Re: Privacy and its costs (was: Re: Mandatory encryption)

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 11:12 PM, Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 6:44 PM, Greg Wilkins <gregw@intalio.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't understand the benefit of encrypting traffic to/from a public
>> blog site?    There is no privacy obtained by doing so.
>>
>> If I can see somebody on my network make a connection to belshe.com,
>
> Um, suppose you observe that I have connected to 204.45.137.222 or
> 225.173.34.64.   You’re a bad guy and can’t see the content.  What
> have you learned about me?  -T

If you are a common criminal, nothing of importance.

If you are a criminal government, pretty much everything you need.

Social network analysis is how oppressive regimes track the
opposition. If you know who is talking to whom, you know who is likely
to follow whom. That is why Iran was trying to get into Facebook.

Responding to that type of attack is important and rather more central
to the history of the Web than people might imagine. But it isn't a
sensible attack to base the design of the core specification on. That
is what schemes like Tor are for.

It used to be 'one war, one rifle'. The US army had to throw out their
old guns and replace them after each major conflict as opponents
adapted to the capabilities of the old one. Today it is one revolution
one application. Fortunately the number of really bad regimes is
falling fast enough that we will run out of crappy regimes before we
run out of ideas. And that is taking into account the fact that the
success rate is about 75% and 25% of the successor regimes need a
repeat revolution.




-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/

Received on Monday, 6 August 2012 12:14:42 UTC