Privacy and control need to be put back into the hands of the individual

https://decentralize.today/privacy-and-control-need-to-be-put-back-into-the-hands-of-the-individual-301c4c318ef8#.u3sba968w

by merkleme • 10 years ago

118 93 10 years ago

decentralize.today

unicornporn• 10 years ago

Domain: decentralize.today. Published on: Medium.

Seriously, it isn't THAT hard to at least host your blog outside the centralized disservices. You could argue that reach is negatively affected. It probably is. But if everybody (and that includes the outlets promoting decentralization) just swallows the bait, how can things ever change? (Wo)man up!

pjmlp2• 10 years ago

Having been raised in a country enjoying the first winds of freedom after a dictatorship of 44 years, I wonder how serious this kind of blog posts are.

Sometimes they look just doing activism from the couch.

maglavaitss• 10 years ago

Anything that raises a flag and makes people think and consider alternatives to FB, Google, printed money, etc, is good activism. Whether it's from the couch or the armchair, is irrelevant.

bogomipz• 10 years ago

What do you not find serious about it?. The author is sighting actual examples of behavior that they find concerning. Do you doubt the veracity of these examples? Also Why does it matter where activism is conducted from?

natch• 10 years ago

Maybe they're not yet perfect, but kudos to them for at least decoupling services so they keep more flexibility to move anywhere.

mSparks• 10 years ago

Its not even a real article. Just some mindless repetition of some braindead cia propoganda against foreign governments being used to promote a new crypto currency called shadowcash.

Yawn.

mastazi2• 10 years ago

Maybe the author should give a look at https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/ - there are a lot of decentralised blog engines around.

nebulon• 10 years ago

You could also checkout https://cloudron.io we do try to make it a lot more user friendly and approachable to self-host your blog and lots of other app categories. I think once self-hosting such apps doesn't require much technical knowledge anymore, it removes a lot of friction for users.

martinko4• 10 years ago

The article mentions shadow cash. I've never heard of it, but why would someone use it over bitcoin or perhaps monero?

jbpetersen• 10 years ago

Article is actually a lengthy pitch for YAC$ (yet another cryptocurrency)

It's another anonymized coin that appears to have fancy chat/marketplace support in the main wallet application as a flagship feature.

martinko4• 10 years ago

Indeed, I'm actually surprised it is on the top of the front page, given the lack of content.

creshal2• 10 years ago

I don't understand how blockchain applications can ever be considered "anonymous", when there's a public ledger and everyone knowing your wallet address can track all your transactions.

kqr• 10 years ago

I guess you could own several wallets for different purposes?

pas• 10 years ago

There was a paper a few years ago (when the need for proper anonymous bitcoin spending came up), something about zero-knowledge proofs, and you can switch your known bitcoin (public key, basically) to this anoncoin and you can then switch that back to a bitcoin, but all outside observers will just see that your known address "bought" an anoncoin. Of course, if someone observes the whole anoncoin switcher network, all they would see is that anoncoin users together bought some bitcoins.

But here is the relevant wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin

awqrre• 10 years ago

Bitcoins can be somewhat anonymous if you buy them with cash.

pash• 10 years ago

That sort of transparency is not an intrinsic property of blockchain-based systems. There are already several cryptocurrency protocols in use that obscure data in their blockchains to various extents.

Dash [0] does CoinJoin-style mixing at the protocol level. Some newer systems use cryptographic techniques to provide even better security guarantees. Monero [1] implements the Cryptonote protocol, which uses ring signatures [2] to obscure who owns what and who's transacted with whom. Zcash, an implementation of the Zerocoin protocol [3] that should go live in a couple of months, will use zero-knowledge proofs [4] to similar effect.

There have even been a couple of well developed proposals for changing the Bitcoin protocol to make it impractical to track transfers of coins. And one of them will probably get implemented eventually, since privacy (unlike transaction throughout) is a real concern among many of the leading Core developers.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_(cryptocurrency)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero_(cryptocurrency)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

agroot12• 10 years ago

The first half lists lots of state actions against encryption, the second part advertises the shadow project, a blockchain based anonymous currency, communication and commerce platform: https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow

tbarbugli• 10 years ago

The right title should be: how to loose all or most your money by using crypto currencies

tomp• 10 years ago

Earlier this year the Brazilian government used the courts to block WhatsApp for 72 hours as it seems they did not like being unable to peer into the private communications of their citizens. This happened again just a couple of weeks ago and it seems what the government cannot control should be blocked or even banned.

It's very hypocritical when an American criticises foreign "corrupt, oppressive" governments for "peering into private communications" by using public legal means against US corporations, whereas the US government has done exactly the same thing (using legal and illegal means) but you just didn't know about it (because most Internet companies are based in the US).

