(no subject)

[kradeelav]

> makes a few predictions last new years about nationalized fragmentation of web / privacy/resistance to surveillance will become an outdated concept; those who do will be branded terrorists / biggest moral panic in decades / etc

> sees this. fucking. news.

ahahaghsdfgjkljhjhhjk

fuck this, fuck that, fuck all this shit.  what is this, bloody mcarthy era hunts 2.0 plus soviet level stranglehold on tech?
this combined with alarmingly effective socmed censorship experience that's been ongoing for the last few years?

guess i'm taking a crash course on TOR. :v 

Comments

[queenlua]

curious question: if (and only if!) you're comfortable sharing, do you have an idea what your threat model is / what precisely you're trying to get out of using Tor?

i ask because the actual privacy guarantees / protections that Tor offers are weaker than most users tend to think, and in particular, infosec has a hell of a lot of security LARPers who are willing to wildly overstate the utility of various tools because of any number of reasons (inability to grasp that tech has advanced since the 90s, unwillingness to accept that some problems can not be addressed solely via personal technical wizardry, egos, etc, see the sadsauce gpg saga https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html ).

for e.g. casual browsing to get past a firewall, assuming a non-hostile government, it's "probably" "fine", but my understanding from the last time i looked is that Tor isn't really robust at protecting your anonymity against a particularly curious attacker.

[kradeelav]

An excellent point! it's actually not as much anonymity being a goal (accepted long, long ago that my footprint's too messy now to ever be salvageable against anything more determined than your average kiwifarms doxxer lol, which is a *credible* threat, mind, but think i have that mostly contained), but (a) building a more censorship-resilient ... non-social media art presence? and (b) using hosting ability and my audience spread to give other artists / hobbyists that same resilience.

like ... there's a group of us queer/kinky NSFW artists that've actively had our posts removed from twitter/dA/instagram/patreon/etc in addition to tons of doxxing campaigns, so I would say *that* would be the threat model .... except that's frankly, impossible to work around, other than to build your own site and defend from "your own turf", so to speak?

(for a specific example i was looking into today - eg mirroring kradeelav.com as kradeelavhgfcsdhhd.onion to have a version on there as well as the clearnet, and both sites with resources to give other artists the tools to replicate that with minimal pain. also a layered defense so that when the US firewall turns into the Great Firewall, there's already that built in 'nanana already outside your firewall, try again bro' vibe.)

it's interesting - so many of the hacker resources i've read focus on anonymity rather than the challenge of simply keeping your stuff *up* on the tubes. it's also why i've invested hard into a home printer with zines and building the physical infrastructure there - turns out printed media in the end might be harder to censor than digital all along.

[queenlua]

gotcha, okay, that all makes sense! fears alleviated :P

and yeah, like... there are many things i love about the hacker community, but they have some disappointing blindspots in terms of practical advice—i don't think i've seen any talks on a major conference slate that would obviously be targeted at your use-case, for instance, and that's a shame. good on you for DIYing it up and such + having a good head on your shoulders!