adry

@adry@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Mind at least providing a link for your pretty strong claim about Tor?

  I don't have one. Thanks for asking, you made me actually reconsider the truthfulness of my own statement... I was just parroting back what I heard many times, years ago, among the people that attended a hacklab from the city I was living in back then.

  Same goes with the 'tip' that said that Tor was initially funded by the US Military (which apparently is true, but then the project turn out to be independent.) These two "facts" were presented, and parroted back and forth in that space a lot.

  It would be great to have real analysis knowing which data centers or actors have the biggest control of exit nodes. If there's really a way to de-anonimyze any traffic from there.

  PS. Since we are on the topic, another concern regarding Tor network is the possibility of correlation attacks. It always strikes me how ISP stops providing connection at 'random' if you were a frequent user. Pretty sure there's legal forces behind it... but that's my paranoia. Now those minutes or hours offline sprinkled here and there to my router were a fact. Anyway, the dark web is really full of a lot sick places. I'd rather just stay away from it entirely and use a VPN for my privacy when searching media and stuff. That's a lesson I learned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate it when I don't know an acronym, but this one is particularly hurtful to my brain since everyone is saying "yeah, that link to the FSB was obvious glad someone demonstrated it." So... I will just assume FSB=KGB and be done.

  Anyway, most of our privacy "war fronts" are honeypots in one way or another. Take for example Tor network (high number of exit nodes are controlled). Except those apps or protocols that are truly decentralized (e.g. OMEMO in XMPP), these are good. But then again, they lag behind to our standards of "normal" Internet that connects us to the world, outside of our tiny circles of nerds.

  Now, the thing with honeypots, is that they are there to catch some specific type of fly. If you were to use their network to take advantage of the features for anything that the "predator" behind doesn't care, you're fine. So, I will keep using Telegram for the memes and piracy channels...

  From an OPSec perspective this is important news nonetheless and I will keep it in mind.