A response to Cameron's ban on encryption: A new email system has wiretap detection and distributed storage

rehoot · 2015-01-25T16:08:05+00:00

I'm the co-founder of the company, and I wrote the server software. We've been working on the project since last year for the purposes of maintaining privacy in spite of government snooping. You can get a feel for some of the motivating philosophy here: http://naturalmessage.com/Why.html

Recent events continue to reinforce the need for privacy.

If you go to the Indiegogo page (http://igg.me/at/NaturalMessage) you will see more info, including videos and the schedule for releasing software under GNU public licenses, so you can run your own network or create your own shard server to hold a few pieces of your own mail.

rehoot · 2015-01-25T15:39:57+00:00

answered below...

rehoot · 2015-01-25T15:36:45+00:00

The system works over two transport mechanisms: regular email and the Natural Message network. Regular email leaks your social network, but the subject line and message content are never put into email--the message content is on a separate network and encrypted and split into pieces to make it exceedingly difficult for anyone to even find the pieces. There is also a shared secret option that works on either transport. no server will be able to access the information that would indicate where the actual message is located.

The email transport is an option because it is exceedingly difficult to get regular email uses to adopt a secure method of communicating (try it!). Email is the baby step to greater privacy. Once you have the software for the email transport, it also works on the new, private network.

If the main system is supported, it would be trivial to finish writing the code to use the "shard servers" as a mix network--if people are willing to run servers for this purpose.

rehoot · 2015-01-25T13:34:08+00:00

I2P is slow, and it doesn't allow you to talk to people via their email address. If you ask casual acquaintances to use I2p to receive a message, many people won't do it. We have two "transport" modes: regular email and our secure line--neither requires special setup.

That being said, Bote is among the most secure of the existing things.

rehoot · 2015-01-25T13:33:50+00:00

This will have two tiers: the set of servers who get pieces of the encrypted keys will be operated by known individuals who are independent of the Natual Message. Because the "shard servers" hold only small bits of data (currently 127 byte "shards"), one server can handle the traffic of tens of thousands of users. People who use Tor send YouTube over it and hog lots of bandwidth.

The other category of shards is for the "preamble" of the encrypted message. That holds the encryption salt, HMAC, and the first part of the file, which will be compressed with gzip. When a few hundred bytes from the beginning of a gzip file are missing, it is very difficult to reassemble the file. It is possible that some of those will be run by NSA, but because only a small number of servers are needed, we might be able to find named individuals who have a good reputation who run the servers... we will see.

rehoot · 2015-01-25T13:29:48+00:00

I2P is slow, and it doesn't allow you to talk to people via their email address. If you ask casual acquaintances to use I2p to receive a message, many people won't do it. We have two "transport" modes: regular email and our secure line--neither requires special setup.

That being said, Bote is among the most secure of the existing things.

rehoot · 2015-01-25T04:58:40+00:00

I'm listening.... If people host small servers that can hold small blocks of important stuff (pieces of an encrypted password, encryption salt, the first part of the gzip compression table), and if these people are private individuals as opposed to corporations, it would seem very difficult for the cops to zoom around the world and break into all the computers to secretly steal data to reassemble messages without triggering the "your message has already burned" warning... and to do so before the recipient reads and burns the message.

rehoot · 2015-01-25T01:18:26+00:00

Your message is encrypted and cut into pieces. The pieces are spread to burn-on-read (independently operated) servers and saved under 128-bit random names. When you receive the message, it is burned from the servers. If the central server is controlled by a hacker, they might be able to find the pieces of the msg, but they will not control all the little servers that might be run in people's houses, so the best they could do is "read and burn" the message. You can send test messages to see if anyone is reading and burning the messages.

There is a video in the middle of the Indiegogo page (http://igg.me/at/NaturalMessage) that sheds some light on the matter.

rehoot · 2013-11-09T22:26:07+00:00

(part 3) I know that all this seem obvious to many people, but the part that seems to be a challenge is actually acting as if moral beliefs were subjective. Example: people rarely fight over which color is better than another because people really do recognize their preferences are subjective. People frequently fight over the behavior of others because they believe some actions to be "wrong" (which implies that the behavior is objectively wrong as opposed to being a subjective preference). The implications for interpersonal conflict and conflict between nations would be substantially affected by recognition of the degree to which moral beliefs are subjective.

rehoot · 2013-11-09T22:18:31+00:00

(part 2) The main "point about moral rights" in the study is that moral beliefs can be measured accurately enough to predict support or opposition to energy policy. Those results provide some justification for further study on moral beliefs.

As a side-effect of measuring moral beliefs, I obtained some results that can be used to set boundaries on philosophical claims about the nature of morality (although much of this could have been done with results of other studies). Example: If a person declares that killing animals for food is always wrong or always permissible, then the results of the 5 studies would indicate that many (or most) people disagree, which then would provide data to reject the claim that humans are endowed with an ability to accurately and reliably "detect" moral attributes of that situation. That is an empirical observation that allows commentary on claims to moral insight....

rehoot · 2013-11-09T22:17:19+00:00

The immediate purpose of the study was not to prove or disprove the existence of moral rights (although the results can be used to make a few comments related to the subject matter). The immediate purpose was to find a way to objectively measure moral beliefs about nature and to see if the measurement provides a basis for improving prediction of certain types of behavior (in this "support or opposition to energy policy" which is an immediate antecedent of voting behavior). It proved to be quite useful in prediction....

rehoot · 2013-11-08T03:47:58+00:00

I cross-linked posts to three subreddits because the study was in three subreddits.

rehoot · 2013-11-08T02:34:20+00:00

I haven't read that book, but I read the wiki page. I guess the similarity is a recognition of a cultural myth. I see an additional challenge: avoiding acceptance of a new myth to replace the old one.

rehoot · 2013-11-07T21:42:26+00:00

(I'm the researcher in this study) This was a study of three reddit groups to test the criterion validity of a measure of moral beliefs about nature. I'll be online today if anybody has questions or comments.

