IPVanish “No-Logging” VPN Led Homeland Security to Comcast User

Re:IPVanish “No-Logging” VPN Led Homeland Security to Comcas... by mirimir on Friday June 08, 2018 @03:05AM (#17263250)

Sure, the NSA can arguably see every byte on every wire. But that wouldn't do them much good, unless they knew what to compare with what, over what time period. But OK, say that they had the processing power to compare every traffic stream with every other traffic stream, with time offset up to a week or so. That still wouldn't tell them whether Mirimir had shared something with someone else. Because we'd all be using Tor.

And about onion file-sharing sites. With OnionShare, you can create a site just for that transfer.

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Re:IPVanish “No-Logging” VPN Led Homeland Security to Comcas... by zrm on Friday June 08, 2018 @11:28AM (#17266384)

What you're describing is equivalent to a dead drop, which is an old school anonymity method. It's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's completely independent of Tor and it doesn't work in all the contexts where Tor is supposed to work.

If Alice uploads the file and Bob downloads it immediately then you haven't gained anything. Bob has to wait some time for it to work, which means you didn't actually need a low-latency anonymity network to begin with. You can't use it for things that actually need real-time communication, like for live streaming or anything interactive.

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Re:IPVanish “No-Logging” VPN Led Homeland Security to Comcas... by mirimir on Friday June 08, 2018 @05:38PM (#17269927)

True. But Tor is the large anonymity network that we have. I2P is cool, but it's too small. For high latency, perhaps Mixmaster remailers via alt.anonymous.messages is still workable. Last I checked, there was a Tor onion news server.

I agree about unworkability for real-time communication. But there, you want to keep messages small. And use padding. Trying to make live streaming anonymous is nontrivial.

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