Boingboing bbs discouraging privacy?

I knew exactly what you meant. I figured it was autocorrect being finicky, which is where nine and ninety luft balloons of my spelling mistakes come from.

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Disqusting.

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Just going to wander in and say, don’t bother VPNing to the US. I had to in order to purchase pizza for an American friend, and it worked only once. Absolute pain in the ass, and it will not protect you from three letter agencies or an evil ISP.

I used to use VPNgate in order to access american content, but now I just use random pirate streaming sites in a burner VM on burner hardware.

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I fully appreciate and respect this. But, it does fly in the face of one of bb’s main themes, that of “the inherent right to internet privacy technologies,” which, let’s just say, are often presented in relatively black/white, right/wrong dichotomies. I will refer you to many of the works of a Cory Doctorow, and a large chunk of the published articles on this site over the past many years.

Just sayin’… :sweat:

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Yes. Considering I also host all of Cory’s Websites and email, lets just say I have an intimate knowledge of the subject at hand. :wink:

We don’t block all IP addresses. We don’t block all VPNs. We don’t block Tor. We do block malicious IP addresses that attack the site, because if we didn’t, we’d literally have more spam accounts than legit ones.

We can both acknowledge that privacy tools are useful and protect the BBS from bad actors at the same time. We do this by being light-handed in IP banning, and using the awesome features of Discourse to auto-remove these IPs when bad actors are no longer detected.

You seem to suggest there’s some sort of bias against VPNs or Tor or other privacy tools, and there just isn’t. There is a bias against malicious IP addresses, and nothing more.

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Wait, this is potentially an option? I HAVE YOU NOW, FA

[this post has been flagged for imminent deletion by the moderators]

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Doesn’t that suck? Hate that shit. People all licking my Zig Zags and shit.

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Actually none of that, and as I said, I completely respect and appreciate your policies. If you didn’t get the hint, that was me saying I support them. What I was commenting on is the irony, because these nuances you speak to are not often projected into the site’s content itself.

And yes, I kind of assumed you were familiar with the site’s and Cory’s content, silly. That was what we call “rhetoric.” Ya dig? :slight_smile:

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I don’t think I agree with that. I don’t think Cory’s ever said (or linked to anyone who said) “All VPNs should be whitelisted and no amount of bad behaviour should cause them to be restricted” (or anything similar). I know we’ve had more than one article discussing how Tor and VPNs are important for protecting privacy in some cases (for example, VPNs likely won’t stop a state actor looking for you, or even a large corp willing to subpoena your VPN provider), but it is effective in keeping your ISP from tracking you.

i think we can all agree that the site’s stance is “Use privacy tools. They will help you stay safe”. I assure you Cory doesn’t run around without a firewall on his laptop just because he believes the net should be open. In fact, if he did that somewhere like Defcon, I think I’d have to subsequently lock him out of his own sites. :wink:

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Fair 'nuff.

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Yup yup yup. And a couple more yups.

We agree on a fundamental principal, there is no black and white. In this day and age IP banning is like Han Solo with a blaster when we need a more elegant weapon, but it gets the job done.

BTW, do you happen to have a source for tor and i2p interconnect or routing nodes? Entrance and exit are easy, it’s the stuff in between that is hard to track.

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It was pretty funny the first year defcon moved to the Rio, and every ATM and elevator was pwned on day one. Well, funny to me, I was staying somewhere else.

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I don’t, but I’m not sure why you’d need it, either? If the node doesn’t have an exit policy than it isn’t routing traffic outside of Tor (and as a result isn’t going to hit BBS).

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Let’s just say I have $reasons. But it is God awful hard to trace, unless you bribe ask nicely for netflow or router log data.

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and most reasons are Not Nice, even academia has no ethical problems doing attacks research (c.f. CMU’s SEI)

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The main reason I track onion routing and crypto currencies isn’t because there is anything inherently wrong with them. It is because libraries bundled with malware commonly tunnel via protocols such as tor, and very commonly use computer power in crypto currency pools.

So answering the question, are there tor transit flows on my network, is really a proxy question for, Are there compromised hosts on my network.

Onion routing is neither bad or good. It is just traffic. But I sure as shit want to know if VPCs in my DC are forwarding certain kinds of traffic–cause they should never do that. Being able to answer that question is literally a multi billion dollar issue.

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Disturb, disrupt, disengage, disease, dissolve, disavow, dispense, disgrace. Loads of possibilities.

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I have a suggestion regarding your visualisation. (And no, I don’t want to derail. There’s the Peter’s projection thread for that.)

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It was crude, linear, and slapdash. I appreciate the link, I suspect this won’t be the last geo infosec dashboard I develop :grinning:

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