
Non-realtime publishing for censorship resistance - bjornedstrom
http://blog.bjrn.se/2020/01/non-realtime-publishing-for-censorship.html
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schoen
One part that the author doesn't go into in detail is that low-latency
interaction makes it much harder to be location-anonymous when an adversary
can experiment on your service. Of the three examples given in the article,
only Silk Road has tried to be location-anonymous by being exclusively
available with Tor onion services. But for Silk Road and several other dark
markets, it didn't work out because investigators were eventually able to
locate the infrastructure.

I haven't looked into how that happened in detail, and I think it was quite
varied in practice in each case, but there are known methods to take advantage
of the low-latency thing to experiment on services and draw conclusions about
where their infrastructure is located. One example is to try to attack
different parts of the Internet (different links or different colocation
facilities, for example, maybe by overloading them with a DDoS or trying to
partition them from the Internet with a BGP routing attack) and see which ones
cause the service's availability to suffer when they're under attack. When a
service is available in real time, this kind of experiment is much more
practical because it's possible to see directly whether each individual attack
has had an impact.

I think Freenet has something along the lines of the author's zine concept,
where people can publish signed pointers to the latest revision of a document
or set of documents.

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s4n1ty
That is true re: Freenet, they are called "signed subspace keys" or SSKs.

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xwowsersx
I'm having a tough time following the logic exactly. Can someone ELI5? I would
think the question of centralized vs decentralized would be the dispositive
issue. I think I'm missing something basic.

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fernly
Yeah. Near as I can tell, it says "to safely publish something that can be
considered illicit, don't put it on the internet." But to the obvious
response, "ok, where then?" it doesn't answer, as far as I can tell.

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Finnucane
Someone would have to publish a digital Factsheet Five (zine of zines) to tell
you where to send your digital stamps to get these zines.

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zozbot234
Wouldn't ipns and ipfs be enough to achieve most of this?

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SamPatt
Probably yes. In fact, a censorship-resistant marketplace that allows for
asynchronous trade already exists built on top of IPFS. It's called
OpenBazaar.

[https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-
go](https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go)

