rasengan

> I'm a huge fan of the technical basis for this

Trusting random internet people is actually the biggest “troll” of the internet.

Any VPN that asks you to trust their guarantees and not the guarantees of code is selling you snake oil and should not be trusted.

Trust is not a feature in security. Thus, we removed and replaced it with code based guarantees.

The first part is definitely true.

The second part in terms of correlations is untrue since we include a number of techniques to frustrate timing attacks among other things.

This has been debunked.

Freenode was sold to me by Christel, the previous owner. I did not even offer to purchase it and simply assumed I was doing what I had been doing for a decade for freenode and many other FOSS projects - keeping them alive. It was my funds that did so the whole time for freenode (and a number of other projects which I stopped funding thereafter given the death threats I was receiving which led to the end of many of them unfortunately).

The Libera staff [1] attempted to steal the domain because they wanted control. None of the staff were developers at the time and complained they couldn’t even write their own irc client. Think of Mozilla. The people who run it aren’t the coders. Same thing.

Here are the receipts for every statement I just made:

http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/lee-side.pd...

PS: Freenode seems more active then Libera where everyone is just idle (bots?) but that is another point. See for yourself with the client I wrote: IRC.com.

[1] By Libera staff I mean the former freenode staffers who left to form Libera. These are the same people I spent a lot of money helping to protect legally from the allegations made by “OldCoder”

I didn’t sell PIA. It was a merger to create a publicly owned privacy company and, unfortunately, the terms of the merger did not come to fruition.

I left the company on principle by relinquishing my shares at a mere fraction (about 1/3) the value. I walked away from millions of dollars, and I am happy with my decision.

Given what happened, we built VP so that trust is no longer required.

> Cryptocurrencies? Aka the least private form of transactions, where not only the sender and receiver know, but the whole block chain immutably stores for everyone else to view?

There are cryptocurrencies like ZCash, Monero, Zano, Freedom Dollar, etc. that are sufficiently private.

> how do I know it's actually running inside the enclave, and not an ordinary process sending a hardcoded expected fingerprint?

It's signed by Intel and thus, guaranteed to come from the enclave!

> Honestly, I feel more comfortable using Mullvad. This team has some folks with questionable backgrounds and I wouldn't trust Intel.

Relying on "trust" in a security/privacy architecture isn't the right way to do things - which is what this solves. It removes the need to trust in a person or person(s) in most VPN company cases since they have many employees, and moves it to trusting in code.

> Also VPN providers are usually in non-us countries due to things like the Lavabit, Yahoo incidents and the Snowden revelations.

The system is designed so that any change server side will be immediately noticed by clients/users. As a result, these issues are sufficiently mitigated, and instead, allows people to take advantage of strong consumer, and personal, protection laws in the US.

> Any network protocol can be spoofed, with varying degrees of difficulty.

Because of the cryptographic verifications, the communication cannot be spoofed.

The attestation guarantees it's the one serving the request, and the encryption/decryption and NAT occurs inside the enclave so it's definitely private.

It is slightly more than just a UI since all of the applications actually work (you can save and reload for example and still see your previous files too).

It seems functional to me!

Kudos to the author!

A chilling effect has been cast upon mankind today with this verdict [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44816363

Unfortunately, this is simply a by product of the fact that this is both news and the state of the world.

Like most it too will come to pass (as it is further adopted in the mainstream and becomes commonplace).

In the future, there will need to be a lot of transparency on data corpi and whatnot used when building these LLMs lest we enter an era where 'authoritative' LLMs carry the bias of their owners moving control of the narrative into said owners' hands.

All great projects start with a grievance.

If you feel this to be a problematic situation, do not accept it as the norm. If you wish to find others aligned with you, share these grievances and engage with the community, and within yourself, to identify a solution.

There are things that people want and, yet, can’t know they want, until much later in their lives; often times, too late.

Not an endorsement for “web3,” which seems to be a sort of centralization of the decentralized technologies at this point in time, unfortunately.

Makes sense.

I treat an LLM the same way I'd treat myself as it relates to context and goals when working with code.

"If I need to do __________ what do I need to know/see?"

I find that traditional tools, as per the OP, have become ever more powerful and useful in the age of LLMs (especially grep).

Furthermore, LLMs are quite good at working with shell tools and functionalities (heredoc, grep, sed, etc.).

Obscura looks like it's a double hop system which lacks verification and is based on trust. All it takes is collusion of 2 persons to break this "security" model.

Trust, a non constant, has no place in a security architecture.

Don't trust, verify.

> some of which I know very well indeed.

I can't do anything for those who do not know how to read and are simultaneously friends with them it seems. ;)

tl;dr — Christel asked me to keep freenode alive in 2017, I paid every bill, including the former staffers legal woes, from that day forward, and the volunteers who later founded Libera registered their new domain weeks before any of the "hostile take over" headlines.

Straight timeline with docs linked so you don’t have to trust my prose:

1. April 12, 2017 - christel’s posts about freenode changing hands. Companies House lists me as director from April 1, 2017; Christel removes herself shortly after. [1]

2. LWN’s May 2021 timeline notes staff had accepted the 2017 sale [2].

3. libera.chat registered April 23, 2021, three weeks before any "hostile-takeover" fake news [3].

