livnev

Exactly. But the important point is that the current situation with CAs may be flawed, but since ultimately the user has control over which certificates to trust, it will be possible to use better trust models (like convergence.io) to eliminate censorship. After that, we can indeed use encryption to fight censorship.

Surely, this is an (admittedly broad and difficult) issue with CAs and the trust element of SSL authentication. By the theory of SSL, an 'attacker' is not supposed to have control over a 'trusted' CA, so SSL is 'supposed to' protect against this.

What about determining the salt from the domain for the given login? (perhaps slightly more refined than that to mitigate cases like *.google.com)

Would you care to expand on these bad precedents that you are referring to?

It's also important to note that not only do they run a Tor exit enclave, they also run a .onion hidden service, which unlike the enclave is not deprecated in the next version, and means that DDG can be accessed without leaving the Tor network.

Weapons are violence. There's no room for violence in the future.

Note that the author seems to misunderstand a few things about BitTorrent sync:

1. Firstly, Btsync is not open-source (unfortunately), as he claims. [1]

2. 24-hour secrets don't give someone read access for 24 hours. They must be redeemed within 24 hours after creation, but if they are redeemed on time they become permanent read-only secrets.

[1] - Answered in these threads: http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/8816-will-syncapp-be-open-... http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/17782-bittorrent-sync-faq-...

This is a very good point. Looks like vendors are just copying each other's practices, like 6 confirmations, without looking into why they need to be in place.

A lot of people mention the 6 confirmations requirement as a serious inconvenience of Bitcoin, when in reality, a lot of the time it is not necessary at all.

The overall message is stop worrying so much about the locations of other people's genitals.

The internet is more than access to knowledge and information, and I agree that the sectors responsible for knowledge and information should have the imperative of increasing living conditions, and not generating capital. This is why Wikipedia should not be a business; this is why universities should not be businesses and this why they should receive tax dollars. Note however, that whether or not they should be regulated is a totally different matter. I was questioning the notion that the problem with banking, medicine, and education in the US is excessive regulation.

On the other hand, companies like Amazon and Facebook have little to do with broadening access to knowledge and information (barring the latter in a trivial sense of the word), and are oriented towards generating capital, so I don't think the rhetorical questions that you open with are applicable here.

I'd like to hear you elaborate on why the reasoning for regulation is flawed in the cases of healthcare, education, banking, telecom.

Yes, your comment is witty, but I think it's critically flawed. Firstly, medicine and education should be public services, in the sense that their management should have the imperative of increasing living conditions for the populace rather than generating capital. It can also be added that arguably, the purpose of banking is to increase living standards, instead of being a business for those that control it.

Secondly, you're implying that the correlation between regulation and 'success' in those sectors implies causation between the two. Do you really think that the problem with health care in the US is that it's not regulated ENOUGH? Similarly, correct me if I'm wrong, but are you implying that education should be privatised? And lastly, do you think that the success of internet technology is a result of the fact that it has been less regulated than other industries (I'm not saying that it SHOULD be regulated, I'm just questioning whether or not that is a crucial factor)?

If that was intended only as a joke I understand, however I think it's important to think seriously about these things if we are to every try to fix them.

EDIT: typo

I haven't though about this carefully but I wonder what the shortcomings of the following would be: when a domain 'owner' wants to update their DNS entry, they just push out a PGP-signed (or similar) message of their new IP onto a P2P swarm, which will only propagate your message if their message verifies with their public key, from which you can then grab the entry (and verify it again for extra security). Then, registering your domain would just consist of getting the swarm to accept your public key. Of course, this could be first-come first-serve, or it could be regulated in some way. This way you could have multiple swarms, and each swarm is only governed by their own decisions.

And I suppose on a smaller scale, TPB could create their own swarm right away, and have people use it parallel to existing DNS infrastructure. Then other censored domains could jump onto their swarm.

I suppose you could have an even less centralised system to resemble Tor hidden services. This transcript of Assange and Schmidt's meeting discusses this at a certain point, just grep for 'hash'[1]. That way the domain name itself is proof of its authenticity.

Couldn't you also have something akin to bitcoin's blockchain, where the identity of a domain is agreed upon by the majority of the creators of the blockchain? I don't know what the equivalent of mining would be though. Assange also suggests how domains could be made hard to make, so that they can be 'mined', creating scarcity so that "some arsehole" doesn't "register every short name themselves"[sic].

[1] http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt

I know nothing about this but given that DNS is quite low volume, distributed peer-to-peer DNS services sound really promising. It would definitely be interesting to hear someone with knowledge in this to chime in.

TPB could (inadvertently) change the structure of the internet.

May I ask which one you're with?

Rather than a dump on a prison server, it would be easier to get Wikipedia to block the prison IP range from editing. I believe that some schools (high schools/secondary schools, not universities) do this due to high rates of vandalism.

Unfortunately that's not really feasible without being part of a Mining pool: it simply takes too long until you make a block.

[1](bitcoin mining is granular and not continuous https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Pool)