Re: [tor-talk] Tor as ecommerce platform

[antispam06@xxxxxxx]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012, at 23:11, Mike Perry wrote:
> Thus spake antispam06@xxxxxxx (antispam06@xxxxxxx):
> > The non technical, non freak population doesn't really see the use in
> > the developed World as Facebook marketing is way past advertisments and
> > into the actual news. Just the other day I have read a fascinating
> > article in one national newspaper about how the parents who have teens
> > should advise their children to check up on FB the people they meet
> > on line as (and that is an proximate quote) only freaks and weirdos
> > won't have a public profile. They went even further as how to check on
> > their FB activity for the sake of âsafetyâ. In short they really bought
> > the if you don't have anything to hide...
> 
> Yeah, I know. I saw that. Pretty amazing, especially given that it came
> out right around when Face book's user's numbers declined by 1%.
> Someone saw their portfolio about take a pretty big hit I guess.

From that standpoint is easier day by day to inject publicity once you
figgure out how to phrase your article such it would catch the editors'
attention.
 
> I bet I can also guess why the article was written towards making kids
> get accounts, too. I think Facebook is losing cool among the Young's.
> 
> The good news is that parents telling teenagers they *have* to do
> something is the /fastest/ way to make it uncool. Let's hope it starts
> an epidemic. I hate being the only weirdo without a Facebook account ;)

It's funny how you put it. One paragraph points to the clichà approach.
The following just contradicts the previous pointing out that it could
be an attack to profit from the news that membership is already going
down.

In the past years have been quite a lot of these examples. In a dream
world where every programmer was an agent of propaganda for Google some
entity took the time to prove to the World Google is evil in the
conventional view. And it's not the press. Those are good at rephrasing
ready made PR articles and pretty much nothing else. In another light
the tango between Apple and Samsung is wonderful. The two are partners
and do almost identical products for different price ranges and
expectations. Yet they get so much publicity with their legal chaâcha
they can peddle the same old hardware by just putting an extra letter to
the name. And people would take a job they don't like to have one of
their gadgets they don't need.
 
> > Also, to generate a .onion is not trivial. And it's not a one click plus
> > a form like getting a hot-mail account. Make it as easy as getting a
> > Wordpress account and the numbers will rise. But I'm not sure the
> > quality will rise.
> 
> Yeah, but it's not like wordpress blogs are the bastion of great
> Internet content, either. The thing that makes published Internet
> content useful is the search index, and that thing *could* just
> memory-hole all the scum, and maybe even the stuff that links to the
> scum, too.

Of course not. I put it as a benchmark of the ease of use. Compared to
MySpace, Hi5, FB, whatever, is as is to use. And it's Open Source. It
can probably called free software.

As for the content, the nature of Internet is pushing to low quality.
Low attention span. The ease of repost. While the password can be
checked as weak or strong, a newly posted article can't even be checked
to show other articles just like it, if not identical.

> But I'm also not even talking about self-publishing. These things are
> arbitrary communications endpoints. What if you could call them and use
> voice? Ok, that's a bit far off. But chat and email could work today, if
> someone built the software to support it and people used it.

But how? Email is hard to secure. Say you even get two tormail accounts
or two gmail accounts via Tor. Now you have to exchange keys and be
careful as encrypted stuff is quite obvious in a sea of plain text spam.
You have to develop ways of making sure the other one is who he is. See
the weasel that told on Bradley Manning. In the former SU those
scoundrels were the cornerstones of a good population surveillance. So
why reinvent the wheel when there are so many who still don't own an
iPhone?

What abut chat? Jabber over SSL with OTR. Is there something more
secure? But what can protect an audio stream? Or video? I just have read
a bunch of papers about analysing Tor. One from 2008 was pointing out
how little of the trafic was over SSL. One interesting thing was they
were putting downloads -- identified as over 1Mb files over HTTP -- in
the same league as torrents. Sure, the interactive use of the web should
be important. But how about uploading a movie documenting a meeting that
never happened officialy? That should be more important. Yet, how do
people know how to document such a meeting beyond the silly: see, Mr. A
and Mr. B were together in the same room? Here, people are quite helpful
and tolerant even with repetitive silly questions. And that goes for the
Tor blog where guys like Runa do a wonderful job. But most of the
mailing lists and forums are filled with geeks who can't explain the
basics: HOW. Sure, this thread has gone quite far with WHY. But how
about HOW? Ask some question of cryptography and the gist of the answers
is: you can harm yourself doing that.

To structure the above mess:

1. People (myself included) need to know in a clear way how to secure
email trafic.
2. How about IMs? What to use?
3. Can voice and video be secured with something like OTR?
4. How can one extract the relevant information in order to blow the
wistle? Press is the obvious counter example.
 
> It would be costly and our current network and protocols might need
> several upgrades first, but we could build out a whole platform on this
> technology. Steve Jobs built the most valuable company in the world
> around a computer that has adoption rates smaller than the 10% of people
> who probably *really* want private personal communications at least
> sometimes. The secret sauce is in how the integration works between
> devices and technologies, and how much is sucks to use versus
> centralized and non-private solutions.

I admire the guy. While the Gates dude had a powerful family that pushed
him, Jobs did something original. Just to make any non technical guy
want an expensive gadget, now, that was a special trick!
 
> It wouldn't be easy or quick to get there and existing players may be
> sorely tempted to manipulate the legal system to keep new decentralized
> technologies out. That would be depressing for a while, but ultimately I
> think the space aliens would probably think of something to handle that
> scenario. They appear to be pretty smart and strangely determined, for
> some reason...

Because privacy is losing them money. Wistleblowing is losing their
clients money. Eradication of government corruption pushes their costs
higher and thus lowers the profits. And skeptical thinking might put
them out of business. In shot it would be stupid not to have the
foresight and do this.
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