No no no, you have to go read technical documents first, since you don't understand the subject in detail already. Then, after having done that, you'll know which servers to expect to have which information.
Where you say "the server doesn't know," you didn't even just reference a specific server. Lets put this in logical terms:
Some servers know who Tor users are. Some servers do not know who Tor users are. Therefore, "the server" doesn't know who the Tor user is. T/F
Yes, you really do need to look things up before attempting to tell sysadmins they are wrong about network infrastructure. They might be wrong, it happens; but if you didn't just look it up, you don't even know. A sysadmin faced with a technical dispute would look it up, and you can be sure that I have.
So your only source of information is whatever it says on the about page of the project? You didn't bother even with wikipedia? You know an "about" page isn't technical details, right? Everything on that page is consistent with what I said, but it isn't technical; it uses broad generalities that do not attempt to uncover the actual detail of the semantics of who knows what. You don't consider that everybody they mention as groups using it are the same people that I mention as the groups the government built it to support.;) You got lost in the phrasing of the PR, instead of looking up the technical, non-PR explanations of how it works, where it came from, why, etc.
Somewhere in that pile of logical and well-reasoned text, albeit not tacitly articulated, you're expecting people to be educated, alert, and accepting of personal responsibility or accountability?
No, I simply target my communication at those parties, and I really don't care about the comprehension ratio or average interpretation.;)
There is way too much available noise for me to worry about the external ratio. I'm only worried about controlling my own data stream.
There is nothing in the project about "crinimals" or "terrorists." The goal is to develop "prototype products and systems that have the potential to threaten current military operations, equipment, or personnel and are assembled primarily from commercially available technology."
You're right. The idea that they would do this for chasing criminals is stupid, as is the idea that DARPA cares about crime. This is about things that will sound scary to them in the context of overseas deployments. They already deploy to places saturated with small arms, so obviously a gun isn't going to impress them very much.
Probably because you were trolling. Duh. You should try a low-troll diet.
"Derp derp police state" is generally not going to be seen as an attempt to add analysis. It is just you spewing opinions that are unrelated to the story, and not even interesting, insightful, informative, or funny. Maybe things that don't have to do with the police state, are about other things? Gee.
There is literally nobody trying to take Americans guns away. All the different factions agree that the 2nd Amendment exists, that it doesn't mean you can have a personal tank, and nobody thinks they could get a new amendment passed. You're just straight-out crazy-talk tinfoil trolling about people taking guns away.
And insurgents have small arms. Your whole idea is stupid. The US military deploys to places already saturated in small arms; this has nothing to do with what people would use to fight if they didn't have small arms. Small arms are not even a major concern, they already have effective strategies for managing that risk, and technology that gives them a substantial advantage even if heavily outnumbered. If it comes time to defend the nation, hicks with rifles are going to be totally useless.
It doesn't really do much good to scan everybody to make sure they don't have freely available commercial parts.;)
You need to work on your conspiracy theories a few milliseconds longer, don't just go with the first thing that pops into your head and sounded good after half a moment of reflection.
This isn't "things that could be dangerous" in general. This is specifically things that could be dangerous to the military. Also, it has to be legal to make under Federal, State, and local laws. So there is very little potential for domestic impact; if you have an idea for something not legal, like an explosive, or a missile over half and inch diameter, then this isn't even the right program.
It is a US government-funded thing, sorry. That was the whole point; people who wish they had our laws, can get on Tor and their network experience happens as if they live here. So that they can engage in free speech for political and creative purposes that are banned in their countries.
It was not invented to hide from the US Gubermint. It was invented for people who wish they had our Freedoms, and all it does is hide their activities from their ISP and State-sponsored firewall. It is up to them to hide their face from the video surveillance at their web cafe. The server would be using for these speech activities would generally be located in some western country in the offices of some ex-pat group from their country, except for where they're just using it to access mainstream international news.
There is no conspiracy theory involved. This is all stuff you would find out if you went and looked it up.
As for the technical details of where the logs are expected to be and where not, you didn't actually say anything other than "hurr durr ur wrong."
