Anyone else having this problem? When accessing anarchistnews.org through Tor, I usually get this message three or four times before getting through and need to keep either restarting Tor or asking for a new circuit:
--
Error 403
We're sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server.
You do not have permission to access this server. Before trying again, run anti-virus and anti-spyware software and remove any viruses and spyware from your computer.
Your technical support key is: (string of characters)
You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.
If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact worker at anarchistnews.org and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.
--
Not the biggest deal, but it seems to be getting worse with time. I wrote to the address above about a year ago about it and never heard back.
Yeah, consistent Tor user here for... 7 years now? It's a real PITA, but it boils down to IP blacklisting. It's a shitty way to go about spam control. There's some service a-news uses to reduce the amount of spam posts, and if an IP ever posts spam to any site that uses that service, the IP gets blacklisted. Since Tor relies on shared IPs, when someone uses Tor to post spam on one of those sites, that Tor exit node gets blacklisted. For reasons I don't fully understand, worker has historically been borderline hostile to those of us who take online privacy and security seriously (maybe "hostile" isn't exactly the right word, but there has been a decided "I don't give a fuck about you, deal with it" attitude for sure), and I don't expect the changes behind the scene to help out much either.
What you call a shitty attitude is an attitude of ambivalence about complaining.
When many connections come from the same IP address (over 20 connection) they get blocked. Tor exit nodes get used by angels and demons. The blocking of IPs affects them both.
How would you do it differently?
I echo the comment, "ambivalence about complaining". Running a site like this is a lot of work and people gotta prioritize. I guess if we're choosing to use a widely available (and widely misused) security service like Tor, we need to take some responsibility for figuring out how to make it work here too.
I figured it had to do with blocking spammy IPs. I don't know much about computers, but there are also ways to automatically block spam based on what's being posted, the content, no? That might be inadequate to catch the volume of shit this site probably gets dumped on it (and we see remarkably little spam on here, so something must be working).
One solution Tor users could take on would be to make a .onion mirror site. Though I guess then there would be problems with Tor users not being able to submit content and comments from that page... Probably doesn't work afterall.
It's just IP blacklisting (as written by other poster above). Thing is... Tor has been infiltrated by many toxic nodes.
It's stupid these days to use Tor out-of-the-box and not changing important settings like blocking exit nodes by country, blocking Javascripts, changing user agent and, last but not least, changing security settings in about:config in Firefox. Some of this is already implemented in the Tor Browser, but still the node blocking and deep security settings are still to change. Do a web search on that for more details.
If you get the problem of spam attacks (many posts from one IP address sequentially) and the IP address is a Tor exit node, a temporary blacklist of an hour or so will block the bot, while allowing others to use the exit node later. The bot won't be able to get back to that exit node, so it won't be a factor there.
BTW, Tor was designed from the start around the assumption that some nodes would be hostile and that's one of the reasons three hops are used. Since no individual Tor node is presumed trusted, Tor is designed so that no node can simultaniously see source and destination, and that only the exit node can sniff unencrypted content. The exit node can see what you are posting and where it is going, but not where it came from. Tor only becomes unsafe if so many malicious nodes from from the same adversary as to allow a reasonable chance of all three nodes being under the control of the same entity, or two under that entity's control plus the connection between the exit node and the final destination.
You don't need a toxic node to post spam, though toxic exit nodes call into question content downloaded from any site while not also using https. There have been Tor exit nodes in Russia that patched Windows binaries downloaded over plain http and Tor for instance. They took advantage of the fact that an http connection gives the exit node access to the plaintext, and a government may simply treat ALL tor users as enemies. Thus, Tor should not be used when https cannot also be used for downloading anything.
Another major threat is Google Fiber, which controls both ends at once of any connnection by any route to a Google server. That Youtube video you posted over Tor from a coffeehouse could get you arrested if the coffeehouse has Google Fiber. Here's how: Tor is not designed to defeat someone counting and timing packets in and packets out, watching only the data going to Tor and coming from Tor. This is known as a "confirmation attack" as it only proves a connection you were already watching. In this case, Google owns the connections at both ends and presumably is simply watching all of them at once. Don't use Google Fiber, and don't use a coffeehouse suspected of using them either.
