pj = Pamela Jones
But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London.
It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.
How about new government - one that isn't broken and tramples on all of our civil liberties? The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex
Yeah that'll happen
Whole new enforcement of privacy laws, you mean?
While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower.
(But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)
I think these systems cannot work :(
If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies.
Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight of abuse :(
- That's why I prefer to think about protocols, as opposed to a system (i.e. global implementation of one or more generalized protocols)
- You don't always have to solve the problem theoretically; solving it practically may be good enough. A system can be usable for a long time, before it collapses under abuse.
Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion – anonymous but requiring micro-payments. Say, 500 or 1000 satoshi (around a tenth of a cent) per message delivered – not as a means of generating revenue, but as a way to destroy email's current "if I only get one sale per 100,000 emails I send, that just means I need to send 10,000,000 emails a day to get my desired 100sale/day" vulnerability - if that actually cost the spammer $10,000/day, it just wouldn't happen.
('course that required having hard currency to bitcoin exchanges easy enough for the general public to use, and scalable enough to service a significant proportion of internet-using people)
That's not fresh. I think it may have even been entertained by Congress for a while.
Bitcoin is itself a proof-of-work system.
However, these again don't work. The abuser has ample resources to actually do the work on: a botnet.
I am currently writing such a system. Some details up at circleofdistrust.com in about a month or so.
And how to measure forward rates?
All packets must be hashed and authorized ( signed ) by the server before they can be sent out. Any packet not authorized by a server will be rejected. In this way, servers will rate limit originating packets.
The traffic is distinguishable because the onion layer is identified at each level. If, after unwrapping your layer, you discover the underlying "level" is not 1 less than your own informed level, the ip origination will be flagged back to the server for spamming.
Current estimate for number of onion levels is 100. Actual destination should be somewhere in the middle 60 or so, to prevent government tracing of the packet because all hops.
At each hop, random delays will be implemented, as well as injection of extra data and/or disguising the entire packets as other forms of tcp communication. ( to prevent dropping of the packets through filtering )
The "servers" know that users are sending out origination packets at a specific rate and to whom, but nothing about the layers beyond the first. Additionally, the entire onion packet is never sent to any server, only a hash of it with specific other information. This way, "servers" can never be accused of harboring illegal data of any sort.
Forwarding rates are measured because each onion layer containing a "message of receipt" that is sent back to the server. The server receieves all of those from the originating user before approving the onion packet.
The only think attackers of the system could try to do is attempt to DDOS users of the system. This is prevented inherently by it being known at all types all users logged into the system ( this is public knowledge in the system ). Communication is only allowed from valid behaving users.
So you intent of fixing just a small point of the whole mess (the surveillance thing) and not the overall mess (bad governments, something that affects 100% of our life and countries)?
Not to mention there is nothing to fix this way. Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time.
(In Philosophy, you'd call this position "materialist", I assume.)
I think that genie is well out-of-the-bottle.
Did you see the article recently about installing linux on the microcontroller on a hard disk controller board? There's no end of "consumer electronics" that have "general purpose computers" inside them. Hell, I'm helping out some people deploying christmas lights with a half-gigahertz ARM Linux board with wifi as a controller. (hardware details here: http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-op... if you're curious). They've shipped over a million RaspberryPi's in the last 16 months - they're mostly still going to be useable in 20 years time, and between now and then pretty much every toy,appliance,car,tv,phone,coffeemachine,whatever is going to contain something capable of running linux...
And of course, as long as the current political situation in the US lasts, cloud services in the US cannot be trusted. Run your own server, or use a server abroad.
It's easy to feel helpless and isolated, to feel like you can't do anything because the government is so big and you're so small. Realise that this feeling of helplessness is not based in reality. It is fostered; not by some kind of global conspiracy between government and business, but because it serves the interests of powerful people and institutions everywhere. There is no need for them to cooperate, for them to get together in shady backrooms to decide how next to disempower you. Their interests just happen to align.
But that isolation is not something you're forced into. You can break free. It's not easy, but if people suffering under military dictatorships can do it, then in our (still) relatively free society, we can do it too.
Anyone who feels like this should read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I'm rereading it these days (relistening, actually), and while it's certainly not perfect, you'll get a lot out of the shift in viewpoint.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...