makeasnek

makeasnek OP , 15 days ago to Privacy in The EU are voting on Chat Control this Wednesday 19th June

These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don't understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it's not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn't mean it's not a threat. It's one step closer totalitarianism, and what's stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.

makeasnek , 19 days ago to Privacy in Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it?

My memory isn't perfect, it would be nice to have a second set of eyes, and I could describe things to it aside from knowing the exact words. "What was that website I visited within the last six months where I played an online game that was like snake but different?" or "What was that cryptocurrency i was researching which was touting it had perfect forward secrecy?" "Who was I emailing about the football game" etc.

makeasnek OP , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago) to Privacy in Nostr continues to raise the bar on private, uncensorable online discourse

Still some of those, as with any social media platform. I have come across a few objectionable things, I just blocked and moved on. But you pick who you follow so you pick who shows up in your feeds. Each relay has their own moderation policies, so (like Lemmy), you can pick relays which suit your moderation preferences (which effect the "trending notes"/public square section). Most nostr apps by default upon install will ask you if you want to automatically filter out crypto/nsfw/foul language/etc. I picked at random and didn't enable many of the filters.

makeasnek OP , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago) to Privacy in Nostr continues to raise the bar on private, uncensorable online discourse

Okey, so relays can pass message to other relay? Didn’t know that, so thanks.

Relays currently don't talk to each other. But users are typically connected to multiple relays and publish simultaneously to multiple relays. Likewise, a user pulls in data (tweets etc) from multiple relays. My client is connected to ten. So to give you a more accurate answer to your question, to DM another user, you and that other user need to share a relay. If you are crossing networks (such as clearnet->tor), this means one of those relays needs to talk to both networks. If you want to follow a particular person but aren't normally connected to a relay they are on, your client can connect to a relay just to get content from that particular person. All of this is handled automatically, of course.

But then, why not use network like Yggdrasil? Which would be basically like Nostr, but can relay any TCP/IP packet for any app, instead of just Nostr notes.

Taking a cursory look at this, it sounds more like a general routing protocol not something that is specifically designed to relay message content or other formatted data (ie you build your apps on top of it, it's just a protocol for packet delivery). Nostr could conceivably run on any base routing protocol like Tor, I2P, or Yggdrasil though I don't know of any specific implementations either way. As long as the relay has a way to resolve addresses and send data to them over TCP it should be fine. Hadn't heard of Yggdrasil yet thanks for letting me know about that I'll do some more reading later.

makeasnek OP , 19 days ago to Privacy in Nostr continues to raise the bar on private, uncensorable online discourse

Why do we even need relays in the first place?

To store message content. To hold message content if you send a message to an offline contact. To handle getting things across networks. To work around NAT etc. To moderate "public square" type features (ie trending posts). Many reasons.

What if one relay is on clearnet and the other one is on Tor?

No problem, relays can communicate cross-network. They relay things between each other so traffic will find a way through as long as one node speaks to both networks.

What if relays I use are not rechable by my contact, that lives in censored country like China and can only connect to relays in there?

As long as there is a relay path between you and your contact, there is no issue. Relays can be run through Tor and other anonymity networks which are very difficult to distinguish from other forms of encrypted traffic.

Why do we even need relays in the first place?

makeasnek , 19 days ago to Privacy in Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it?

No, but if a linux distro implemented a local-only version of this, I would be interested in using it.

makeasnek OP , 19 days ago to Privacy in Nostr continues to raise the bar on private, uncensorable online discourse

It definitely started as mostly crypto bros, kinda like how lemmy was 100% tankies, but it's gotten better. Lots more human rights activists and scientists and even just regular people on there now. A lot of human rights/privacy activists/orgs are joining up to it after nostr got some promotion at their conferences. Ultimately your feed will be who you follow so luckily you're in control of that. The default settings for most nostr apps even include a filter to remove anything crypto, NSFW, and other controversial topics related.

Still very early days for all these platforms.

makeasnek OP , 19 days ago to Privacy in Nostr continues to raise the bar on private, uncensorable online discourse

Finding good people to follow has been a challenge for me both on mastodon and nostr. But I find just posting and seeing who likes my posts and then following them has got me a decent feed curated at this point. And searching hashtags for topics I'm interested in.

