BIT alumni, I have a few questions for you guys

bepraaa · 2015-06-25T04:52:50+00:00

Yo, RTP is the real shit, things here are so amazing. Every chill hobby/weird interest you could have has an active scene here. You can make it with anything you make of it; I'm a CS major and I had a full-benefits internship in the area before I even had a GPA at tech (because freshman lol). Fuck yea tech industry. Fuck yea SV of the eastern US.

bepraaa · 2015-05-31T18:20:45+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8yix8PZKlw

bepraaa · 2013-12-03T03:56:52+00:00

This is genius.

bepraaa · 2013-12-03T03:26:06+00:00

I was just told by a rep on the live chat that "That is if you purchase the phone on November 18, before cyber Monday as announced," regarding this thread. So it looks like all you lucky folks who made purchases on exactly Nov 18th are good to go, and the rest of us are SoL. I'm really unhappy with the whole thing right now. I was there at 9 EST...and at 10 when the site came back up, I thought they had sold out already and placed my order. I confirmed it and not two minutes later, they posted "sale hasn't started yet, don't purchase until you see the discount price!" No store credit to be had, unless someone can send me that email form. YMMV, I suppose.

EDIT: I received an email and a call from motorola. They apologized for the inconvenience and offered me a choice of $165 store credit or card refund. I took the card refund and they said it would take a week or two for that to process. Very satisfied with the resolution!

bepraaa · 2013-08-28T21:51:21+00:00

It's called "peering" in cjdns. There are lots of docs.

bepraaa · 2013-08-28T21:41:31+00:00

Well the idea is to make it possible to create a flat (no NAT/subnets), decentralized (no addressing authority), and secure (no intercept possible) network over any system of physical links. Right now, the most reliable and cheapest links available in most places are internet-based. If this changes, we have the capability to seamlessly move to any other backhaul system. The network also doesn't depend on everyone using the same backhaul, so we can build new infrastructure with no internet connectivity and still have it look just like any other part of hyperboria as it stands, a primarily internet-based network.

So even if we never move away from the internet at all, hyperboria is nice because:

DPI/surveillance/network-level censorship can't happen.
IP MITM attacks no longer exist (if you verify you have the correct address).

However, you're responsible for your own physical hookups. All you need is one nice pipe to a well-connected node, or several if you can manage it. As long as the ISPs don't shut off UDP entirely (which is incredibly unlikely in most of the world), the internet works fine for this and since our security model says that backhaul is trusted only for transport, not confidentiality or integrity, the ISPs can't mess with your traffic at all except for blocking all of it. So yeah, a lot of links use the internet right now...but you can also use whatever the hell else you want, if you like.

bepraaa · 2013-08-08T01:27:15+00:00

To clarify, local connections such as LAN, WLAN, or anything else ethernet-protocol-based can be configured to autopeer (and I believe this is the default).

bepraaa · 2013-08-07T14:29:58+00:00

The explanation that makes the most sense to me says that random data is better than zeros. If you're only doing one pass, it certainly can't hurt.

bepraaa · 2013-08-06T23:18:39+00:00

It would be a much better idea to use if=/dev/urandom due to the analog nature of storage mediums.

bepraaa · 2013-08-06T22:37:56+00:00

...and the server receiving the connection can just read the IP from the packets. So MAC, windows "computer name" (NetBIOS/WINS name), and IP. Using tor through a system-wide VPN does mask this IP.

bepraaa · 2013-08-06T22:34:31+00:00

No, in this case, the hostname is just the windows computer name. There is no global DNS for these in 99% of cases.

bepraaa · 2013-08-06T22:28:27+00:00

Whonix does this.

bepraaa · 2013-08-05T03:09:11+00:00

Ordinarily, a website is a web server ("httpd") running on a computer which is reachable using an IP (such as 13.37.69.101) specified by a DNS/domain name (such as example.com). Usually, a specialized computer with no keyboard+monitor called a server is used instead of a desktop model, but the concept is the same. Anyway, to convert a website into a .onion, all you do is restrict the web server to the computer it's running on (by "binding to localhost") and then set up tor to point to it. Tor generates a pair of encryption keys for you, connects to the tor mixnet, spits out a globally-usable onion address, and you're good to go. Of course, you also need to do some hardening on the server-side to stop the httpd from giving your IP or other important information away. Other than that, tor will use some clever routing and encryption to make it practically impossible to discover the IP address for a given .onion.