I prefer also that admins find solution to protect privacy/anonymity of visitors. that's one of the reasons I stopped to visit some anarchist sites before 1-2 years, simply it was not possible to publish comments/forum when I used proxy or tor. I think it was libcom.org
When A-news blocks me while using tor I just use a web proxy on top of tor. kproxy.org
removed.
thecollective is in the middle of a conversation about whether ITS communiques should be posted here or not.
since they explicitly say that they are not anarchist, some of us think that is a reason not to post them here.
others of us think that they are anarchist in their actions, even if they don't claim the label... which is of course a slippery slope.
but we're still talking about it.
people may feel free to engage the question here. if there's intelligent conversation about it, perhaps it will be the next topic of the week.
Well I'm glad that this criticism is seriously being addressed. As I wrote elsewhere, ITS had also been showing a quite arrogant and nearly-hostile attitude towards international solidarity with prisoners, especially anarchists, including CCF fighters. There's a bit of a serious contrast here between some "naively-anarchistic" insurgent group who avoids any political expression and these guys, who the other way around have expressed some borderline right-wing views (referring mostly to their neopaganism, clinging to conservative values, as well as relative racism and irritation towards anything part of the Left, whereas anarchists included in these diatribes).
i thought the purpose of @news was about news etc "of interest to anarchists". not necessarily by or about anarchists, per se. if ITS is not of any interest to anarchists... then fuck anarchists! not saying one has to agree with their position or their tactics. but to say they are of no interest, is either ignorant or dishonest.
Well, feel free to fuck off from anarchism as much as you want in favor of your love for a bunch of sociopaths who think "nobody is innocent" like any cop would and therefore deserve to die for their beliefs...
Like one tear drop in the rain of an authoritarian society, I don't think we'll have this in the front page of newspapers the next morning.
But anyway this ain't the topic of this thread. If it gets to this I got more to say about it.
I'm not joining your dinky
I'm not joining your dinky little forum just to tell you this: ITS communiques while not specifically anarchist are still of interest to anarchists particularly those of us with anti-civ / anti-tech perspectives. I'd rather see the latest ITS communique that absurd articles taken from mainstream news websites. Also, how come the FAI-IRF communique from Chile I contributed here wasn't posted?
What communique? Didja posted it anywhere else?
Lots and lots of non-anarchist stuff is of interest to anarchists. What criteria should thecollective have for its filtering? We could easily be overloaded if anything of interest to anarchists were to be posted. Already we get crap from 'The Wildest", moralistic identity politicians (or was all that sarcasm and satire?), Wayne Price articles which are really leftist not anarchist, etc. I am interested in all sorts of non anarchist perspectives and groups, but I don't expect to get all their communiques here. To satisfy everybody we would end up with texts and manifestos and communiques on Taoism, speculative physics, art movements, authoritarian clandestine groups and rackets, half-baked extremists and weirdos of every stripe. I don't mind having a discussion of criteria on where to draw the lines...
ITS says they are anti-anarchist, but they also seem to feel that they can't really ignore us, probably because some of us are among the very few that will have any understanding of the rage that drives their misanthropy and nihilistic psychopathy.
News connected with ITS should be published 100%. even self-proclaimed anarchists are often speaking one thing and doing other thing, the same as some Muslim drink beer but he is a Muslim in any case. nobody is 100% anarchists and ITS are in general in the line with anti-civ anarchists. even if they are not 100% in the line, so what? as I said, many traditional anarchists are far away from anarchism, in their behavior, although theoretically they know everything about anarchism. we don't need to count percentage, how much we are anarchists in the present system, in our actions, in our behavior with people around us, in our relationship, etc... I don't see any sense in trying to find something bad about ITS, if you want to find, you will find many bad things at many anarchist. The only thing is that anarchistnews collective will get FBI on their neck for publishing anything related to militancy, but it is their choice how far they will conflict with FBI.