How do I take the money from my drug enterprise into bitcoin without any tracing back to me? Is there a bank where I can walk up with $10 million and ask to convert it into bitcoin without the bank requiring ID?
They didn't say the crime is easy, they said this tool is used by the people doing it.;)
There are additional steps and parts to the plan. Generally, you have to create a fake business and pretend it has income, and so you lose the overhead of the business, and pay taxes on the claimed profit, so you end up paying more taxes than a legit business. You don't just drop it in the bank. You do a bunch of risky things, and end up with 25 cents on the dollar if you're good at it. That is why lower level criminals just spend it directly instead of trying to launder it.
Think about it: if it was easy, organized crime wouldn't have a reputation of offering it as a service!
Russians aren't interested in libertarianism, and not even close.
If that is your personal perspective, great. But it has nothing to do with Russia, and if you insist on trying to understand Russia based on your personal views, instead of their views, you'll have little chance to understand because it will never appear to make any sense. It will just be gobblygook until you try looking at it using "theory of mind."
Russia banned cash flight in preparation for annexing Ukraine and being sanctioned by the international community. They don't mind value-for-value trades, they mind soft-for-hard currency trades. Hard currency can leave the country. They certainly don't dislike value-for-value though; the main non-cash trade item in Russia is unopened bottles of Russian vodka. It is a standard barter item, it is almost like coinage. But you can't buy bottles of vodka at retail and then export them to move your money out. There would be too much overhead, you'd lose most of it. Bitcoin is free and easy to move outside the country, so of course they're banning local exchanges.
As to the lack of tractability, or the FBI even having an opinion on it, that part is all hogwash. The FBI can track it just fine. The US has a long history of alternative or private currencies. I grew up with "wooden nickels" that were issued by the local Chamber of Commerce. (they were worth 50 cents) So those are non-issues here. The reason bitcoin is used for money laundering is that the exchanges generally do not have mandatory reporting, so it would have to be traced by first suspecting a specific crime by a specific person, and investigating that. With regular banking, there are all sorts of reporting thresholds and spot checks and things like that that can uncover the activity without starting from a human-generated lead. In traditional banking they already have evidence of suspicious behavior before they even apply for a warrant. With bitcoin they'd need some other type of reason to even know who to ask for a warrant about.
Criminals, including money launderers, aren't really concerned about traceability, because they have to keep records the same as any other business. They care about discoverabilty; they don't want the authorities to gain access to their ledgers in the first place. If they do, they will find ways to trace things by correlation. Pooling in consolidated funds just obfuscates things enough to prevent casual discoverability.
That's the whole point, the oligarchs were supposed to divest themselves of significant foreign assets and start bringing their money home years ago, in preparation for annexing Ukraine and the anticipated sanctions.
This is entirely about preventing cash flight. The black market is bringing money in, not sending it overseas. This is not about he black market, and how big the effect on price will be depends mostly on how much of the bitcoin market is actually legit Russian wealth pretending to be the black market so that it is liquid.
Russians are not supposed to have hard liquid assets, their economy is on a soft money diet now. Welcome to Neosoviet Puttiland.
People who think bank fees are robbery should probably read more. Maybe that "fine print" is important documentation, and not just entertainment for silly nerds?
As an American, every time I've ever had a bank fee I didn't think was fair, I just went into my bank and asked them to rescind the fee (or challenged it if it was a technical error) and they agreed to do it every single time.
Of course, I only complained about incorrect, confusing, or unclear fees, not just regular ones that are part of the offered service.
It is the same in most countries with modern banking. There are a few sucky banks of course, so choose the bank that has a good reputation for the type of services you're interested in and not just the one with the most branches or the best advertisement.
You can just read the headline of your link and understand the difference: Bank fees in the West are simply "annoying" and can be "avoided" by collecting knowledge. Is that true in Russia? No, in Russia the rules might change and you'll still get punished for having done it before it was banned, on the theory that if they had to ban it then it must have been something awful and you should have known better than to make Puttiput mad.
