Is Anonymous Surfing Impossible ?

Discussion in 'privacy technology' started by parpi, Jan 15, 2009.

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  1. SteveTX

    SteveTX Registered Member

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    You give people too much credit. OperaTor is closed source yet somehow very popular, with an unknown author, just as proof. Consumers of software don't care, just like they don't read the license they agree to. They just want functionality and warm fuzzies, they don't spend much if any time independently checking the software does what it purports and has no hidden stuff in it.


    Only if it becomes widely known there was something untrustworthy. And even then, it is already too late. The evil guys got what they came for: your trust.

    I'll ardently defend that there is no such thing as free, and those who purport free will quicly fail as the market consumes them. The information superhighway is littered with the roadkill of "Free" services and softwares and websites that have failed. Why? Because they couldn't find a free business model. Everything has a cost. If the developer absorbs the cost, then he donated it, but there is no free. Money represents the value we choose to exchange with society. Value can be created and destroyed, but it can't be created without expenditure of some resource. The resource costs somebody money from somewhere. You see a dirth of "Free" this and that. But check on them again in a year and see if "free" was found to be a sustainable way to offer value and if they are still in operation.

    Let's take Tor for example, a very large community with thousands of users and hundreds or IRC idlers with a mailinglist. They have a massive community, and the groupthink there is massive. Yet somehow individual hackers keep finding hacks that the community misses. Depending on the community is a false hope, unfortunately there is no wisdom in the masses, only a false sense of security because the crowd depends on each other:shifty: .

    I don't think HESSLA mentions the US anywhere. The only thing it says about govs, as far as i see, is that governments can't use hessla licensed software to spy on citizens.
     
  2. Klaus_1250

    Klaus_1250 Registered Member

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    Agreed. But the issue is that even if people do care, they'll quickly get tired of it. I read licenses, but truthfully, I would not agree to 80% of them IF I had a choice.

    True. On the Internet, most people are a bit too naive when it comes to trusting people. But not trusting anyone doesn't work either.

    Agree.
    Disagree. Resource != money. You can't always trade in resources in for money.
    In theory, you might be right, if you believe in a perfect world where everyone wants, tries and is able to monetize their resources to a maximum extent. But that isn't the world we live in.

    But the "community" consists of only a small amount of actual knowledgeable people. They can't do or see everything, they don't have the time. TOR isn't perfect, but which anonymity system is?

    The points about government use (14.x) almost exclusively refer to US laws and stipulations. If they did the same for every country in the world, the license would be a book no-one could understand. I'm not a US citizen, nor do I speak legalese, and it is incredibly difficult to read and understand points 14.x and how they would translate to other countries.
    I don't even understand why they need to put it in there in such detail.
     
  3. caspian

    caspian Registered Member

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    I hope you post a link to this site. I would love to see it.
     
  4. caspian

    caspian Registered Member

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    Maybe I am missing something here, but I think Rapidshare beats the hell out of torrents. I downloaded a video (Frank Zappa "Babay Snakes") from a torrent once. It took hours. I said never again. It was about 1.5 G's but I can download from Rapidshare much much faster. With my bare connection I get up to 3,000 KB/s. I can download 100MB in less than a minute with free download manager. With Xerobank, I have approached up to 1,000 KB/s second on occasion, and routinely get 400 to 800 KB/s.. That is faster than what a lot of people get from their ISP.

    Now maybe I am wrong, but isn't downloading from Rapidshare safer than using torrents?
     
  5. SteveTX

    SteveTX Registered Member

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    Agreed about Rapidshare. Good peering, fast downloads. The only thing I've seen that is faster is Valve's STEAM network. I loaded up the game Left 4 Dead, and it had to download 6.5GB of updates, and completed it in about 10 MINUTES. That's over 10Mbps sustained throughput. Guess what, neither of those are free services in their pure state.
     
  6. caspian

    caspian Registered Member

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    That is truly amazing. I will have to check that out.
     
  7. SourMilk

    SourMilk Registered Member

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    Yes.

    SourMilk out
     
  8. n33m3rz

    n33m3rz Registered Member

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    It is possible for perfect anonymity in a subgroup using encryption. Here is an exert from applied cryptology:

    So yes totally anonymous surfing is possible using this technique to broadcast a message, but it is only totally anonymous in a group. If there are 1,000 servers set up to do this coin flip protocol, lets say this. Ok, 1,000 servers are set up networked together, or connected together on the internet. They are all set as out proxies, so each one of them can connect to other servers on the internet. Using this coin flip message broadcasting protocol, one of them could encrypt a message to anothers public key, and circulate the message through out the entire network. The server which has the private key decrypts it. Let's say the message is "send this data to this server" or whatever.

    The message can be traced back to that server cluster, meaning someone can know the server than sent the message was 1 out of the 1,000 servers. But they can never tell what server it was the message originated from.

    Also only one message can be sent at a time, and it needs to be sent one bit at a time, so this isn't a really good system.

    But it is as close to total anonymity as you are ever going to get online I think.
     
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