perhaps (or perhaps not?) anarchist news would like to big up themselves and think they are attracting FBI attention by posting ITS or FAI-IRF communiques etc but the reality is that they won't. The websites that attract the big risk of law enforcement attention are the ones that clandestine direct action groups contact directly with their communiques - also the ones who translate such texts. All anarchist news is doing is re-posting content from another website. Being based in USA about the only thing that could get them in trouble along those lines is perhaps printing communiques from Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, Revolutionary Struggle or from Revolutionary Struggle member Nikos Maziotis - all of whom are officially considered terrorists by the US State Dept. However they can still post articles reporting on these groups, just not posting articles that give the impression that the website is providing direct support for them. Also anarchist news should stop thinking that the comments section is an accurate barometer of anarchists who read this website. A lot of people just ignore the comments or don't get involved due to so many idiots commenting on there these days - Sir Einzige, post-biceps, Emile etc and their various alters / pseudonyms who all seem to think that everybody appreciates them commenting 500000 times with their by now thoroughly boring and un-entertaining opinions that we are now all very familiar and bored with on every single post. The biggest mistake this site could make would be to start catering to these imbeciles by making the majority of content posted that appeals to them. I also think it would be a good idea to stop re-posting every bit of crap that the mainstream media publishes about anarchists and to concentrate on content made by anarchists from all around the world and of varying tendencies. I think although ITS are not anarchist it is still important to post their communiques because these are important (although somewhat crazy in many respects!) developments in anti-civ / anti-technology direct actions and we should be kept in the loop about them and also they obviously still feel the need to engage with the anarchist movement even though they condemn it and it also provides an opportunity for anarchists to comment on their communiques and let them know how we feel about what they are doing and saying - there is no use just burying our heads in the sand and pretending they don't exist or that these actions are not happening or that they are in no way connected to the anarchist movement. Also - as far as comment censorship goes - it seems very arbitrary and ridiculous currently - maybe just delete spam and obvious trolling and just leave everything else either that or just remove the comments altogether cos half the time it is not making sense with big chunks of conversations deleted or moved to the forums.
I really think its time to stop running leftist, liberal or platformist articles from around the world. I find SirE and emile at the cutting edge of post-leftist praxis spreading the word oh mighty pompous Caesar.
yes but you are another sectarian crypto fascist all lives matter egomaniacal blowhard who gets a hard on every time you see your on here so your opinions are irrelevant. love from 'stalin'.
Well I gotta fully agree with that. No matter how I find ITS annoying, there's far bigger shit hanging over this website than a bunch of insurrecto-crazies in Mexico who might be actually okay chaps in real life only fighting for their lives. If I had to choose between purging ITS and the "post-left" troll warriors from this site, my choice would obviously go to the second.
Pretty lazy of thecollective to use another topic to talk about ITS, rather than starting a new topic to specifically handle ITS. ITS is of interest to anarchists. I'm glad someone is willing to translate and share this information with us and I'm glad ITS is part of a dialog on what anarchy is and isn't. I have more affinity with ITS than I do with social anarchists, so there is that too.
Site is almost unusable on Tor for me now - eight or 9 reloads to get in, write a comment, then can't post it because IP is blacklisted. Comment is lost.
The people running this site are slowing getting greedy with their control.
Yeah... since the time they started erasing posts by revisionists, sexists and po-mo text generators. It's the Spanish Inquisition all over again! What will happen of our Race an our God and also that Nation... they're shutting us down everywhere uuuuurgh!
Must be the Gay commie NWO conspiracy.
No, come on now. It's just the IP blocking system. This isn't some fuckin personality thing.
Also, why did the ITS conversation end up in this thread about technical problems? Is it a joke about tech complainers and anti-tech?
I doubt thecollective is that sophisticated. Most likely they were being as lazy as they are with the rest of the site. The article choices have been rather bland, few and far between. Its like they have other things to do, but this site is a chore and a bore to them and this attitude is reflected in how the site looks and feels. There isn't anything sexy, funny or interesting. The one creative thing they did, the Topic of the Week, is interesting only because The Brilliant talks about it.
