Albatross wrote:
It is though. Or, rather, that's one of the things it is. It's other things too, but the point deserves to be made. Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't this be a pretty tremendous boon for online paedophile rings wishing to exchange material?
My argument is that people who infringe on a person's copyright are not necessarily breaking criminal code. To blanketly suggest otherwise is unfair.
To your paedophile comment, to a particular extreme, the same could be said about opaque walls. Biggest difference is that they're not new tech.
On a more serious note, I find the claims of the software a little magical. I cannot think of a way that a significantly powerful enough governing body could not be able to shut down said traffic, even if they could not intercept and target individual users, and given enough resources, I think that even that would be possible. I've not done a full audit of the code. I'm honestly probably not qualified. I wish there was something describing technically how this worked that was somewhere between the crap article and trying to tear apart the code itself.
From what little I can glean, I feel like they still don't solve the "trust" issue. Even if you know your distributed network is 100% secure, how do you know all nodes are 100% secure? Most of their magic appears to be based around the idea that the more peer nodes you insert between you and what you're trying to get at, the less everyone immediately knows about what any one person is doing. That alone makes sense, but these nodes aren't restricted to just handling this data. What happens when parties (Microsoft/NSA/SIS) start listening in at a node through a different attack vector? Probably nothing. What happens when they do it to a number of nodes several orders of magnitude greater? Well, then you route murky stuff through five proxies, but when all five of those proxies are compromised, things become much less murky. You almost need a dedicated OS and a computer that uses nothing but this network, and even then, you need hardware you can 100% trust to not have anything malicious burned into an
IC somewhere. And before it gets to that point, if the traffic actually looks like anything other than straight-up HTTP/HTTPS traffic to anything looking at it at an ISP, the whole network can likely be shut down completely within days.
I don't do criminal things with computers, but if I did and they required people shifting files around, either sneaker-net or an anonymous wireless network with attached hard drive would be the way to go. 2600 had a fun story a couple issues ago about setting up a raspberry pi some place public in a hard to find location with a couple wireless cards, and then using that as a proxy to do questionable things. That'd be a better start than using anything located in your home.
Network security is a rabbit hole of paranoia and fear, and if someone powerful enough wants you, odds are they'll find a way.
