Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Security holes, Law, and Control

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:5/10/2000; 8:32:44 PM
Topic:Security holes, Law, and Control
Msg #:17193 (In response to 17178)
Prev/Next:17192 / 17194

Ernest Argetsinger wrote:

Capturing data for nefarious marketing purposes I might have to concede, but that is not a purpose any level of technological controls will protect us from. Only procedural controls, in the form of privacy laws and mandated disclosures about what information is gathered and what's done with it, can protect us from that.

Wow. It's one thing to take a philosophical position that I can politely disagree with ("legal solutions are generally preferable to technical solutions" would be how I would characterize your position; please feel free to correct me). But this assertion is simply wrong.

A commercial product (sadly at the moment only for Windows) that provides hard pseudonymity, including strong crypto, multiple anonymizing routers, IP address stripping, etc. is <http://www.zeroknowledge.com>'s Freedom. I'm waiting for the Mac version with bated breath.

A series of anonymizing services for browsing and e-mail are available at <http://www.anonymizer.com>. Some are free, some are commercial.

Crowds works by basically building a huge collection of individually-run proxy servers for web interaction which any given user's browsing gets routed through; the effect is that you get "lost in the crowd." <http://www.research.att.com/projects/crowds/index.html>

iProxy is in a list of resources that I found, but it's unclear what privacy features it provides. See <http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/iproxy/>.

Rewebber (another anonymizing browser) is at <http://www.rewebber.de/>.

"Onion Routing"--used by Freedom, mentioned above, as well as the cypherpunks' anonymous remailer, is found at <http://www.onion-router.net/>.

I included iProxy mostly because I know a lot of people at AT&T Research are keenly interested in the privacy issue and because Crowds is also AT&T work. But so far the most thorough approach to the issue I've seen is Freedom, and again, the only reason I don't use it is that there's no Mac version as of yet.

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