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posted by martyb on Monday June 13 2016, @11:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the going-fishing dept.

From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/10/bernerslee_warns_of_spying

Speaking at the Decentralized Web Summit conference in San Francisco run by the Internet Archive, the engineer [Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee] joined other internet notables including "father of the internet" Vint Cerf and Mozilla head Mitchell Baker in discussing how to strengthen the open internet as well as ensure its contents are retained over time.

"The web is already decentralized," Berners-Lee told attendees. "The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one social network, one Twitter for micro-blogging. We don't have a technology problem; we have a social problem."

[...] founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle: "Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network with the web. We have the ability to change all that."

The conference featured the developers of many tools that aim to retain the internet's decentralized nature, such as Blockstack, Ethereum, Interledger, IPFS and others.

It's not just the World Wide Web, it's the entire internet: your phone reports on your location at all times, apps on it flush contents of your phone to the owners of the app, almost all websites do some sort of tracking (most of them using Google Analytics), e-mail providers happily hand over anything to anyone asking, and the rest is vacuumed up automatically by the NSA.

So with that in mind: how are Soylentils protecting themselves online aside from the usual (i.e. not running javascript or 'use a VPN')?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13 2016, @06:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13 2016, @06:19PM (#359502)

    But it misses the point.

    All of these steps are the digital equivalent of preppers, and ultimate force the hand of escalation until you are spiking directly into a line with a food bucket and 56k modem.

    There lots of different ways to do anonymity, but reducing the usefulness of a tool is assbackwards IMHO. Might as well go back to sneakernet.

    Making the data worthless seems more effective long term, like if you could design a program to do random searches and visit random pages, so it becomes impossible to detect signal from noise.

    Eventually tech will progress to where reliance on telecos will be less pronounced, but for this particular epoch, you might as play along with an ace up your sleeve.

  • (Score: 2) by number11 on Monday June 13 2016, @08:05PM

    by number11 (1170) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 13 2016, @08:05PM (#359572)

    Making the data worthless seems more effective long term, like if you could design a program to do random searches and visit random pages, so it becomes impossible to detect signal from noise.

    TrackMeNot [nyu.edu] works for Firefox, Chrome, and at least some derivative programs like Pale Moon.

    • (Score: 2) by number11 on Monday June 13 2016, @08:20PM

      by number11 (1170) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 13 2016, @08:20PM (#359583)

      Note that random searches are a 2-edged sword. They increase the noise level, which is good. OTOH, they may sooner or later search for "anthrax kiddie porn jihad bomb", which could conceivably attract unwanted attention. Though it's more likely to be something like "our apr nov consensus divided" (the last thing my browser seems to have searched for). Random searches have the most desired effect if lots and lots of people are doing them.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13 2016, @08:36PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13 2016, @08:36PM (#359596)

        Actually, that works in your favor.

        For any search, if you can prove the extension was installed, you have plausible deniability.

        Same works for encryption, privacy settings, etc. (a lot of people have to use them otherwise they stand out against the traffic).

        Anyhoo, best practice is assume you are being tracked regardless, and work from there.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13 2016, @08:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13 2016, @08:23PM (#359585)

      Perfect. Thank you.