There are some bridges so you can follow mastodon users on nostr and vice versa, but it's not quite the same. We're still pretty early adopters on both platforms at this point.

makeasnek OP , 19 days ago to Privacy in Nostr continues to raise the bar on private, uncensorable online discourse

DMs aren't as relevant in Lemmy so I get why securing them isn't a priority, but in Mastodon or any twitter clone it seems like a relevant feature I'd like to have some security/privacy with. Instance admins, and anybody who breaks into their server, being able to see all DMs seems like a security flaw that should be engineered away. Even Facebook, the place with the worst privacy, has E2E encryption (or so they claim, who really knows)

makeasnek OP , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago) to Privacy in Nostr continues to raise the bar on private, uncensorable online discourse

Lemmy is "uncensorable" and offers identical moderation abilities in the "public square" aspect. E-mail is "uncensorable". Uncensorable does not equal unmoderated. It means if you want to publish something, nobody, not the even the government, can stop you (though they can throw you in prison but that's outside the discussion of protocol). It doesn't mean anybody has to choose to listen to what you publish. It does not mean relays have to include you in their list of public tweets. Relays can pick what tweets/etc they show. They can choose what goes through their relay. What they can't do is stop you and another user from using the protocol to DM each other. As long as one relay allows your traffic through, the traffic will flow. They also can't stop you from tweeting, they can just choose not to show your tweets. If I want to follow somebody, frankly, it should be no business of a relay operator or the government or anybody to prevent me from following them, just like it should not be the business of the government to decide what books I am legally allowed to read. By building networks which are "uncensorable" we can guarantee that it remains not their business for future generations. So that they can live as free, or freer, than we do.

The internet, as a structure, is "uncensorable". This is good. Power should be decentralized. The whim of a government shouldn't dictate how the entirety of the internet operates, and it can't. People in power love censorship, it is to their advantage that we are not able to organize among each other using common communication platforms.

makeasnek OP , 19 days ago to Privacy in Nostr continues to raise the bar on private, uncensorable online discourse

Almost ready for it’s prime time I think. We just need a bit more on the UI/mobile app friendliness to make it shine for all.

Yep, been using it for a few months now and it's getting really good. Not quite as polished as mastodon (as least in the app I'm using), but still very fully featured.

makeasnek , 23 days ago (edited 23 days ago) to Privacy in Chat surveillance law by the EU Parliament?

We need more censorship-resistant, private, decentralized communication protocols. We need them to be widespread enough that lawmakers see censoring/controlling them as technically impossible and politically unwise. That means they need to be easy to use for the average person so we can get sufficient adoption. Donate to your software of choice, that's how it happens.

This is kinda how Bitcoin is. Even if a nation-sate wants to "ban" it or attack the network, the network is gonna keep working and doing its thing (technically impossible) and they will piss off a bunch of voters and/or other keys to political power and potentially lose out on businesses and jobs building in this sector (politically unwise). The CCP tried to ban Bitcoin some years ago, did not work at all, and the network wasn't nearly as strong or large as it is today.

makeasnek , 26 days ago to Privacy in Internet Archive is in danger

There's no reason to store the data on chain. Chain stores the metadata and pointers to the files (IPFS, torrent/magnet link whatever). Chain administers how many copies etc should exist and enforces those rules. Filecoin etc have already successfully done this.

makeasnek , 26 days ago (edited 26 days ago) to Privacy in Internet Archive is in danger

Downvote this guy all you want, but this is an incredibly true point. For 15 years, Bitcoin has maintained a distributed, uncensorable ledger, the question is, can we use similar ledger tech to store archive.org? Wikipedia is a single point of failure, so is Archive.org. So is the library of congress. We could easily store all the text content of wikipedia on chain that's under 100GB, along with IPFS pointers to media content. Long-term, humanity needs a resilient censorship-resistant system to store our collective knowledge and history. These systems, when sufficiently large, are uncensorable and incredibly difficult to exercise undue influence against or shut down. Ask anybody whose tried to get a judge to enforce a judgement against the bitcoin blockchain lol. And they can survive quite well major disruptive events like wars, natural disasters, and even widespread network disruptions. Blockchain can also solve the spam problem that plagued early P2P systems like Gnutella/Ed2k/etc. Everybody moved to BitTorrent because we could trust custodians (trackers and indexers) to curate lists of valid torrents. But that can be decentralized now.

There's over a dozen different blockchain projects working on the "file storage problem", some of them have very interesting proposals, at least one of those is going to emerge from the smoke with something that will replicate archive.org's current role, but it might be a few years before that happens. Already, we have blockchains which offer "decentralized file storage marketplace" that competes pretty well with current file storage providers (AWS etc), and some of them have been running for years.

makeasnek , 27 days ago to Technology in 42 key points of the secret #EUGoingDark surveillance plan for the new EU Commission

Let your MEP know their voters care about privacy. These efforts have been defeated before, it just requires vigilance. Your letter can be as simple as "I care about privacy". That's all you have to write.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home