Remember, hating America is not patriotic. And electing a Democrat for President doesn't magically make the US the same as Russia.
... the whole point of TOR is to prevent the server or anybody else from identifying you.
Nope, complete fail. You can just google tor and find out what it is, who funded it, what it is for, all that stuff. You don't have to just go with whatever somebody told you in a chat room.
Yeah but if you're not on Tor, you're not doing anything illegal and you're not worried about tracking of that sort because normally of course the remote server knows your IP and everything, and there are a zillion potential logs or whatever in the middle.
If you're on Tor for free speech, of course you don't care because you're not there for privacy; you're there to disguise your activities from local observation of the network. You already have to trust the remote server not to tattle to your government in that case.
According to his user number he was born yesterday, and will continue believing that privacy is dead until he graduates from college and gets his own place to live.
Then there is some small, remote chance of discovering that where you shop was never really private, and that you want your bank to know what you spent money on, or else you'd have used cash. And that if you avoid specific behaviors, you get a lot-lot-lot less junk mail than less paranoid people.
If it is private, don't put it on the internet. If it is private, don't leave it on your porch. Don't give your phone number to a store just because you shopped there. (just say "no thank you" when they ask you for your number)
Google knows a lot about most people, but thankfully they don't sell that information. Or send junk mail. Or call your telephone. Or talk about you. Hopefully for your sake, your bank is also traditional like that.
Who cares? Perverts trying to hide from the FBI after they bust a child porn server and are trying to identify people from the logs.
And, and people who want to see the perverts burn also care.
You're right, for freedom of speech under oppressive regimes (the main purpose of Tor) it is not a big deal.
In your scenario though, you'd care a lot if #2 got busted and they had the server logs. But that is true anyways, the content needs to be in a safe country. That is the whole Tor system. So it is only people doing things that are illegal in "western" countries that are at significant risk.
No, what it says is that there is nothing that is turn-key. This isn't (yet) something you can just choose to deploy; you will have to hire real engineers to implement it for you.
For corporations that means, if your CTO is an engineer and says you have the resources, then do it. Otherwise, don't.
If sonar pings "do not tell you what is actually there, it just gives you a theory", then you can say the same thing about vision and touch.
No. The lack of the quality of sonar data is a totally different issue than Plato's Cave, or the general existential fact that we do not directly perceive the world that that vision is processed and can be faulty.
If you're willing to bring that in, you'd never be able to label anything as anything. Rule of Law does not go that route.;) In Law, you only have to consider the likelihood that what you think you saw is really what you saw. It depends on specifics. In good conditions, the human eye is a very accurate sensor, and can differentiate between a ship wreck and a funny-shaped coral reef; sonar only tells you the shape, which in real ship-wrecks is just a bump or structure on the ocean surface. If you have a webcam on the bottom of the boat, and can see something in the image, then that is the same as using your eyes. Sonar, however, just tells you where to look.
Remote-sensing does not matter at all, sorry. Does the image you see on the sonar screen tell you what is on the bottom of the ocean? No. It tells you there might be something interesting, but it doesn't tell you what is there. A sensor is just a tool, the same as eyeglasses. What does it actually show you? A clear picture, or a fuzzy lump? That is what matters; what the human can see when using the tool. They might still be mistaken, that is handled by completely different legal principles.
The same as a dog, on a computer. The same as a dog, on a porch. The same as a dog, in a painting. The same as a dog, with no collar. The same as a dog, with LEDs implanted in his head.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least then it would finally get settled.
Yeah, at first I was worried we were missing one of their submarines.
Too bad we can't rescue them, though.
No no no, you have to go read technical documents first, since you don't understand the subject in detail already. Then, after having done that, you'll know which servers to expect to have which information.
Where you say "the server doesn't know," you didn't even just reference a specific server. Lets put this in logical terms:
Some servers know who Tor users are. Some servers do not know who Tor users are. Therefore, "the server" doesn't know who the Tor user is. T/F
Yes, you really do need to look things up before attempting to tell sysadmins they are wrong about network infrastructure. They might be wrong, it happens; but if you didn't just look it up, you don't even know. A sysadmin faced with a technical dispute would look it up, and you can be sure that I have.