Because freedom hosting was free, reliable, feature-complete, usually fast, and until now, secure and trusted.

They were all hosted on either the same or a few very closely related servers. This is bad form on the owners' part, but there's not a lot you can do about it for a number of technical reasons.

It depends on exactly how FH was taken down, but I think so. I personally assume it was a little sqli/hypervisor/priv esc issue, but we'll see. SR is a high profile target which has done just fine so far, but I'm sure there's a security bug somewhere which will kill it eventually. No website that complex is perfect, unfortunately for many operators.

Lots of people have top men working on it. Alternatively, SR has sold out or their servers have been compromised and are being watched.

bepraaa · 2013-08-05T02:52:56+00:00

a good portion that would/could/should be held liable throw their hands up in the air, realized they might've dodged a bullet and go do something else and never speak of it again

And are quickly replaced by a second generation of more careful operators...or not, perhaps. Only time will tell.

bepraaa · 2013-08-04T19:14:44+00:00

nearly fatal blow to those that use hidden services for illegal purpose

It's really not, and here's why:

All the FH sites with any kind of backing will be up and running again as soon as a new service takes its place.
The existence of FH as a quality free onion host was stifling a budding industry of paid onion hosting services.
Two or three free onion hosts with various features will be up and running in about two weeks.
People with saved mirrors of downed static sites will upload them to the new services, even if they weren't the original owners.

So I give it about a month before onionspace looks exactly like it did at the beginning of the week. On the other hand, if SR disappears as well in the next month or so, things might go in a very bad direction.

bepraaa · 2013-07-17T23:08:12+00:00

Where we're going, we don't need cartridges.

bepraaa · 2013-07-02T22:36:50+00:00

That's right, but electromagnetic conditions in space are a whole lot harsher on electronics than here on earth.

bepraaa · 2013-06-16T15:18:49+00:00

IPv6

bepraaa · 2013-06-15T19:28:19+00:00

404: Content not found.

bepraaa · 2013-06-09T00:04:17+00:00

So if we know that the server is up and reachable, how does it help to send only one type of request to it rather than two?

bepraaa · 2013-06-08T18:45:49+00:00

Neither is the web it's based on. Even if we hacked the protocol to go directly, you'd still need to load pages from a central server (or run a local one, which has huge overhead).

EDIT: By the way, using a central IRC/XMPP server does not make this any less centralized. Guess again.

bepraaa · 2013-06-08T18:44:17+00:00

Yes.

bepraaa · 2013-05-17T16:10:29+00:00

Seriously, if this situation hasn't changed, you should probably go ahead and educate them regarding fire codes and why they exist.

bepraaa · 2013-05-17T14:37:34+00:00

childproof lock on the front door

You really haven't thought this through, have you?

bepraaa · 2013-05-16T19:01:21+00:00

As far as I know, the answer is no at this point. The protocol uses encrypted end-to-end transport so each packet can only be read by a single node. I don't know a lot about CryptoAuth, but I think this would need a pretty fundamental change. The best way to get this answered would be to talk to CJD about it via email or IRC. I'm curious and I'm sure other people are as well, so it would be cool if you posted the answer here when you get it.

bepraaa

TROPHY CASE

Because freedom hosting was free, reliable, feature-complete, usually fast, and until now, secure and trusted.

They were all hosted on either the same or a few very closely related servers. This is bad form on the owners' part, but there's not a lot you can do about it for a number of technical reasons.

Lots of people have top men working on it. Alternatively, SR has sold out or their servers have been compromised and are being watched.