Hitchhikers Guide to Online Anonymity

[Burncycle360]

https://anonymousplanet.org/guide.html

Even if you don't have a computer science background, this should be required reading for anyone in a position to make policy (ie, Congress) for an awareness level understanding of how complicated things are today.  Don't worry about every little detail, it's complicated, but at least skim it.

This sort of stuff goes well beyond section 230, and time after time public officials (due to age or otherwise) have been shown to be ignorant and susceptible to all sorts of security compromises - you don't know what you don't know.  The amount of telemetry commercial companies gather off you for ostensibly non-malevolent purposes is genuinely shocking, especially considering this is a valuable resource for them to mine while you see absolutely no royalties for your own data.  This information would also be extremely useful for adversaries to wield against ideological opponents -- and to identify ideological opponents (particularly in the age of state actors backed with AI assistance to sort through and analyze gobs of collected metadata).  While typically the state wants a back door just for them (after going through the motions of "due process"), in truly wise hands an awareness level knowledge of this could also be the first step to regulatory measures to enshrine privacy protections of the citizenry in stone, frustrating future bad actors operating within the state - either intelligence communities or the administration itself.  Things like banning of VPNs and national level banning of ECH/eSNI handshakes (just as one esoteric example) should be a canary in the coalmine situation and automatically trigger overreach protections, including judicial review, so that they can't sneak this stuff in and boil the frog slowly. 

This isn't to say governments can't still find malicious actors, but regulatory protections erring on the side of the citizenry would at least help ameliorate the threat of dragnets / mass surveillance and requires the state level adversaries to drill down and snoop via fingerprinting which is at least somewhat more painstaking by design.  For instance, using Tor (as one part of a comprehensive approach) is good, but state actors can still de-anonymize Tor users through various techniques - it just takes more effort.

Such regulatory measures to protect the citizenry would require founding fathers / bill of rights level wisdom and implementation, which is extremely unlikely especially in today's political environment, but maybe in the wake of all this...

Edited June 11, 2023 by Burncycle360

[lucklucky]

Thanks.

[Ivanhoe]

The bottom line is that governments fear their own citizens far more than any OPFOR.

The obsession with CBDCs, especially in the wake of the Canadian trucker protest and clampdown, is to give the DeepState an enormous cudgel to beat citizens into compliance.

As for Tor, always assume that various branches of Uncle Sam's malodorous henchmen are operating a lot of the exit nodes.

 

[Tim the Tank Nut]

this thread deserved more airplay here than it got.

I think some of what is happening with Gemini is an example of how things can go unexpectedly sideways.  The danger of AI is what the governments will do with it.

[Stargrunt6]

5 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

this thread deserved more airplay here than it got.

I think some of what is happening with Gemini is an example of how things can go unexpectedly sideways.  The danger of AI is what the governments will do with it.

Chine LOVES AI.

That is all.

[Strannik]

5 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

this thread deserved more airplay here than it got.

I think some of what is happening with Gemini is an example of how things can go unexpectedly sideways.  The danger of AI is what the governments will do with it.

It's really not a new problem - it's well known in IT as GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out - refers to the idea that in any system, the quality of output is determined by the quality of the input). 

[rmgill]

AI is going to be like every other tool we harnessed. Agriculture, industry, mining, chemistry, the atom. 

We will have great things and awful side effects.
 

Better living through chemistry. Sorry about the arsenical dyes in the wallpaper. 

Harness the power of the atom. Oops, radium girls.