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Anonymous' WikiLeaks-Like Project Tyler To Launch In December
hypnosec writes "A hacker who claims to be a member of the hacking collective Anonymous has revealed that the hacktivist group is working on a Wikileaks-like service dubbed Tyler and that it will be launched on December 21. The Anonymous member revealed that the service will be decentralized and will be based on peer-to-peer service, unlike Wikileaks, thus making Tyler rather immune to closure and raids. The site will serve as a haven for whistleblowers, where they can publish classified documents and information. The hacker said in an emailed interview that 'Tyler will be P2P encrypted software, in which every function of a disclosure platform will be handled and shared by everyone who downloads and deploys the software.'" That sounds like a lot to live up to. Decentralized, attack-resistant and encrypted all sound nice, but I'm curious both about the funding it would take, and whether it matches Wikileaks' own security.
... you do not talk about Tyler!
It could be a government funded honeypot
What will this do that Freenet does not already do?
P2P? Encrypted? Decentralized? Sounds like Tor to me.
Why not just set up a Tor hidden service and be done with it?
For all of you that understand the technical inner workings of the bitcoin network (from what I've seen in comments, that's zero of you), you can very easily use the open source source code for the client but rig it to run in more of a litecoin configuration and store text data instead of bitcoin transactions. That would be 100% secure, fake-proof, and block-resistant just like the bitcoin network. Of course, once a block is written, by definition, it is impossible to modify so it would be unmoderatable and heavily spammed. That's actually a problem with my idea and theirs. P2P means anyone can put anything in it they want and there is no master moderator that can delete it.
This is not about personal privacy.
This is about governments and other public bodies trying to keep secrets from the people who elected them (or, in some cases, didn't elect them). One could argue that this information should be freely available (with reasonable restrictions) but in an effort to cover up and deceive, governments keep the information secret.
Wikileaks seemed to take a lot of effort to prevent personal private information from disclosure.
Many governments have "Freedom of information" laws which specifically grant access to government information so they do recognize that information should be free. However, there is always a battle about where to draw the line with governments wanting to be more restrictive and "the people" wanting more information.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I would, and if I wasn't it would be pointless to try and do anything about it anyway. You cannot control information. Nobody can. Once it is out it is out for good.
SOPA and friends aren't going to go away if we play nice. We have a choice between a creeping and unresisted loss of freedom, and an outright war where at least we have a chance of prevailing.
There is a reason that even as pacifists we remember Churchill more fondly than Chamberlain, despite the former getting way more of his people killed.
Once it is out it is out for good.
Our friends in Hollywood certainly think you can put the cat back in the bag.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
And then one week later it will be full child porn and paranoid conspiracy theories and very little in the way of leaked documents. Such is the fate of all darknets I guess. (see Tor, Freenet, I2P, etc).
Indeed. Comparing individual privacy interests with government secrecy is a pretty stupid analogy.
Government are not individuals with inalienable rights. They service (or rather should service) their constituents. The only government secrets that are worth keeping are the ones that revealing would actually harm the people, rather than the government.
In an ideal world, there should be no conflict between the people of a democracy and its government...a perfect government would already be serving its people's interests.
30 years ago, music sharing was copying cassettes...in person. And sharing government secrets was done largely in person, too, spy to spy agency.
15 years ago, music sharing was Napster. Downloading from a centralized source. Ditto for Wikileaks.
Today, music sharing is "in the cloud", decentralized, private, and often encrypted. Seems only natural for Project Tyler (which desperately needs a new name) to do the same.
Sounds good, except Project Freenet came out around the same time as Napster (late 1999, early 2000), and does everything Project Tyler is attempting to do.
The downside to Freenet is that unused content will atrophy -- but supposedly this would work well for leaks, as you'd have a limited time to grab the information that was leaked, but unimportant stuff would eventually expire.
Information wanting to be free means that when market forces restrict our access to factual information, like how a PDP-11 allocates memory, that information should be liberated.
Wrong. "Information wants to be free" has nothing to do with "should" any more than "Water wants to flow downhill" does. Both are amoral observations about the world, not a call to action.
It means that it's extremely difficult to keep information contained, because once it gets out, it tends to propagate because there are no natural constraints on its ability to reproduce. e.g. if I tell you a secret, I have forever lost the ability to take it back, and if I don't want it getting out, I have to actively set up artificial barriers to prevent it. Without such barriers, the secret becomes "free" in the sense that I lose control over it.
Whether we should take action to restrain or promote the free flow of information is a completely separate discussion.
Does this offer any advantage over the already-established Freenet? Any at all?
The point everyone is missing is that Wikileaks does not just provide a technical service. They go through great lengths to protect the wistleblower by e.g. cleaning documents. Just publishing and keeping things online is reasonable easy. You don't need a technical solution, you need a process and you need to establish yourself as a trustworthy entity to be approached by whistleblowers.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.