Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous Online Diaries With Invisiblog
An anonymous reader writes "The Cypherpunks have finally caught on to the blog phenomenon: enter Invisiblog. This blog system allows users to register accounts and update their weblogs using Len Sassaman's Mixmaster anonymous remailer program. Now you can post all those tales of late-night dumpster diving, without fear of being branded a terrorist!"
The sure-fire way to make a website invisible is to put a link to it from Slashdot....
... or just a cool place to post those secrets you've been dying to shout out to the world.
isn't the whole point of a blog to give the world a small peek at what you're doing? If it's anonymous, there's nothing to stop someone from posting absolute fiction. I might as well just write short stories and post them on usenet...
My tinfoil hat is feeling very comfy today. Now with Invisiblog, they'll NEVER get me!
I think this could turn out to be a very interesting project. Think of the people who can now share their story -- Chinese dissidents, drug dealers, hitmen, etc. Society will definitely gain from this.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
The problem with anonymity is that you don't know who to blame when it get's slashdotted.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head><title></title></hea d><body></body></html>
This reminds me of the time my boss wanted me to code something to prevent web pages from being printed by users. I told him that if the information was so sensitive, he shouldn't be putting it online in the first place.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
It would be funny if this was set up by the gestapo to catch criminals. obviously not your standard doughnut eating gestapo but maybe the NSA or something
There is no god
I guess the good thing about the invisblog site being slashdotted offline is that they'll learn from their mistake have better servers next time around a 13 year old doesn't like what someone said on their site and decides to DDoS it.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
Or *maybe* someone should set up a DMCA-busting blog with this. Imagine if the Blackboard card reader info, DeCSS info, sharpie-marker-on-CD info were all readily obtained through an anonymous blog on a website not in the US.
The freeness of a society is inversely proportional to the number of things you can write about that will get you in trouble.
This is a good idea. Find the DVD encryption key? Post it here. Find something out about your government that could get you killed? Post it here. This opens up great possiblities for those of use living in the age of Pointdexter, the DMCA, and the Patriot Act. While we may not need it yet, it's nice to know it's there. And, who knows. Maybe this could be used in conjunction with my DMCA Loophole idea, in which one uses the DMCA against itself to protect programs and texts which violate it, and illegal music.
Providing anonymity is only half the battle, you have to base yourself someplace that U.S. law reach to.
Can anyone hear the server drives screaming?
> --- All Of The Above --- >
There's already a couple of posts to the effect of "don't post anything on the net that you don't want traced back to you." But, that's not an argument against having anonymous publishing forums. Security agencies want to eliminate anonymity as a route to engaging in criminal activity or, more ominously, as a route to expressing dissent. In some countries, the suppression of dissent is explicit. In others, it's implicit. If these countries allow access to the Mixmaster remailer, and individuals use tools to which security agents don't have access, then "nym" weblogs could be a way of publishing information that governments (and other organizations) wish to suppress. The worst they could say is "you sent an encrypted email to someone" (which is bad enough in some places).
Saying "it's pointless to hide your tracks, so don't even try" is giving in to those who wish to be able to track down every dissenter, and I'm not sure we should do that quite yet.
Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't write about things that would get you in trouble.
Yeah, 'cause freedom of speech is overrated.
This sort of system could benefit people like "Salam Pax", the Iraqi blogger who disappeared from the 'net a few weeks before the US invasion of Iraq. It's nice to have a public forum for which to voice your views -- but if the ruling government is known for killing those who speak out against it, you need some sort of assurance that you will not be killed for your speech. Note that this system still needs work. It should be combined with something like JAP to protect against identification of bloggers based on who views what blogs.
Yeah. Thoughtcrime is doubleplusungood.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
timothy writes:
"Now you can post all those tales of late-night dumpster diving, without fear of being branded a terrorist!"
No, timothy, we'll still be labeled terrorits. Encryption will simply be chalked up as one of ou^M^M their tools.
My
Limekiller
Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't write about things that would get you in trouble.
And this was called 'insightful'? Many of the "things that would get you into trouble", in this country and others, are simply those things that the powers that be don't want you telling the world. But I suppose if you're just another alpha-male-worshipping ass-kissing moron, then advice like this is just the thing to make the world a good and right place to live in.
Forget things like exposing political corruption or corporate wrongdoing - you shouldn't be even thinking about such things, much less discussing them with your fellow human beings! Why, if we all bowed down before our political and corporate masters and acted like the proper slaves we were meant to be then we'd all be much, much happier! And should ever a disloyal thought cross your mind, just ignore it and turn on the TV until it goes away....