[I'm not sure that the author is an American, but there are undoubtedly many Americans that share this attitude.]

martinko4• 10 years ago

Remind me, was that before or after they enabled end-to-end encryption?

kbart• 10 years ago

Since WhatsApp is virtually a blackbox, their word for end-to-end encryption means nothing. Few 'bugs' in implementation and you have a nice backdoor.

tim333• 10 years ago

It's kind of complicated. There were Brazilian bans in 2015 and 2016. Whatsapp has had encryption since 2012 but it was a bit half arsed. It now seems good. I guess the courts could still order the metadata of who's been calling who though. It's a bit unclear what exactly the courts did order.

rmc4• 10 years ago

Remember: if you're a non-US citizen outside the US, then the US Constitution protection against search (4th Amendment) doesn't apply to you! We have no 4th Amendment protections!

jnbiche5• 10 years ago

I'm as opposed to mass surveillance as anyone on HN, but I've been surprised by this kind of reaction. Why are non-citizens surprised at this lack of constitutional protection? Are there actually any countries whose constitutional protections apply to non-citizens and/or non-residents? I think that would be pretty cool and progressive if it were the case, but I'm not aware of any.

GunboatDiplomat11• 10 years ago

Duh? That's trivially true. Similarly, as a non-EU citizen outside the EU, the freedom to travel within the EU does not apply to me. Or, as a non-Canadian outside Canada, I cannot receive medical coverage from their national health care plan.

Draiken• 10 years ago

Honestly I see this whole WhatsApp debacle as a big old scape goat.

They're putting a big corporation on the spot so they can extort money from it, make people talk about this and ultimately it's just a means to keep spying on every single brazilian citizen.

People say WhatsApp is evil for not cooperating now and pretend the government is a pure entity only seeking good.

Meanwhile they forget we probably just had a silent coup for the presidency, the whole government is corrupt and so is the justice system that is enforcing these rules. I see talks about how evil the americans are for not helping the poor brazilian government, pretending like before WhatsApp existed crime in Brazil was almost non-existent. It's honestly sad.

The best part is that this only generates animosities between citizens, who attack each other because they support "red" or "blue" allowing the corrupt to keep doing whatever they want.

The whole world has shown exemplary individuals that despite living in their corrupt environments stand up and take a stand for us all. Despite that we're stuck pointing fingers at each other with blind faith in our own corrupt governments.

Honestly you can even be right that the brazilian government is "legally" spying on us. That doesn't make it right.

And to say we the author "doesn't know about american government spying" seems extremely naive to me. We probably know more about how corrupt the US government is than any other government on the planet and I doubt he's not aware of that.

geon• 10 years ago

It is not hypocricy unless they endorse the american governments actions.

JadeNB• 10 years ago

It's very hypocritical when an American criticises foreign "corrupt, oppressive" governments for "peering into private communications" by using public legal means against US corporations, whereas the US government has done exactly the same thing (using legal and illegal means) but you just didn't know about it (because most Internet companies are based in the US).

Surely this is only hypocritical if the American supports his or her government's doing these things. (I am an American, and I don't support these actions, whether taken by my country or any other.) Surely you don't want to take the position that those ruled by a morally corrupt regime by that fact lose their right to protest corruption?

lsiebert• 10 years ago

I worry about specific implementations of software for decentralisation. You can ban or block an app, arrest it's creators, but it's a lot harder to ban a protocol that has a number of different implementations. Maybe there isn't enough resources for that, maybe encryption and privacy tech is hard enough that more than one implementation isn't possible at this moment, but I think it should be a goal.

rini172• 10 years ago

Has anyone of these activists ever considered the appalling inability of average person to manage private keys properly? Whether it is Bitcoin, pgp, whatever else, using private keys on own hardware where noone else has access to is absolute prerequisite of successful decentralized crypto. Yet the privkeys keep getting leaked,stolen,lost(including Zimmermann's pgp key),cracked(due to generation by buggy software) without any good solution in sight.

microtonal• 10 years ago

You will have a hard time stealing a private key remotely from a good hardware token.

(Of course a compromised machine can be used to sign using a hardware token, but that's a different level of compromise than getting the private key.)

rini172• 10 years ago

Obviously the token can be stolen,too. Also,people all the time voluntarily allow others to use their tokens if convenience demands it.

Your comment is also a good example of how the concern 'people can't manage privkeys well' keeps getting handwaved away, with sad results.

david90• 10 years ago

Not only on contents on global sites, China did lots of censorship on the local sites content.

xyzzy42• 10 years ago

Printed money is decentralized and anonymous in the cash form.

etatoby2• 10 years ago

Anonymous yes, decentralized no. The bill in your hand is printed by a central authority, is given value (or taken away, at their whim) by that same central authority, is protected by law, and is technically not even your property. It's the opposite of decentralized.

phatfish• 10 years ago

Well the use is decentralized any two people can (anonymously) complete a transaction. But the creation is centralized.

GunboatDiplomat11• 10 years ago

That's the only way to have a physical fiat currency. And the alternatives all have much more serious problems.

xyzzy42• 10 years ago

It's decentralized because you don't have to communicate with a centralized authority in order to make a transaction.

Privacy and control need to be put back into the hands of the individual

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