yanmaani

One would sort of expect the NSA to be able to get ahold of the weights and have the budget for a few graphics cards.

Already exists, see <https://cryptpad.fr>. Open-source.

Google's paid alternative does not share your data with advertisers.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30530876

(Title of this post changed due to length constraints, original was "BEREC: Open Internet Regulation is not an obstacle in implementing EU sanctions to block RT and Sputnik")

Europe, Europe, and Europe. But it isn't actually a war. A war is a horrible, brutal thing. Wikipedia tells us:

> War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, aggression, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces.

When you describe what the rest of us would call 'poor relations' as war, it raises the question of what you call it when thousands are drafted and brutally slaughtered. If this also is to be called 'war', then it raises the question: if you're already at war with them, what difference does it make if you decide to draft a few million young men and send them over there? Or for that matter a few strategic offensive weapons (colloquially known as nukes)?

Alternatively, you may contend that what everyone else calls "war" you call, let's say, "war 2". But in that case, your definition is unique to you, and is not terribly useful for communicating with other people.

No. They are not at war "in all but name". War is a brutal thing, involving the deaths of thousands of young men. The EU is not by any stretch at war with Russia, nominally or otherwise.

The entire point of a free country is that people can handle the information. If not, why even bother?

Probably not. The technology still exists, and nothing beats it on P2P file transfer.

From the economic point, the fragmentation of streaming services will probably give it a resurgence.

A determination subject to whom?

1. RT does provide a view, and I would like to hear it, thanks. 2. Who decides what are the "actual news reports"? Who decides that RT is not "valid"?

No, encryption isn't going to help, because they can still block on IPs. Encryption plus eSNI helps, and if, for example, Yandex.Cloud sets up a big "shared host," I fully expect that to get the Kharkiv treatment, like Roskomnadzor tried a few years ago with Telegram.

Tor operators can see the IP, they can see the DNS, and their operation has the effect of unblocking RT.

Yes, and I earn money to pay my bills from global business dynamic economy enterprise trading.

How are you to get on the Tor network?

I am not talking about the economy, I am talking about the Internet. Cutting RT off from the European Internet requires cutting the EU off from large chunks of the global Internet. If Russia responds, that would have the potential to get very ugly.

IANAL, but as far as I know, EU laws are more important than national laws (you can search "Supremacy of EU law") except in Germany, so the question is if it violates the equivalent of the constitution of the EU.

According to EU officials, it does not.

I've sent out some e-mails, if what you say is true I will amend it.

Where will you go when they block the VPNs?

The previous regulation didn't ban broadcasting, or anything relating to it.

Re: "knowingly and intentionally," I will repost my comment <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30537459>:

> "Knowingly and intentionally" seems to apply to the operation (e.g. "you know that you're running a Tor node") - "circumvention" is on the basis of "object or effect". (For ESL speakers: "object" means "goal", "effect" means "result", and Tor obviously has a final, de-facto result of unblocking RT)

My concern is that with this, you're not just segregating Russia from the world, you're segregating the EU from the world. You're going to get a new Iron Curtain, only this time, the restrictions are going to be on both sides.

"Knowingly and intentionally" seems to apply to the operation (e.g. "you know that you're running a Tor node") - "circumvention" is on the basis of "object or effect". (For ESL speakers: "object" means "goal", "effect" means "result", and Tor obviously has a final, de-facto result of unblocking RT)

If you like laws, how about Cunningham's Law? :)

No, but I am aware of this, I even thought to mention it, and I sorely hope that I am proven wrong. However, my concern is that the ban explicitly does apply to the medium itself.

In particular, article 12 bans participation in "activities the object or effect of which is to circumvent prohibitions". Can you think of any reason for why Tor would not be considered to circumvent the ban?

What if you explicitly target it with respect to the money?

Most of the crap on Google is going to be monetized sites. If you just block/downrank all the sites with e.g. ads, then the profit motive for spam goes down - the more value you extract, the less value you are able to extract.

Step 1 is quite difficult, and step 2 has the downside of disincentivizing people to use it. There are some attempts to make search engines where you pay per month.

That's not a hard fork. A hard fork makes a previously invalid transaction valid; this made a previously valid transaction invalid, e.g. a soft fork. Bitcoin has had many soft forks.

Yes, but new technology makes it easier. Think of all the logistics associated with burying $10,000 in a hole in the ground and the skills you need to do it properly, and compare to the relative ease of acquiring and stashing $10,000 in cryptocurrency.

If I want to remove the airbags from my car and strap a gigantic bomb in there instead, this particular method of doing it makes sense.

I mean, yes, that's true, but it's still a bad idea.

> Balance between security and usability, as usual. If you want more, use pgp, but loose most users.

They could just have a local client. Thunderbird/Outlook/whatever isn't exactly difficult to use, even for non-technical people.

It's certainly a thing for the payment rail - Bitcoin qua payment rail is entirely irreversible. So as a category in the real world, it is trivially a thing.

Whether such storage exists is a much better question. I think it depends on what you want to do with it. For example, if the Bitfinex guys were ideologically motivated, they could've spent all the money on, I don't know, political ads or whatever. More generally, I think you can certainly come up with storage that is outside the reach of a given threat actor in pursuit of a given goal.

Right, it's certainly cheaper, but my point is it's not a fundamental game-changer - she could've done it 5 years ago with the technology we had then, too.

There's no such thing as secure web-based e-mail, because web-based e-mail has the flaws outlined in the article.

Try running Thunderbird or a similar client locally, and use PGP (ugh) or something similar to encrypt messages.

(Theoretically, you can also use PGP with webmail, and it's secure, but extremely unpleasant.)

> Because everyone uses reproducible builds

Of course not, but it is possible to do so. It can also be verified by trusted third parties, etc.

> However, I believe that most people use protonmail for convenience and that it fits the threat model of the average joe. If you're getting targeted by the NSA, you shouldn't use a browser with JIT enabled anyway.

This is a non-sequitur. If you're starting to talk about average Joes with an unspecified threat model, surely GMail will be fine too, for some very low bar of "crooks can't hack my facebook". But there's obviously a big span inbetween that and "specifically targeted by intelligence agencies".

More to the point, no matter your threat model, you should try not to do business with scammers. Firstly, out of moral imperative, and secondly, because your threat model might change.

I don't think the first point is accurate. You have to study the entire system, which is made up of two parts:

1. Storage

2. Payment rail

If your storage is solid (e.g. keys in brain wallet, account in crooked bank, money in shoebox) and the payment rail is solid (e.g. gold, cryptocurrency, cash), you're good. (To clarify, "solid" here means "beyond the legal-regulatory system", which means the rules aren't trumped.) Otherwise, you aren't.

I say that Bitcoin has "finality," because it does the job of payment rail with 100% irreversibility.

Grant that Bitcoin is a mediocre storage (1). But the payment rail (2) truly is irreversible. The combined system of two disjoint parts, built out of bitcoin-as-storage and bitcoin-as-payment-rail, is not.