They need to create new aliases and put some personality into them, add new features, be more on point to handle spam and fix the TOR blocks so people can post here anonymously. This site used to be my daily thing and the commenters aren't the reason I have stopped coming so regularly. Rather it is because thecollective has been a banal force since they got started and there is no fun or thrills coming from their direction. Just a bunch of "I guess I"ll delete some spam before I go to bed" "I guess I'll add a new article before I go out for the day" "I guess I'll search for offensive comments and delete them. Sure it might ruin someone else's day, but I'm playing on Facebook and don't really care".
It really does show how little thecollective cares and how uncreative they are.
It's good to have criticisms, but you're being a hater. thecollective stepped in to try to change the direction of the site while maintaining what was great about it. It's true the rhythm of articles has been a lot slower, but that's probably because they aren't going hunting around as much, which is something worker was often cricitized for.
I might be really ignorant here, but who are these "ITS"'s anyway? I got really confused when the IP-blocking issue suddenly shifted to a discussion about a group I haven't heard of.
Individuals with Savage Tendencies, maniacal moralists and self proclaimed terrorists!
(i just Googled it)
I tried "Googling" it as well, but got a whole host of other examples of what it could be an abbreviation for, none of them fitting.
Thanks.
Even when searching for "Individuals with savage tendencies". Actually, the only hit I get is your comment from this very site.
(or savage)
is what to search for.
google is evil. use duck duck go.
I use duckduckgo myself, that is why I try not using the verb "Googling".
New record of 14 new tor circuits to get the page to load. And on tor for android, I havent been able to access the page in a week. I know there's no capacity to do many techy changes (and I certainly don't have those skills), but I just wanted to bump this thread to keep it on the back burner.
Sounds like paranoia is one big mind-fuck, have you ever asked yourself why do I fucking play this cat and mouse spy vs spy bullshit, is it the women, the parties, the cocktails?
Tho I bet you're not a cop.
Internet security is often impractical, because our relationship to computers is atomized. Paranoia is a mental condition, something that states actively foster.
Install ghosty and you'll see this site tracking you and logging your IP address on every page you visit. The IP logger is Bad Behavior which screens out Tor exit nodes associated with spam. You don't really even need those tools, you can open the developer tab for your browser and see everything running in the background from openguild. Hope you are able to read this before the moderators take this post down.
I installed the helper as you suggest and I see no trackers from this site. Either the trackers you have are from other sites, or I've not got it installed properly (unlikely) or you are just making the whole thing up...or...something else?
Ghostery registers nothing.
Just being made up, I guess. That's why these posts about our "benevolent hosts" here keep getting removed. Looks like they shutdown the JavaScript tracker, for now. You can thank me for pointing it out and spurring on the action to kill the tracker. The bad behavior IP logger is still running. That one will stay up because that's how they filter out incoming Tor traffic.
If you're crafty, you'll put the pieces together. I can't help if the posts showing you how to see what they're doing keep Vxgetting deleted. Use the developer tools in your browser and tcpiputils.com to open your eyes...
"That one will stay up because that's how they filter out incoming Tor traffic."
What are you talking about? I'm always using Tor to access this damned site. People get blocked more often than me, it's just because they don't edit their torrc file to select their Tor node countries (as the spam and spy nodes come most often from NATO countries).
Don't wanna defending Thecollective as I still don't know who they are.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/doc/ListOfServicesBloc...
http://www.b3rn3d.com/blog/2014/03/05/tor-country-codes/
I'd just like to bring this up as it's causing me major butthurt and yet no one appears to have addressed the matter already...
Early on last summer, Jacob Appelbaum, the founder and long-time head of the Tor Project, was forced to resign from his position and stonewalled as well from other hackactivist groups he was involved in, due to a callout campaign directed at him, based on allegations that yet have to be proven, even though they are based on multiple accounts from apparently reliable persons. I ain't saying de facto that this was just more ad hominem against prominent and threatening cyber activists -considering how violently all the big names have been flamed through media, save perhaps Snowden- the guy may be some fucked up pervert and serial abuser, given how it's conservative to say he's been having a plentiful sexual life (something that in itself should legitimately draw some suspicion when it comes to a prominent leading figure).
