
Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest - molsongolden
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/obfuscation
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dombili
I'm not sure how smart it is to give people advice on privacy and which
software to use to avoid surveillance via a traditional book. I'd much rather
get my advice from EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense or TTC's Security In-a-Box
because they're online and can be updated easily if a critical bug is
discovered with any given popular privacy or security software. Capabilities
change over time and when they do, you can't update a book as easy as you can
update a website. If someone relies on this books' recommendations and think
that they're secure when they're not for whatever reason, that's incredibly
harmful.

Reading the overview though, the book is also seems to be about history of
obfuscation and protesting laws (?) so I guess it could be useful for people
who're seeking that information, but I wouldn't recommend this or any book
that acts like a tutorial to someone who's trying to learn more about online
privacy.

~~~
sandworm101
Would it be less ironic if they published the information on a website
supported by targeted adds? There aren't many privacy-friendly options to
monetize content these days without resorting to donations.

~~~
atmosx
Well _privacy_ and _content monetization_ do not play well together. The only
option I can think would be a blog with 1 add a-la "Daring Fireball", but you
need a huge amount of hits in order to make that a viable business, as J.
Grubber does.

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pakled_engineer
Same author created Ad Nauseum to click on every ad you encounter as opposed
to selectively blocking them
[http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2014/10/06/helen-
nissenba...](http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2014/10/06/helen-nissenbaum-
on-ad-nauseum-resistance-through-obfuscation-and-weapons-of-the-weak/)

Obfuscation won't slow down data scientists. To see this in action open your
gmail account and notice there's (likely) no spam in your primary inbox. Those
spammers spend considerable resources to obfuscate themselves from Google's
filters yet still fail.

~~~
WmyEE0UsWAwC2i
But what if the user would "read" the spam?

Of course "fake behavior" could be dected if you have known real behaviour to
compare it to.That also means that it is possible to simulate "real behavior"
given the relevant data.

Whis is a win-win situtation, ad networks get to fight fake traffic, fake
traffic becomes indistiguishable from real human trafic.

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eternalban
Why isn't this in the public domain?

~~~
dublinben
It's also quite hypocritical to sell a book about privacy that is encumbered
with DRM.

~~~
todd8
Aren't they two different things? The open software community has been, in
general, a big supporter of human rights, but every author or artist should be
able to decide how he or she sells or gives away their creations. (Am I
missing some important point?)

~~~
286c8cb04bda
Maybe in theory, but when the DRM tracks when you're reading the book:

[https://www.adobe.com/privacy/ade.html](https://www.adobe.com/privacy/ade.html)

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286c8cb04bda
The ebook version from MIT press is Adobe Digital Editions. It is also
available (more expensive) in Kindle format:
[http://www.amazon.com/-/dp/B0135G71BG](http://www.amazon.com/-/dp/B0135G71BG)

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amelius
I was already thinking about a whole industry that could be spawned based on
this premise. You could hire people that would inject "noise" into the
internet on your behalf, and you could ask (other) people to measure the
signal-to-noise ratio that remained.

~~~
dublinben
It should be possible to add this kind of obfuscation noise algorithmically.
Real human activity isn't random, but it does follow certain patterns.

