[tor-talk] Neal Krawetz's abcission proposal, and Tor's reputation

[Ben Tasker]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 2:55 PM, Jon Tullett <jon.tullett at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> Weeeell. Sure. Except that the proposal here claims to be making life
> difficult for operators of illegal services without sacrificing any of
> the anonymity and security goals of the project.


That's not quite the claim he's making though. He seems to be claiming any
"legitimate" (in his eyes) service shouldn't mind sacrificing their own
anonymity by being linked to a clearnet identity and becoming a "verified"
onion to avoid the rolling rotation. He uses examples of some who've
already done that (by having an easily findable clearnet site - like
Facebook and DuckDuckGo) whilst sweeping other legitimate users under the
rug with a handwave of "they should be fine".

So his suggestion is portrayed as not sacrificing much, but actually
sacrifices quite a lot.

The comments are fairly telling as well, he notes that political dissidents
could just have a clearnet site in a "friendly" country to verify their
onion:

> For example the "China Dissident Blog" could choose a stable site hosted
in the United States or Europe and have it point to the current unvalidated
name. Or they can just use a friend's Internet site (located in a friendly
country) for the validated onion name.

Which (IMO) kind of overlooks the additional risk it puts onto them. That
site may be in a country that respects freedom of speech (and so will stay
up), but there's now another potential vector for their unfriendly
government to link their writings back to their real life identity.





> Presumably it's not
> the only possible suggestion, and they may well all be complete crap,
> but that's what I'm interested in. So, it's not a request to
> compromise on the goals (though it might do so anyway - Alec seems to
> think it would, and he would surely know better than me), and as such,
> what does the project think of it, is kinda where I was coming from.
>
> -J
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-- 
Ben Tasker
https://www.bentasker.co.uk