Comment by txutxu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by txutxu | Hacker News Reader

Didn't know this project (gnunet).

I see it provides file sharing and vpn.

VPN will fix some ISP level tracking issues.

Private file sharing will protect some cloud surveillance and limiting laws.

This is great, to minimise surveillance. It's nice to be able to share files properly, but it's not my "typical" internet usage (neither it's on my family members). It's nice to be able to go out through a sane VPN.

Still I miss important things to fix my "internet":

* DNS and search. * Email service. * Browser.

These are my main problems today. I can workaround my ISP when I want, and I can share files in the way I like... but I see the problem in my previous 3 points.

Also I wish so many interesting initiatives could be separated of the "pirate" "trademark".

It's not a problem for me, but I think it's not a proper "image" for general purpose projects, just because of how people brain works in "general" (in special people not literate about what this really is).

Nice talks, and thanks for the link.

If you're already willing to sacrifice privacy for convenience, they already have you.

If you're using OSX or that wacky hybrid kernel system from Redmond, WA, You're basically screwed anyway because your endpoints are compromised from day one.

Here's the thing, if you jump at every convenience then blame people working on the vast and complex software required to support privacy, absolutely nobody will come to your defense.

I set my bar very low, if I can obscure the source location of my IRC and email traffic, then I'm all good; All other channels are secondary, and are not worth bursting my basic network node anonymity over if there's no other option.

As someone who cares about security and privacy, I'd like to know why I'd want to obscure the location of IRC/email traffic.

On IRC I can see that you could come across adversaries on some sketchy irc networks - but, in my case, as just a random developer idling away on freenode (using a host cloak) should I really care that I'm trusting freenode?

And what about email? Is that because your ip will be visible on the mail headers if sent from localhost?

And if you're using a VPN or Tor, aren't you just displacing the trust to those providers?

Another thing I'd like to know is just how much more of a potential target you become once you use the tor network. I speculate that tor has a lot of blackhats fishing for potential targets.

Anonymous, secure, encrypted and instant random web browsing is simply not possible. Technically not possible.

If you want anonymity, privacy and security you will have to make certain compromises to your "current internet" that isn't anonymous nor private, but instant and convenient. Or you can just give up and accept having your every step in the net monitored.

>Anonymous, secure, encrypted and instant random web browsing is simply not possible. Technically not possible.

Do you have a link to the paper where this was proved?

Suppose we take Tor and throw a bunch of fiber at it so that the bandwidth improves, then whenever two Tor nodes make a connection they send data at a fixed rate, sending real data when there is any and padding when there isn't. That clearly isn't "impossible" so what's the attack that works against it?

It's trivial, and indeed you can read about this discussion in many papers. I will give you a run-down.

A naked insecure connection through HTTP has response times as low as 100ms coast to coast (US). This makes these connections look instant or almost instant. It's impossible to achieve neither anonymity nor encryption through a naked single connection - you need several, at the very least for AUTH - and this alone multiplies the latency vs a single connection. The problem is that the naked eye can notice the difference between 100ms and 200ms, so the experience cannot be the same. The speed of light is already significant in world-wide distances when you consider a number of hops and a minimum number of messages being necessary to ACK, AUTH and then provide some anonymity layer that hides both sides of the connection.

Anonymous, secure, encrypted random web browsing CANNOT be as fast as a naked open connection. The difference can be minimised over long transfers, but latency over many requests is always going to be several times higher.

You can make all connections theoretically so fast that even a 5-fold slow down is still "fast enough", but for many small transfers it simply cannot be done so fast that it's humanly not noticeable.

Alas, there's ALWAYS going to be a noticeable difference between open connections and hardened connections (to the standard we are talking about in this thread). A simple AUTH cannot be done so fast that a connection across the Atlantic is not humanly noticeable. And what we are talking about implies a whole lot more than that.

The latency of the crypto itself is minimal, what you're really having a problem with is traversing the ocean. Solution: Don't do that. So we need more nodes. If there are a thousand nodes within a hundred miles of where you are then you don't need to use the ones that are ten thousand miles away.

In addition to that, you can mask latency with caching and prefetch. Browsers could prefetch all the small content on linked pages so that by the time you click on a link the data is already on your computer. This could be helped by general purpose HTTP protocol improvements that allow a browser to know speculatively what such content will be on a page through a POST request etc. without having to actually POST anything. SPDY/HTTP 2.0 also allows asynchronous operation which is extremely good at masking round trip latency when requesting many small objects.

It's not the nodes. It's the inevitable distance between client and server.

The post I was replying to wants casual browsing that's secure, anonymous, private and encrypted AND indistinguishable in speed from what he does without all these features. That's impossible, more requests are needed and every single connection adds noticeable lag past a certain minimum distance.

That post said nothing about speed or latency.

I just pointed out that the experience cannot possibly be exactly the same without any compromise over his current usage as he described it.

Some usage will have to be adapted and/or compromised will have to be made, or else just accept being monitored.

Overpromising is not a good policy.

Gnunet provides its own search layer. In theory you could use it without needing DNS.

I think it's a relative of/inspired by Freenet.

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