'Insightful', my ass.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Dear Penthouse,
I never thought that this could happen to me...
If I was that drunk, I would have remembered it -- H. Simpson
Why not publish your blog on Freenet instead ? That way, you can not only publish your blog anonymously, but you can also be sure that there is no single, centralized server where it is stored that could be taken out or attacked. Besides, freenet can always use new nodes!
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
4/18: I started off with a pretty normal day, reminding myself that arrays' elements start with zero and count up from there, and that ints were four bytes long, and that there are 8 bits to a byte.
4/19: Today I learned that master keys and player keys are the same things, and that DVD vendors don't control them all. I also found out that you could get disk keys from disks, and decrypt them with player keys. Title keys can also be read per file. The disk key can be used to decrypt the title key and the show.
4/20: I took this encrypted disk key, that was six bytes long (well, five bites and a zero at the end), and figured it would take about 3.5 hours to recover one by brute forcing it.
4/21: So, like there's this pointer "KEY", to these bytes. And there's this other pointer, "im", to the six bytes that make up the player key (but those six bytes are a trade secret.)
4/22: I played in an online lottery called Lotto 5/255. I lost, but I heard the winning pick was 81, 103, (someone must have liked 103, because 103 was rolled twice), 197, and 224. The ticket emailbot added a "0" after the 224.
4/23: Suppose your code had some internal variables t1 through t6. Wait a minute, there's these guys at the door wearing black suits. They sound angry. I'd better answer the door.
While your advice is sound... thank god people don't follow it... much of history would be lost.
-pyrrho
This would work out great for this chica... although she already seems to have a handle on technology so far, according to all the people trying to track her down.
[o]_O
First, say you work for a company, like some big name company or organization. Suppose you have some valuable input you think the public should know. When I did work for the [large nonprofit animal-rights group name withheld] in the mid 90s, I was truly shocked how poorly it was run. My company was doing a sort of "cleanup" before an audit, and we saw almost brazen employee theft, accounting black holes (over $600K a year was being funneled into payroll, for example, to a dozen employees who did not exist, or at least, had no SSNs and all shared the same mailstop in the Azores), and just general dishearteningly shocking truths. When our group began to uncover a lot of red flags, we were suddenly told that we were not needed, they had hired another audit company to "start where we left off." Apparently they got away with hiring three companies, all of whom did only part of the audits, so that something they were up to, I guess, could not be pieced together. I wanted to shout, I wanted to scream, "Don't give money to these people!!!!" to anyone who might mistakenly seen their cute animal logo and think, "I'll save a panda or a baby seal." But I could have really fucked my audit company, made some accusations that would have put me in court, and other nastiness. What can I say, I'm a coward.
Second, sometimes you just want to vent frustrations about family and friends, get comments, and just orally dump onto an anonymous crowd to get a sense of whether you're crazy, or they are. Suppose you have a lot of friends in the local SOHO community. You hate some of them, you know some of them have their dirty secrets, but you don't want to expose them or get them in trouble by having them traced back to you. Those can make the best blogs. "The man we'll call 'Sleeps-with-underage-boys' was at my gallery today, bragging about his new blond hair. He's bleached it so much, most of it has fallen out, and he looks like Colin Mochrie with a Quake II -rendered haircut. Despite claims he makes at book parties, he's only sold one painting, and that was six years ago. If it weren't for his father's inheritance, he'd be mopping the floor of porno booths at the local wharf. Itchy-Scalp-Redhead is flirting with him, because she has no gaydar, and doesn't realize that Sleeps-with-underage-boys is so past gay, he overshot Liberace and landed deep in Emerald City; red glitter shoes and all. It's like watching a sparrow crash into a plate glass window over and over. You want to stop it, but you can't stop laughing at the little bird's persistence. I hate this job, but I can't tear myself away because its a circus that keeps getting worse and worse, and you just want to be there when the whole big top finally catches fire and Jumbo tramples a few trapeze acts."
I have to second the recommendation to try Freenet. I believe it is superior technology to mixmaster and is completely decentralized so nobody can censor it or take it down. Very slick. Undergoing some growing pains for sure but definitely moving along.
I too started a blog, and its prior incarnation. The reason I have a "prior incarnation" is becuase 1) I changed formats, and 2) I really, really pissed someone off.
Here's what happened:
My best friend was getting married, and I was invited to be one of the groomsmen. I'm cool with that, very excited to be a part of it, etc etc.
