The answer for me was giving up on most privacy. I gave up in
2002 after Google exposed my early 1990s Usenet posts for easy
searching. At its root though, the Internet was never designed
for security. It's a store and forward system. Store and forward
means "copy and send copy". There's always multiple copies of
everything continuously. Want to break into someone's system?
Forget all the high math cryptography methodologies. Kidnap
their family until they give you the passwords. The systems can
never be fully secured as they stand. == If you want security,
don't use the Internet. It's not, never will be, and cannot be
secured. The flaw is fundamental. The very processes that cause
it to function at ALL (as opposed to NOT being networked) is
ALSO WHY it will never be a secure medium for information
transmission. All humans can do is keep closing gaps as they're
found, just for a clever one to find new ones. The bucket will
always leak and never be plugged. It's the nature of the beast.
The tradeoff for all the wonderful goodness it gives us. ==
Precisely. But it's using uncommon channels even over public
networks. You're talking about buring the signal within the
noise. The thing is, we're getting more and more clever at
focusing on retrieving faint signal within noise when bundled
together. But a lot of this speaks of my personality: Back in
1999-2002, I did a lot of investing. Through trial and error, I
found a methodology that works for me. I found out it even has a
name: contrarian investing. See what the bulk is doing, and look
in the opposite direction at the stuff they've neglected or are
running away from at full speed. People right now are running
TOWARDS qubit math, incorporating chinese remainder theorem and
all sorts of folding, tearing, swapping, shifting base systems,
and all kinds of math tricks. But what about sparse information
distribution? Staggered timing? Hiding in old documents? These
are all well-worn methods for hiding your trail of information
but because they're not in bundles, neatly packed and utilizing
standard protocols but require human intervention and
creativity, these simple techniques make it harder to trace. ==
Well, that's all you need is time. Once messages are received,
they're no longer needed. I ran a Minecraft server from
2012-2014 for my elementary age nephew. It got very popular,
gathering 27,000 unique players and had a ongoing userbase. Felt
bad shutting it down honestly but it was killing my laptop.
Anyway, I let them do whatever they wanted (creative /
roleplaying) and I kept only a loose eye on things, to make sure
there was no sexual harassment or bullying 'cause there were
people of all ages on it, and I allowed ppl their privacy as
much as possible. I was a friendly "serverGod" but those who
knew that I could theoretically see all the chat on the system
(I rarely looked at it because I was busy) had a clever message
passing method they used: They'd write notes in a book, using a
pre-established code, pass the book, then throw it in lava after
being read. They bragged about it of course. Still, quite
clever. Foolproof? No. But it was the speed of transaction and
deletion that was clever. It left no permanent log file traces.
== I'd focus on auditing systems myself if I was worried about
security. Any history trails generated during the process. For
example, I have all of the chat logs saves from 25 months. I
could search through and easily find Skype names, email
addresses, phone numbers, real names, Kik account names,
locations (kinda - that depends on their ISP), youtube accounts,
etc. I could even pull a WikiLeaks on them all and release them
publicly but of course only they'd care. Still, a virtual world
is a microcosm of the real world. For myself, I use my real
name. Everywhere. I pump out information, knowledge and opinion
freely and my throw up is ALL over the Internet. Google me. I'm
EASY to find. You can find my home. Is anybody going to find me
and take me away? No. I talk so much that I'd be too boring to
bother with. == and actually, I did do an Eye of Sauron on them
once. I have several Gigs worth of chat logs and one day, out of
boredom, I extracted all of the youtube accts I could and
subscribed to them all. As a nice server God, they appreciated
my occasional thumbs up on their videos, and even two years
later, some of them still follow me around the 'net and it's
kinda flattering. Honestly,- there's a LOT of freedom in being
an "online persona of yourself". I use my real name. Is that
really "me" that you see out there? No. The real me is sitting
in an ugly yellow chair on a back porch. I'm a fiction of
myself. I even registered my own NAME as a fictitious name a few
years ago to make it legitimate with the Florida fictitious name
database. $50 for a little poetic fun. I even created a circular
fictitious name chain so that I ended up so that I am LEGALLY:
SOMEBODY owned by NOBODY I don't use any of it for evil
purposes. But I like knowing how to do it. == I get accused of
working for foreign agencies sometimes. Here's one from just two
days ago: I've been uploading Vines I've been making to the
Internet Archive. They were nice enough to give me my own
collection because I was clogging up the community collection.
This one user, Noah, was getting REALLY MAD about my massive
uploads to the system. I had it all pre-prepared ahead of time,
Metadata already filled in, the MP4s all ready, everything FTP'd
to the upload staging area.... and then I set my browser to open
each of the url submissions one after another, spaced 3 seconds
apart. boom boom boom boom boom - thousands of them one after
another. Anyway, at one point during a forum discussion where he
was complaining he says this: "If I were to attempt to
experiment on the best way to not so much shut down but
effectively block a MASSIVE site like - - - oh say, gee I dunno
- - - - a government agency (?) what better way to rehearse than
here?" He said a few other things like that, but he was
CONVINCED that I was attempting to shut down the Internet
Archive with all of my uploading. Oh! And he was sure I wasn't
working alone. But, I am. tongue emoticon ==
