You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one [video]

The only issue is that Google would have to ensure you're creating the private key as "locally" and securely as possible, without them being able to copy that key to their servers when they're creating them. That might be very tricky, while still remaining convenient, and they may have to allow for independent audits so we can make sure they aren't transmitting the data.

Privacy software will be needed when criminal electronic surveillance becomes prevalent (as it will, some day soon). But the way it's presented now plays into the hands of those who wish to use the NSA fiasco (which, to be sure, it is) to hide a much more serious problem. It's not a solution — it's a diversion.

Well, it's far from perfect, but you've got clean water, highways, research grants, gay marriage in some states, a national healthcare plan that's a good start — all in all, it's pretty good. I don't see why regulation over private data aggregation would be any harder than healthcare. Sure, Google's lobbyists would work hard against it, and would probably succeed in watering down, and I don't have high hopes for breaking-up Google just yet, but it would do to raise awareness.

> In the US we have generations of fat & happy sheep, living off the short-term benefits of inflated currency and credit bubbles, blissfully and willfully ignorant of what goes on around them, so long as they don't miss an episode of American Idol.

All the more reason to try and educate people on how they're being exploited by corporations.

That is not true.

From the white paper [0] under section 6:

> We propose that nodes store all objects for two days and then delete them.

It's also on the FAQ[1]:

> Yes. However, if you go offline then they must come back online within 2 days of the message being sent. Nodes delete data, and do not accept data, older than 2 days.

The sender will not delete the message until it's received an acknowledge from the receiver. It instead will recompute the proof of work and resend in an exponential growing interval. This is also in section 6 of [0].

> If a node is offline for more than two days, the sending node will notice that it never received an acknowledgement and rebroadcasts the message after an additional two days. It will continue to rebroadcast the message, with exponential backoff, forever.

[0] https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf

[1] https://bitmessage.org/wiki/FAQ#Can_I_send_a_message_to_some...

In what way? The startups wouldn't exist because the founders can't handle the tools? Or, are you saying they wouldn't exist because there wouldn't be huge markets of people sharing cats pictures.

The more I think about it, both cases could both be correct, seeing how many people who call themselves developers would find it impossible to write a line of code if they didn't have eclipse....

A naked insecure connection through HTTP has response times as low as 100ms coast to coast (US). This makes these connections look instant or almost instant. It's impossible to achieve neither anonymity nor encryption through a naked single connection - you need several, at the very least for AUTH - and this alone multiplies the latency vs a single connection. The problem is that the naked eye can notice the difference between 100ms and 200ms, so the experience cannot be the same. The speed of light is already significant in world-wide distances when you consider a number of hops and a minimum number of messages being necessary to ACK, AUTH and then provide some anonymity layer that hides both sides of the connection.

Anonymous, secure, encrypted random web browsing CANNOT be as fast as a naked open connection. The difference can be minimised over long transfers, but latency over many requests is always going to be several times higher.

You can make all connections theoretically so fast that even a 5-fold slow down is still "fast enough", but for many small transfers it simply cannot be done so fast that it's humanly not noticeable.

Alas, there's ALWAYS going to be a noticeable difference between open connections and hardened connections (to the standard we are talking about in this thread). A simple AUTH cannot be done so fast that a connection across the Atlantic is not humanly noticeable. And what we are talking about implies a whole lot more than that.

I know RS allows TurtleHopping, which is extremely inefficient method of transferring data, compared to GNUnets solution. With GNUnet you can transfer data directly with the source anonymously, while also at the very same time creating new sources for that data.