Oh, yeah, I’ve been seeing that a lot of it has been really dragging for, like, the last year or so.
Yes, if a state-level actor is able to get control of all the nodes, then everyone is pretty much fucked. I suppose that, with enough nodes, you could make that kind of attack really, really hard. I’m also guessing that Monero transactions are taking a really long time right now to go through? I saw that the Finnish (?) gov’t claimed to have ‘broken’ Monero, but they’re not giving any technical information about their claims, and most current speculation is that they busted the guy doing other shit that they were able to trace link to Monero transactions. (I don’t really keep up with Monero; last I knew, there wasn’t a good wallet that didn’t require downloading the whole blockchain, and my home internet is slooooooooooooow.)
Freenet was never really anonymous; there have definitely been busts from Freenet. IIRC it’s distributed, but not anonymized; I haven’t really done anything with it in ten years or so. i2p is probably pretty solid, but it’s often very difficult to use. I’ve tried it, and most of the time couldn’t make configurations work. Or else the eep sites I was trying to reach were offline. IDK.
I dunno; given that Tor was originally designed to be extremely difficult to track, and was designed by spooks, it’s plausible that they aren’t able to crack their own security. If they controlled enough of the network, they could, in theory, track individual users. But it would be extremely resource intensive, and they would already have to be targeting you.
IIRC, the case you’re talking about involved social engineering to gain admin privileges, then illegally hacking computers through malicious javascript to leak their real IP. IIRC a huge number of the cases ended up getting thrown out because there was no way they could legally do what they did, and the convictions they did get were ones that they would have been able to get without the illegal hacking. That was, what, something like ten years ago? Around the time that The Silk Road got taken down? (That was taken down because the site owner used the same username both on the Silk Road and on a clearnet site; he essentially doxxed himself.)
Lots of rumors, very little evidence.
There’s a lot of really bad stuff on Tor. Like, really bad; probably worse than you’re imagining. Things that make the old rotten.com stuff look like a child’s birthday party. If Tor was actually compromised, the people creating and uploading that stuff would be grabbed quickly. Instead, LEAs have to cooperate globally and run long-con sting operations in order to identify people in order to bust them. Most of the time, they’re busting people that use Tor due to social engineering or one kind or another, and the remaining times it’s because someone fucked up configuration on a site.
Not necessarily.
My primary account was banned from Reddit. (I suggested arson as a way of solving the early stages of a Nazi infestation in a neighborhood, and Reddit claimed this was “instigating violence”, as though Nazis were humans.) They also banned all of my alternate accounts. Any account that i tried to open–regardless of which computer I used, browser, VPN, e-mail address, etc.–also ended up getting banned. I think that they must have been doing some kind of hardware fingerprinting that I wasn’t able to get around, even with canvas blocker etc., and any computer that I’d used to log into Reddit on my primary account was linked to that account, and hence banned from creating an account.
It took a while, but I did manage to overwrite every single post and comment I’d made in the last 10+ years for that account.
Seems like it’s a good starting point.
I wonder if you can encrypt the files prior to storing them on the key, which would then encrypt them a second time with a different method. Would the compromise the data in any meaningful way? Or would it mean that you had to decrypt the key and then decrypt the data a second time?
I’ve been using a VPN for several years. I’ve tried using every major browser except Mulvad and Librewolf. As far as I can tell, they’re doing some form of digital fingerprinting that I can’t block. My only option would be getting an entirely new computer. I went through and overwrote/deleted 15 years of comment history (but have not deleted accounts), it’s just not worth it to me.
I am using Firefox, and with a shit-load of add-ons that supposedly prevent unwanted cookies and fingerprinting. I use a VPN.
I was permanently banned from Reddit (for advocating firebombing nazis, as if that’s a bad thing). When I logged in to an alternate account, that account was also permanently banned. Any account I tried to create after that point ended up being banned within a week, regardless of whether or not I was using it. I checked online. Apparently this has become fairly common in the last 2-3 years.
While you can minimize your digital fingerprint, it’s almost impossible to prevent all digital fingerprinting. The EFF says that I have very strong protection against digital fingerprinting, but I’m still identifiable to a company with sufficient resources to devote to the task.
Interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of my text messages to my partner fail to send as well, and I also swear frequently and voluminously. I should test this and see if this is what is going on with my carrier.