But this whole trial is so 50/50 that its so insane... I got no way to know whether the opposing party are legit, or that Appelbaum has been indeed scapegoated using the most vicious COINTELPRO tactics. And it's a shame that many anarchists here and elsewhere seem to have turned a blind eye over investigating this, and instead wasting time with Clingon and the Drumpf clown, which is obviously a non-issue and a non-debate.
Coz you know... this is a technology that many of us are using and and somewhat trusting -at least with precautions- and since Anews has got some dubious SSL certifying practices, this would make even visiting this site definitely unsafe for anyone, for how easy that'd be to deanonymize us.
So I dunno if people realize how huge that is...
Lately I've read on some forum (can't give you the source) that the FBI had recently took over the Tor network, and that one person had intentionally given them the keys to the network. If true, I can only guess that it would be either Jacob doing that in retaliation, OR its direct. This might be some scare tactic used to badmouth Tor, but given the latest events in Tor Project's politics, this is strikingly believable.
This would wave off most technical questions related to Tor security, making it basically an even less secure practice than using Facebook based on your home phone number. If the FBI has truly taken over management from-behind, they must have known by now all the ways to track down every IP that posts whatever they're looking after, from child porn to drug dealing to just posting a comment that's detrimental the some fucking abuser in some power position, including everything in-between.
I would like anyone's informed, and verifiable take on that.
(That'd be also a great idea to make this the next TOTW)
There's a lot of stuff to unpack in this post, and I'm not really sure how to adequately address it all. There's a few communities involved here --- the hacker community, the academic security/privacy community, and to a far lesser extent, the anarchist community, and the intersection of them isn't very large (this makes me a sad panda, but that's for another time). Let me preface by saying I do academic work on Tor, have been on the Tor/Cypherpunk mailing lists for god knows how long, and am posting here, so I at least have knowledge of all three of these communities, but I am also not particularly close to anyone directly involved in the Jake scandal. Therefore, getting to any sort of objective truth here is even less likely than normal (but as I will explain, that's okay).
So, with that preface, I'll give my views on things. The three parties I know most with regards to the Jake scandal (again, not that I know any of them well), are Jake, Alison, and Isis*. Jake is an anarchist the way Noam Chomsky is an anarchist (nominally anti-statist, but has engaged in much leftist statecraft); IDK if I'd consider Alison a full on anarchist, but she definitely has some tendencies; and Isis likes to make "Make Total Destroy" jokes on Twitter (they know their shit). Pretty much anyone who has spent any amount of time with Jake (or just listening to him, just search youtube) knows he can be a bit of a pompous dick. What had not ever occurred to me was that he was capable of sexual assault, let alone rape. But I also have met with Alison and Isis, and they don't strike me as the types to lie about these sort of things. In the end, I have to defer to the sheer number of stories, and my trust in Alison and Isis to say that yes, Jake has definitely done some very inappropriate shit. If you want more details, the best account I've seen is Isis's:
https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/the-forest-for-the-trees.html
However, Jake is currently working on his PhD with DJ Bernstein**, was a core member of the Tor project, and heavily involved in Wikileaks, so shitloads of people also came to his defense. Overwhelmingly, the defense was that he should be "innocent until proven guilty," which is a great idea for legalism, but not an actual standard for how we treat people in social relationships. Your options are calling Jake a rapist, or calling a dozen or so trustworthy people liars --- there is no return to the status quo, and someone is guilty of something. But the idea of dealing with these sorts of things on a social level instead of a legal one isn't necessarily pervasive in the hacker community (weirdly enough, given the relationship with law enforcement), and essentially unheard of in the STEM side of the academy, so when people saw this attempt at doing so, they were extremely suspect. For example, someone posted a blog post about how they heard Isis planning to commit perjury if Jake goes to trial, and Isis had to explain that they were looking into German law regarding refusing to testify (because @), not trying to lie to throw him in prison.
Now, for the question of whether this could just be an attempt to discredit an anti-authoritarian. I am of the opinion that someone's accomplishments are orthogonal to their status of being a sexual predator, and as such, the two should be judged independently, even if some actors (even state actors) have some vested interest in discrediting them. Anything less would involve a form of hero-worship, which is in turn a form of authority I can't stand behind as an anarchist. The fact of the matter is that sometimes people do important work, and also do awful things. So if you do take Jake's side, it had damn well better be because you don't trust every single person making these claims, and not because you don't want it to be true.