So your only source of information is whatever it says on the about page of the project? You didn't bother even with wikipedia? You know an "about" page isn't technical details, right? Everything on that page is consistent with what I said, but it isn't technical; it uses broad generalities that do not attempt to uncover the actual detail of the semantics of who knows what. You don't consider that everybody they mention as groups using it are the same people that I mention as the groups the government built it to support. ;) You got lost in the phrasing of the PR, instead of looking up the technical, non-PR explanations of how it works, where it came from, why, etc.
Somewhere in that pile of logical and well-reasoned text, albeit not tacitly articulated, you're expecting people to be educated, alert, and accepting of personal responsibility or accountability?
No, I simply target my communication at those parties, and I really don't care about the comprehension ratio or average interpretation. ;)
There is way too much available noise for me to worry about the external ratio. I'm only worried about controlling my own data stream.
Why would I want to waste mod points on you? Instead, I wrote some words for other people more interesting than you to consider.
Get off my lawn, whippersnapper.
You'll need to inflate your idea that much, since they didn't say anything about criminals or terrorists; whatever idiot submitted it did that part.
There is nothing in the project about "crinimals" or "terrorists." The goal is to develop "prototype products and systems that have the potential to threaten current military operations, equipment, or personnel and are assembled primarily from commercially available technology."
You're right. The idea that they would do this for chasing criminals is stupid, as is the idea that DARPA cares about crime. This is about things that will sound scary to them in the context of overseas deployments. They already deploy to places saturated with small arms, so obviously a gun isn't going to impress them very much.
Cats came to chase the laser beam and ended up eating the shark.
OK, so it won't work in Vietnam or Africa, but it works in the middle east!
Probably because you were trolling. Duh. You should try a low-troll diet.
"Derp derp police state" is generally not going to be seen as an attempt to add analysis. It is just you spewing opinions that are unrelated to the story, and not even interesting, insightful, informative, or funny. Maybe things that don't have to do with the police state, are about other things? Gee.
There is literally nobody trying to take Americans guns away. All the different factions agree that the 2nd Amendment exists, that it doesn't mean you can have a personal tank, and nobody thinks they could get a new amendment passed. You're just straight-out crazy-talk tinfoil trolling about people taking guns away.
And insurgents have small arms. Your whole idea is stupid. The US military deploys to places already saturated in small arms; this has nothing to do with what people would use to fight if they didn't have small arms. Small arms are not even a major concern, they already have effective strategies for managing that risk, and technology that gives them a substantial advantage even if heavily outnumbered. If it comes time to defend the nation, hicks with rifles are going to be totally useless.
Since it has to be legal in the US, I'm sure a lot of people will go with delivery systems. Maybe you can use inflatable lolcatz as the fake IED.
I'm planning a psyops package involving Hampsterdance.
It doesn't really do much good to scan everybody to make sure they don't have freely available commercial parts. ;)
You need to work on your conspiracy theories a few milliseconds longer, don't just go with the first thing that pops into your head and sounded good after half a moment of reflection.
This isn't "things that could be dangerous" in general. This is specifically things that could be dangerous to the military. Also, it has to be legal to make under Federal, State, and local laws. So there is very little potential for domestic impact; if you have an idea for something not legal, like an explosive, or a missile over half and inch diameter, then this isn't even the right program.
It is a US government-funded thing, sorry. That was the whole point; people who wish they had our laws, can get on Tor and their network experience happens as if they live here. So that they can engage in free speech for political and creative purposes that are banned in their countries.
It was not invented to hide from the US Gubermint. It was invented for people who wish they had our Freedoms, and all it does is hide their activities from their ISP and State-sponsored firewall. It is up to them to hide their face from the video surveillance at their web cafe. The server would be using for these speech activities would generally be located in some western country in the offices of some ex-pat group from their country, except for where they're just using it to access mainstream international news.
