What? That's it?".

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