4. HN obviously noticed the WHOIS date the same day [4].

5. Staff minutes show plans for a Freenode-branded web client but admit they have no developers on staff [5].

6. May 18, 2021 The narrative flips as former staffers like post coordinated resignation letters (and begin e-mailing open source projects) claiming I’d just seized control [6].

7. The Register runs "Freenode staff resign en masse" hours later [7].

8. Vice repeats the story but concedes the 2017 sale is real [8]. Hackaday traces the dispute straight back to that sale [9].

What actually happened

The transaction came first (domain, bylaws, infra). I locked the DNS after staff pointed users at their new network, Libera. Until then, since 2017, everything has been paid out-of-pocket. No user data has ever been monetised (and has been deleted).

Ex freenode Staffers Legal Troubles from OldCoder

Robert "OldCoder" Kiraly’s 23 page 2019 statement names Fuchs among other former freenode staffers in a number of alarming allegations [10]. They’re allegations only, but I still paid counsel so the volunteers (Fuchs included) had representation. [11]

IRC.com

Rather than wait for the mythical volunteer developers like the former staffers were, I, a developer, shipped a modern IRC client. Judge the platform for what it is, not falsehoods being spread without facts.

Call me whatever you want, but do it on the paperwork, don't just read coordinated resignations or LulzSec member's fiction. Because a few people wanted to maintain their meritless position in a DEVELOPER's community that I was not only a part of but also financially contributed thereto quite significantly [12], the community was severely fractured.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/e364lu/private_inter... https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/e364lu/comment/f92a4... https://archive.is/Sn7hU

[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/857140/

[3] WHOIS libera.chat

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27213996 https://archive.ph/bSbXD

[5] https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/lee-side.p... https://archive.is/46nLz

[6] See resignation gists.

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/freenode_staff_resign...

[8] https://www.vice.com/en/article/freenode-open-source-korea-c...

[9] https://hackaday.com/2021/05/20/freenode-debacle-prompts-sta... Note: It reports on an Ariadne Connill, who admitted to forging IRC logs.

[10] https://haggishell.com/fibers/misc/190912-freenode.pdf https://archive.is/OsPkt

[11] It was a bit disheartening to see Fuchs take the position against me after I had helped him with legal issues.

[12] https://foundation.gnome.org/2013/09/23/interview-with-andre...

Looking under the hood, some of these things seem like they might be moving your data from one place that might not have your best interests to another place that doesn't seem to have a revenue mechanism?

Take for example nitter - it says its using an unofficial twitter API. I'm assuming this means its using one of these third party services that provide an API to something that doesn't necessarily have an API or has limited access thereto.

If privacy is the purpose, this seems to be missing the point.

The internet is the battle of the narratives.

Agreed, it requires something more significant like an auditable (non obfuscated code) extension or better.

This isn't really privacy or security focused unless 'trust' is a component of security architecture.

Make no mistake, Mullvad Leta knows what you searched for and who you are.

/Theater/ has no place in privacy.

The right way to do it, short of FHE, is to encrypt the query client side, pass this to the proxy which does not pass the source IP, which passes this to the search engine for decryption. Search results are encrypted and pass thru in the reverse:

Client (encrypts) -> Proxy (passes thru no IP) -> Search engine (receives, decrypts, performs, and encrypts results) -> Proxy passes encrypted blob of results back to user -> Client privately reviews private search results.

Edit: private.sh tried this in the past but unfortunately was shuttered with the end of gigablast.

Now that Google is rolling out native Debian with Android, this will only get better - in addition to Google's native DeX.

I'm sooo ready for the one device life! :D

That’s true. The captcha is impossible without the 4chan pass.

soj.ooO [1] which is similar on the other hand doesn’t have the captcha.

[1] https://soj.ooO

This is really troubling given it was dropped on a specific target [1].

[1] https://soj.ooo/p/freethinkers/post/0fa4d357dc784918f0abc7e0...

Thanks for your form mailer. That was the first cgi-bin script I had ever installed and run on Apache. xD

You edited your comment lol so I’m coming back to answer the new parts:

> As for the main page, you should reconsider your stance on free speech for that specific part of the site since we have a mix of crazy people from p/islam, and crazy MAGA on p/freethinkers. It's not a good advertisement for your site.

We wanted to be sure not to take an opinion on the content - only the form of the technology - so we aren’t touching the All feed.

Regarding JS - we are aiming for the modern device user. I understand that security is a thing, but in 2025, few sites work without JS.

Most other questions are simply because we made highly opinionated choices.

In terms of edit and delete — so many people take advantage of edits and deletions which isn’t natural. You can’t do that in real life.

As for legal and illegal - if it’s legal in the US it is legal here!

Great questions sir!

> No single proxy can see the origins that clients interact with and the clients' original IP address.

Wait, double hop is privacy theater in this case. If you control all the proxy gateways it doesn’t matter if you hop around them.

Even Apple’s privacy is technically more so than this although that’s not saying much. There are two entities in their mix — but a simple collusion between the two entities ends that privacy too.