There is no conspiracy theory involved. This is all stuff you would find out if you went and looked it up .
As for the technical details of where the logs are expected to be and where not, you didn't actually say anything other than "hurr durr ur wrong."
How do I take the money from my drug enterprise into bitcoin without any tracing back to me?
Is there a bank where I can walk up with $10 million and ask to convert it into bitcoin without the bank requiring ID?
They didn't say the crime is easy, they said this tool is used by the people doing it. ;)
There are additional steps and parts to the plan. Generally, you have to create a fake business and pretend it has income, and so you lose the overhead of the business, and pay taxes on the claimed profit, so you end up paying more taxes than a legit business. You don't just drop it in the bank. You do a bunch of risky things, and end up with 25 cents on the dollar if you're good at it. That is why lower level criminals just spend it directly instead of trying to launder it.
Think about it: if it was easy, organized crime wouldn't have a reputation of offering it as a service!
Russians aren't interested in libertarianism, and not even close.
If that is your personal perspective, great. But it has nothing to do with Russia, and if you insist on trying to understand Russia based on your personal views, instead of their views, you'll have little chance to understand because it will never appear to make any sense. It will just be gobblygook until you try looking at it using "theory of mind."
Russia banned cash flight in preparation for annexing Ukraine and being sanctioned by the international community. They don't mind value-for-value trades, they mind soft-for-hard currency trades. Hard currency can leave the country. They certainly don't dislike value-for-value though; the main non-cash trade item in Russia is unopened bottles of Russian vodka. It is a standard barter item, it is almost like coinage. But you can't buy bottles of vodka at retail and then export them to move your money out. There would be too much overhead, you'd lose most of it. Bitcoin is free and easy to move outside the country, so of course they're banning local exchanges.
As to the lack of tractability, or the FBI even having an opinion on it, that part is all hogwash. The FBI can track it just fine. The US has a long history of alternative or private currencies. I grew up with "wooden nickels" that were issued by the local Chamber of Commerce. (they were worth 50 cents) So those are non-issues here. The reason bitcoin is used for money laundering is that the exchanges generally do not have mandatory reporting, so it would have to be traced by first suspecting a specific crime by a specific person, and investigating that. With regular banking, there are all sorts of reporting thresholds and spot checks and things like that that can uncover the activity without starting from a human-generated lead. In traditional banking they already have evidence of suspicious behavior before they even apply for a warrant. With bitcoin they'd need some other type of reason to even know who to ask for a warrant about.
Criminals, including money launderers, aren't really concerned about traceability, because they have to keep records the same as any other business. They care about discoverabilty; they don't want the authorities to gain access to their ledgers in the first place. If they do, they will find ways to trace things by correlation. Pooling in consolidated funds just obfuscates things enough to prevent casual discoverability.
That's the whole point, the oligarchs were supposed to divest themselves of significant foreign assets and start bringing their money home years ago, in preparation for annexing Ukraine and the anticipated sanctions.
This is entirely about preventing cash flight. The black market is bringing money in, not sending it overseas. This is not about he black market, and how big the effect on price will be depends mostly on how much of the bitcoin market is actually legit Russian wealth pretending to be the black market so that it is liquid.
Russians are not supposed to have hard liquid assets, their economy is on a soft money diet now. Welcome to Neosoviet Puttiland.
People who think bank fees are robbery should probably read more. Maybe that "fine print" is important documentation, and not just entertainment for silly nerds?
As an American, every time I've ever had a bank fee I didn't think was fair, I just went into my bank and asked them to rescind the fee (or challenged it if it was a technical error) and they agreed to do it every single time.
Of course, I only complained about incorrect, confusing, or unclear fees, not just regular ones that are part of the offered service.
It is the same in most countries with modern banking. There are a few sucky banks of course, so choose the bank that has a good reputation for the type of services you're interested in and not just the one with the most branches or the best advertisement.