Well, during, before, and after the ceremony the bride's mother just got on my nerves. [politically correctness]She generally acted in a very non-friendly way[/politically correctness].
And a day later, after coming down with a cold, and pumped full of cold/flu meds, I re-iterated this truth in my blog, albeit a bit too unfriendly.
You see when I started a blog I wanted to be truthful. I didn't want to worry about holding back, about letting off the pressure a bit so I wouldn't offend people. I wanted to let my thoughts be known, no matter what.
Well, this will backfire for anyone. I promise. That is why this idea is f*cking brilliant.
You can't be brutally honest (such as, say, calling your best friend's new mother in law a bitch) without suffering repurcussions. Such as hateful, bodily-harm threatening email from the bride (and family).
So from then on I had to censor my posts, put my attitude and ideas in check and make sure they're in accordance with the Friendly Blog Act. This means you can't say anything too hurtful or truthful for fear of it affecting other areas of your life.
Was my friendship affected by the post? Sure. But it affected him far more than it affected me. That was the real hurt. Knowing that my words caused him grief, caused him to deal with the bride's family backlash, to try and make up for my stupid ass mistake.
With a service such as this I can tell the truth, change a few names, and no one ever know the wiser. Of course, if I get too specific I can get busted, but considering the amount of blogs this could generate, I'm not that worried about it. I can't wait to sign up and try it out, completely anonymous and completely guilt-free of any posts I might have to put up there.
Blog's can harm kids, remember. If its not your friends it may be the job interview, your future supervisor googling up your name and holding you responsible for some post you made while drunk out of your mind.
Not that I would know...or anything.
"So, you said last March you...'Love the pot.' Can you elaborate on that?"
With google buying that blog company recently and the recent posts about how "the second superpower" term was coined, anonymous blogging will probably die because of all the usual scum--spammers who abuse trackbacks, googlebombers trying to raise their relevancy ratings, and then the RIAA citing every hyperlink on the anonymous postings that points to an MP3 file.
The best thing about this story is that it was submitted by "an anonymous reader".
--Kynn
Kynn's page: http://kynn.com/
http://invisiblog.com/info/faq
8. Mixmaster is slow and not always reliable. Messages typically take 12 to 24 hours to arrive. Sometimes they never arrive at all.
As has been said before, why blab on about something noone cares about in a public forum just to mark it private?
If anyone really cares, they would have asked you.
Some people have blogs while most have a cry for attention.
Well, I can see the Homeland Security boys freaking over this one. Anonymous blogs are sure to be a hotbed of terrorist steganography.
"Your Honor, we need a court order to seize their network logs for the last 6 months, and a gag order so they can't warn their potentially unlawful users." [insert rubber stamp sound]
Right now there are two groups that use Freenet: the cautiously-paranoid and the rightfully-paranoid. The cautiously-paranoid is the group that (with good reason) fears the intrusion of not only government censorship but increasingly corporate censorship, as the line between Corp and State thins... The CP posts content that is unlikely to get them in much hot water if posted to the 'net, but that makes them feel better about supporting a system that will one day (supposedly) protect us from a surveillance-state gone mad.
The rightfully-paranoid are those that use Freenet to post content that is so heinous and illegal (i'm thinking kiddie porn here) that no one would ever host them, and leaving any non-cryptographically-secure trail, no matter how obfuscated, that leads back to them is an invitation for law enforcement to track their asses down and lock them up for a long time. In other words, they use Freenet because, for all the inefficiency and general-lousiness of Freenet as a distribution system, the expected value is still better than getting their ass in stir.
That's pretty much the problem. There's nothing to attract most users, who might appreciate anonymity but would much rather have pseudo-anonymity (which is more just the appearance of anonymity), and have content that might actually be read by someone. The only thing a new user is likely to find on Freenet was posted by tinfoil-hats or child pornographers. This is not likely to endear them to the system (unless they're into that sort of thing).
My argument is that, after the initial fascination with the power (read: geek-coolness factor) of the anonymity of the system wears off, most non-clinical tinfoil-hats would rather have their content read by someone, and will find a new distribution system. The only people who won't make that choice are people who can't afford to make that choice. I expect that will eventually leave the FreeNet as the network of kiddie porn, with a few ultra-paranoids hiding among them.
I'm not sure what the legal standing of Freenet will be if/when it will be used mostly for the dispersal of obscene material, but it will certainly be an easy target in the Ashkroft justice system... and if your intent is to preserve a means of communication when the State outlaws badthinkspeak, you're never going to be able to organize on something as inefficient as Freenet.