More importantly though, if you aren't socially interacting with these people, why would you even care? There's a bit of a false dichotomy here, in that it's often framed such that your options are "you can't prove Jake did it therefore you can't treat him like he did" or "Jake is a pervert and everyone must ostracize him or be forever marked as one of his ilk." But those aren't the only options, and the people who make it sound like that are either misinformed or pushing their own agenda (I could list people on both sides who are doing this). While it's true that there is either a group of liars or a rapist, this isn't the legal system, and we can still be human about it. The important things to come out of this are
- there are people who should not be in the same space as Jake
- people should be aware that their heroes are capable of fucked behavior
- everyone (and particularly women) should feel comfortable disclosing that these sorts of things have happened to them, without having to worry about retaliation
Many of the accusers have outright said that Jake needs the support of his friends right now, so it's not like they're demanding he disappear from the face of the earth. So there's no reason, if you don't know any of these people or work in this community, to have strong opinions on the matter.
Which brings us to the mechanics of Tor itself, and how it relates to the scandal. It becomes necessary here to distinguish between the Tor Project organization (owner of the trademark, employer of Shari, Roger, etc., former employer of Jake), the Tor community (Alison/Library Freedom Project, the people at the NRL, volunteers, etc.), and the Tor network (the technology). Already you can see why when people ask about "the Tor vulnerability" or "the Tor FBI thing," it's extremely ambiguous, and becomes difficult to explain. The Tor Project is a decent sized organization, and the community is massive. Drama comes and goes every week. For what you're referring to, the two most likely possibilities I can think of are:
- the incident with the FBI and Carnegie Mellon University: a research group got a paper accepted into a conference that an attack on the Tor network would not be out of place, but then changed their mind, and... whatever, long story short, the FBI paid the group about $1 million USD or thereabouts to let them use their Tor attack instead of publishing it. A child porn ring was taken down as a result, and the Tor project/community as well as most of the academic community were livid when they found out, since that's not how security research is supposed to work. The attack only worked on hidden services, not normal Tor traffic, the vulnerability was closed as soon as someone in the Tor Project found out, and in the end it was a corruption of a research group at CMU by the FBI, not the Tor Project. There was a lot written about it, but here's the post from the Tor project that originally leaked this had happened: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-tor-users
- the ex-FBI agent incident: an ex-FBI agent was hired by the Tor Project in a non-technical position, I don't remember what exactly but you can search the mailing lists. They didn't reveal to the entire team that they were ex-FBI (I think a few people knew, but I can't recall exactly), and once the entire Tor Project team was aware of it, many voices chimed in with "Are you fucking insane get the hell out of here" and he promptly resigned. Then, someone leaked it publicly (probably Jacob or one of his supporters, but who knows), and a certain segment of the community went apeshit on theories of how the FBI infiltrated Tor, despite the fact that as a registered non-profit we can see who was on their payroll at all times, that everything the Tor project releases is open source and many, many people read that code (myself included), and that there are Tor project employees who would probably rather risk spending the rest of their lives in jail than let it become a secret FBI honeypot.
In general, the Tor network is designed to be pretty resilient to a malicious Tor project. While you could definitely ruin a lot of people's lives if you just took over all of the project's infrastructure, people would notice within a matter of weeks, if not days, or sooner. [warning: gory technical details] Giving everyone backdoored versions of the software is out of the question, since Tor project uses reproducible builds (if I compile the source code, I get the exact same binary as if someone else did, so the back door would have to be in the source code, which means I could just read the recent changes and be like oh look at what this asshole did). Same thing for the directory authorities --- you could take over all 9 and be able to control what relays users were able to see, but then everyone who runs a relay or keeps track of the one available would be like wtf where did all the relays go? So the attack would have to be targeted (send *this* person a backdoored version, make *this* person only see relays I control), but then that would require running the Tor project as normal, except with some major behind the scenes modifications. I can't imagine that the leaks we would be getting would consist of "They once accidentally hired an ex-FBI agent who quit before they started!" instead of "All nine directory operators are currently being held at gunpoint." In fact, Isis is one of the operators, and they wrote about how they fled the US when the FBI started trying to track them down (though this was before they were an operator):
https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/fbi-harassment.html
So it stands to reason we would definitely hear something if all 9 ended up compromised. If you'd like, you can look up the directory authority operators here: https://atlas.torproject.org/#search/flag:Authority
a lot of the community people are here: https://www.torproject.org/about/corepeople.html.en
and a slightly out of date list of employees can be found here: https://www.torproject.org/about/findoc/2014-TorProject-combined-Form990...