You can just read the headline of your link and understand the difference: Bank fees in the West are simply "annoying" and can be "avoided" by collecting knowledge. Is that true in Russia? No, in Russia the rules might change and you'll still get punished for having done it before it was banned, on the theory that if they had to ban it then it must have been something awful and you should have known better than to make Puttiput mad.
Remember, hating America is not patriotic. And electing a Democrat for President doesn't magically make the US the same as Russia.
... the whole point of TOR is to prevent the server or anybody else from identifying you.
Nope, complete fail. You can just google tor and find out what it is, who funded it, what it is for, all that stuff. You don't have to just go with whatever somebody told you in a chat room.
If you ... log into facebook, facebook knows who you are! Where's the outrage?!?!
Actually, I hear people belly-aching about that all the time!
Yeah but if you're not on Tor, you're not doing anything illegal and you're not worried about tracking of that sort because normally of course the remote server knows your IP and everything, and there are a zillion potential logs or whatever in the middle.
If you're on Tor for free speech, of course you don't care because you're not there for privacy; you're there to disguise your activities from local observation of the network. You already have to trust the remote server not to tattle to your government in that case.
There's like a dozen betters ways to track someone using javascript.
It depends if you're tracking them as they browse, or by analyzing the logs afterwards.
According to his user number he was born yesterday, and will continue believing that privacy is dead until he graduates from college and gets his own place to live.
Then there is some small, remote chance of discovering that where you shop was never really private, and that you want your bank to know what you spent money on, or else you'd have used cash. And that if you avoid specific behaviors, you get a lot-lot-lot less junk mail than less paranoid people.
If it is private, don't put it on the internet. If it is private, don't leave it on your porch. Don't give your phone number to a store just because you shopped there. (just say "no thank you" when they ask you for your number)
Google knows a lot about most people, but thankfully they don't sell that information. Or send junk mail. Or call your telephone. Or talk about you. Hopefully for your sake, your bank is also traditional like that.
Who cares? Perverts trying to hide from the FBI after they bust a child porn server and are trying to identify people from the logs.
And, and people who want to see the perverts burn also care.
You're right, for freedom of speech under oppressive regimes (the main purpose of Tor) it is not a big deal.
In your scenario though, you'd care a lot if #2 got busted and they had the server logs. But that is true anyways, the content needs to be in a safe country. That is the whole Tor system. So it is only people doing things that are illegal in "western" countries that are at significant risk.
No, what it says is that there is nothing that is turn-key. This isn't (yet) something you can just choose to deploy; you will have to hire real engineers to implement it for you.
For corporations that means, if your CTO is an engineer and says you have the resources, then do it. Otherwise, don't.
For small business that means, wait.
If sonar pings "do not tell you what is actually there, it just gives you a theory", then you can say the same thing about vision and touch.
No. The lack of the quality of sonar data is a totally different issue than Plato's Cave, or the general existential fact that we do not directly perceive the world that that vision is processed and can be faulty.
If you're willing to bring that in, you'd never be able to label anything as anything. Rule of Law does not go that route. ;) In Law, you only have to consider the likelihood that what you think you saw is really what you saw. It depends on specifics. In good conditions, the human eye is a very accurate sensor, and can differentiate between a ship wreck and a funny-shaped coral reef; sonar only tells you the shape, which in real ship-wrecks is just a bump or structure on the ocean surface. If you have a webcam on the bottom of the boat, and can see something in the image, then that is the same as using your eyes. Sonar, however, just tells you where to look.
Remote-sensing does not matter at all, sorry. Does the image you see on the sonar screen tell you what is on the bottom of the ocean? No. It tells you there might be something interesting, but it doesn't tell you what is there. A sensor is just a tool, the same as eyeglasses. What does it actually show you? A clear picture, or a fuzzy lump? That is what matters; what the human can see when using the tool. They might still be mistaken, that is handled by completely different legal principles.
This isn't complicated.
The same as a dog, on a computer.
The same as a dog, on a porch.
The same as a dog, in a painting.
The same as a dog, with no collar.
The same as a dog, with LEDs implanted in his head.
But, but... "on a computer!"
The same as a dog, apping apps, right apper guy?