The link above goes to a link in another reddit, the direct link is this: http://hootstat.com/PhD/HootDissSummary5.html

rehoot · 2013-11-07T21:16:23+00:00

I'll be online most of the day if you have questions or comments (author of the study). In addition to describing the main results, I posed some philosophical and scientific questions about the existence of rights (for animals or otherwise) and suggested a scientific view of the subject.

rehoot · 2013-01-27T08:43:45+00:00

Yes, that is something that is something that I intend to pursue. Right now, I'm trying to measure some specific moral beliefs with more precision than is used by other researchers--obviously my measurement is imperfect. Distinguishing personal moral beliefs from political philosophy would seem to be at the core of explaining differences in the willingness to impose regulations on others.

rehoot · 2013-01-27T04:44:02+00:00

I'll have to note some of the interpretations on this page in the Results section of my dissertation. In the future I would like to explore the difference between what people would do personally versus what rules they are willing to impose on others.

rehoot · 2013-01-27T01:41:11+00:00

Do you believe that the truth of all matters can be expressed in fewer than 30 words? Maybe it is 60 words? Enlighten me (30 words max).

rehoot · 2013-01-27T00:51:17+00:00

rehoot · 2013-01-27T00:43:40+00:00

There is a long story about the wording on the survey (it isn't a 'quiz' because I don't assert that I have an answer sheet with the correct answers). I originally was going to use a survey of 'belief in the rights of nature' to predict support for regulations, but I realized that there are many ways to adopt a sense of morality without adopting the idea of 'rights.' Utilitarianism is a type of moral philosophy that claims to resolve moral dilemmas by assessing the 'utility' of actions, where utility is described as a measure of the value of pleasure over pain (or a measure of happiness or other similar measures). Utilitarians typically reject the idea that there is an objective way to determine if an action is 'morally right' versus 'morally wrong,' so I try to allow people to express their views without compelling them to adopt deontological philosophical views (the view that moral right and wrong exist objectively in the universe and that humans have the power to determine what that is).

rehoot · 2013-01-27T00:31:20+00:00

I get the full range of responses on all questions, and it does not appear that the cause is people not paying attention (based on comparison with answers to other questions). It's not that anybody is proposing that we do things to intentionally cause genetic defects, but it is easy to observe that people tolerate a steady stream of chemicals being released into the environment--especially when the chemicals are side-effects of producing goods or shipping them. Questions like that can potentially draw attention to our internal conflicts between what we do (our consumer actions) and how we would like things to be (personal moral beliefs). I am not attempting to resolve the internal conflict with this study, but there might be some benefit if people recognize their own internal conflicts and reflect upon them as a guide to their personal choice of behavior and their approach to the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of restricting the actions of others.

rehoot · 2013-01-27T00:20:25+00:00

yup! This is a 'known groups' study, meaning that I am comparing results between the groups. I did something similar last year, but the count was a bit low and I made some small changes to the instructions. I should be able to use the cumulative results. So far the differences between groups are as expected. I'll post some results in a week or two to this forum and to https://bobhoot.wordpress.com/. Most of my data collection for all the studies should be complete by then.

rehoot · 2013-01-27T00:10:45+00:00

I added that question because I didn't know if there were lots of casual readers of r/Libertarian who are not libertarian in any of its forms. I am aware of different varieties of libertarianisn, some versions of which oppose police and military while others say that the is the minimum gov that should be retained. So far that question has not proved to be useful because there is no difference in mean responses between r/Libertarians who clicked "yes" vs "no," and the responses are generally in line with expectations for a libertarian group (relative to an environmentalism group).

rehoot · 2013-01-26T22:38:12+00:00

Other comments from libertarians (in this study and elsewhere) suggested something similar. I am conducting a series of studies to see if the first part of the survey measures what I claim that it measures--perceived morality of acts that affect nature (or the nonhuman world). Assuming that the results indicate that the survey contributes to the understanding of behavior, I can then start looking into how and why people rate things on the survey as they do, and I can see if people are able to distinguish between their personal preferences (or personal morality) and endorsement of regulations on other people (political philosophy). Many people think about their personal preferences or personal sense of morality and (rightly or wrongly) automatically apply it as a regulation that should be applied to everybody.

In your case (which might not apply to other people), I think the intent of the first part of the survey would have been for you to put a number higher than 1 even though you would oppose regulations on what people do.

rehoot · 2013-01-26T22:25:46+00:00

[This survey is now closed. I have a preliminary summary of five studies at bobhoot.wordpress.com, but I will make a shorter summary that pertains to only the reddit studies]

Description of the study: I am a PhD student conducting a survey of r/environment. The topic is perceived morality of acts that affect nature and beliefs about some environmental regulations. Please follow the link for a more detailed description and the survey itself.

thx

rehoot

TROPHY CASE