The relays themselves are operated by thousands of volunteers.
Without more specific details, I don't know how to assuage any particular fears. If you'd like, you can send me an email with a link to the forum you don't want to post publicly: johnny.cant
at yandex.com
or you can just post more questions here.
* Isis here is Isis Agora Lovecruft, the world class cryptographer and Tor dev, not the terrorist organization
** I'm guessing next to no one here will know who djb is, so: they're easily the biggest academic name in modern applied cryptography. As an analogy, there was a certain someone in the anarchist community who was actively criticized for having their fingers in too many important projects in the @ community, including this site? That's djb for the crypto that runs the internet. The academic crypto world can largely be divided into "pro-djb" and "anti-djb".
p.s.: sorry for the emile-length post
this is a model of awesomeness. thanks so much for the informative, thorough, rounded, and thoughtful post. you are an example to us all.
and the departure you make from the usual casting of over-simplified allusions to good guys/good works and bad guys/bad works is refreshing.
one observation re your comment;
“I am of the opinion that someone's accomplishments are orthogonal to their status of being a sexual predator, and as such, the two should be judged independently, even if some actors (even state actors) have some vested interest in discrediting them. Anything less would involve a form of hero-worship, which is in turn a form of authority I can't stand behind as an anarchist.”
the allusion to our actions being ‘independent’ and thus the possibility of the same actor authoring ‘good actions’ and ‘bad actions’ is abstract idealization. in the physical reality of our actual experience, our actions are conditioned by the dynamics of the common relational space we share inclusion in, at the same time as our actions are conditioning the dynamics of the common relational space we share inclusion in [Mach’s principle].
sharing inclusion in a common relational living space with sexual predators can make everyday living scary and induce persisting anxieties. sharing inclusion in a common relational living space in which people can communicate without being identified and prosecuted by secret police working for authoritarian oppressors, whether or not such communications speak out against the oppressive regime and help to orchestrate restoring of natural balance and harmonies, can make everyday living more spirit-lifting.
inhabitant dynamics and habitat dynamics are not two independent dynamics but are just one non-dual dynamic. individuals are vents for the transmitting of influences from the non-local, non-visible, non-material relational dynamics they are situationally included in, to the point on which their individual local, visible, material actions can act [Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’]. in the physical reality of our real-life experience, it is not about ‘what we do as if we were things-in-ourselves’ with absolute powers of good or bad jumpstart cause-effect actions’, ... but about our contribution to the harmonies and dissonances in the common relational living space we share inclusion in.
Hey thanks for the thorough and informative reply. I'm still somewhat skeptical whether the Tor usage of millions of people being safeguarded by only 9 directory authorities, who are human beings and, no matter how very smart and skilled in their fields- are certainly not the Justice League.
But my interest with this scandal was just about its direct relation to Tor Project internal politics, that, under the assumption that these politics have an effect on the security of the Tor network, would be of huge consequences to all Tor users. I don't care personally about taking anyone's defense in the Jake scandal.
Post above was posted by the poster you replied to. Also the article on the Forest for the Trees site challenges the issues I had with call-outs, since this is some rather revolutionary form of collective justice that was applied here, which departs from the usual slander politics based on hush-hush plots and the complete closure of interactions between the oppressor and the accusers.
Kproxy over Tor is the ticket. You can also Browsec over Hoxx over Tor.
Fantastic post. Thanks for all the good information.
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