I know it´s long gone ... but as both privacy and anonymity on the internet are rapidly decreasing, the thought occurred to me. After some digging for Xerobank and Steve Topletz, I have only questions. Steve Topletz made some very good points, like multihop, servers located in the right jurisdiction etc. From a formal and technical point of view, what he offered was almost perfect. One can see the ads for all kinds of services that promise anonymity. I'm not up to date with current 'vendors'. A few thread on Wilders': https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/xerobank-questions.281212/page-22#post-1828969 https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/xerobank-questions.281212/page-25#post-1840742 References to 'clarion'. Anyway, does anyone know what really happened to Xerobank or Steve ? Are there organizations that offer similar services ? One wonders if what he offered was too good to be true, especially in today's environment. Why would the 'powers that be' allow such a situation ?
Steve? He seems to have dropped off the Internet. The last thing that I saw about him, some years ago, was a Russian marital gift registry entry. As I recall, he married XeroBank's PR person. Perhaps they're using other personas. I didn't know Steve in meatspace. So I can't exclude the possibility that "Steve Topletz" and the other XeroBank staff were all just personas. It's unlikely, given his appearance at conferences. And I've corresponded with people who claimed to know him. But Anyway, Steve and crew developed XeroBank, under contract, as a private front end for the proposed SWANsat near-earth-orbit satellite network. You can find stuff about that online. I believe that XeroBank was primarily a Cryptohippie reseller. Perhaps they also relied on other VPN services. But the main SWANsat developer died, and the project collapsed.
What was so special about XeroBank? OK, email ... so use ProtonMail or CounterMail. Or c**k.li Linux VM with a VPn client? Well, just do that I don't recall anything else that special.
@mirmir, At least in theory Xerobank would be very good in some ways ... Here is one thread: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/xerobank-questions.281212/page-22 The multiplexing, location of jurisdiction of the service, ownership/location of the server etc. https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thr...r-proxies-not-us-secure-as-most-think.259885/ 'XeroBank uses lots of techniques to minimize the attack opportunity, using multiplexing, crowding optimization, and multiple nodes. This attack cannot be performed trivially against XeroBank users, and not a local, domestic, national, or non-specialized multinational organization has adequate capability to defeat our techniques.' In theory it did sound good. I just don't know about those VPNs that are available atm !
Yeah, Steve did write some great stuff I'm not sure what "multiplexing" means in the VPN context. Maybe it just means routing one VPN through another, what I call nested chains. Except that it'd be the provider doing it, rather than users. As I've said, XeroBank may have used VPN services from multiple providers, not just Cryptohippie. So they could have been doing multihop by multiplexing. By routing the first hop through Cryptohippie, and the next one through another provider. Or perhaps they worked with Anarplex (anarplex.net) which does darknet peering, and seems associated with Cryptohippie.
@mirimir or anyone else, Not really the subject of this thread ... some time ago I was looking for some old threads about https ... downsides of https, someone wrote about that, I don't recall the author. I'd like to take a look at that stuff again, but you know how it is with old sources ... @mirimir , Some good theory you wrote ... I'll check it out.