adamfisk

5 ms·

1.
by adamfisk 2mo ago
Uggh in any given project I tend to gauge the hype to working tech ratio. The higher it is, the more annoying the project. BitChat is about as annoying as you get. The reason is simple: bluetooth connectivity only works at scale if everyone
2.
by adamfisk 4mo ago
Without knowing too much about the drama discussed here, I think the bottom line is that the "old" Freenet was a bit on life support as far as I could tell and absolutely needed this kind of innovation from its founder.
3.
by adamfisk 4mo ago
Exciting to see Freenet innovating so much, Ian! I haven't really dug in too deep but love that it's in Rust. What's it look like over the wire? How conspicuous is it in the face of, say government censors who can see and con
4.
by adamfisk 6mo ago
Author here, but one piece I didn't dive into is CEF vs CDP. Things like Browserbase use Chrome Devtools Protocol, which is useful for manipulating the browser for some use cases, but it's also detectable in a variety of ways. Wic
5.
Show HN: Wick – censorship circumvention tech repurposed for AI web access(getwick.dev)
4 points by adamfisk 6mo ago|2 comments
6.
by adamfisk 8mo ago
Tor is used relatively little in Iran - https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-country.html... Other tools are much, much more popular, such as Psiphon, Lantern, MahsaNG, etc.
7.
by adamfisk 8mo ago
Theoretically this is true, but in practice it's not. Most p2p services rely on the global internet in some way. The BitTorrent DHT, for example, is unlikely so self-heal in the event of a completely inaccessible global internet. Thing
8.
by adamfisk 1y ago
You're dramatically underestimating the sophistication of these groups. Think about it: these people are risking their freedom by working on this technology in any capacity. They are not naive to the risks of the work nor are they naiv
9.
by adamfisk 1y ago
@reisse is 100% right. Most people outside of heavily censored regions have no clue what technology is actually used in those countries. The well-known, well-established providers don't actually work in censored regions because: 1) The
10.
by adamfisk 4y ago
Oh it's also worth noting that Cloudflare is actually more aggressive in blocking domain fronting than almost anyone else. Lots of folks match the SNI to the Host header, but Cloudflare takes it a step further and also makes sure that
11.
by adamfisk 4y ago
Fascinating, Filippo. We stayed silent on it at the time primarily because we were keeping a low profile particularly as more and more Chinese were using Lantern, but there was also back channel pressure through various contacts, to be hone
12.
by adamfisk 5y ago
Yes they’ve received funding from DARPA. I realized I forgot that after I posted. Good catch. To my knowledge, that funding is for new anti-censorship transports to sneak traffic in and out of censored countries.
13.
by adamfisk 5y ago
First, there’s a vast difference between the state department and the pentagon. Lumping those two together just reflects an unsophisticated understanding of the federal government. Signal has never received any state department or pentagon
14.
by adamfisk 5y ago
Um, ok. All of the above projects use not only reproducible builds for many platforms, but they’re all open source, and they all have public security audits. Those three pillars are about as good as it gets. Is there something you would add
15.
by adamfisk 5y ago
I’m certainly not defending all US government actions. That’s exactly the point. Levine tries to lump all of this in with surveillance. The US government funds the NSA, that is true. It also funds food stamps. And torture. The trick is to u
16.
by adamfisk 5y ago
“The Navy built it” is a bit of an exaggeration. Paul Syverson did early work on it at the Naval Research Lab, and Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson added to the collaboration at approximately the same time, with neither having anything t
17.
by adamfisk 5y ago
Yasha Levine is a conspiracy theorist hack. There’s really no other way to say it. His narrative is attractive to a left leaning audience with shallow knowledge in this area, but the reality is that without publicly funded software like Tor
18.
by adamfisk 5y ago
Wireguard traffic is easy to identify and therefore easy to block.
19.
by adamfisk 5y ago
Having two NATs is really the only case worth mentioning. Considering almost all internet traffic involves at least one NAT, if you can’t handle a single NAT case, you’ve got issues!
20.
by adamfisk 6y ago
Many Gnutella clients were also using Merkle Trees by about 2002.
21.
by adamfisk 7y ago
His p2p research group was extremely influential in the design of second generation Gnutella search algorithms around 2002, particularly those integrated into LimeWire. Sad to hear of his passing.
22.
by adamfisk 7y ago
Or encrypted traffic for that matter -- a lot of VPNs install root certs on your OS.
23.
by adamfisk 7y ago
Full disclosure: I work on Lantern at https://www.getlantern.org . That said, you should just use Lantern. Recently international links out of China are insanely unreliable, but we’re continuing to improve it. There are hiccups,
24.
by adamfisk 7y ago
This risk is generally exaggerated. Every once in awhile someone is fined for using a VPN or circumvention tool. Even that is rare, however, and the consequences are relatively benign. The practice is also so common that it would likely be
25.
by adamfisk 7y ago
Very few people use Signal or Psiphon in China just FYI
26.
by adamfisk 7y ago
Does Aliyun support path-based file storage? That could be handy!
27.
by adamfisk 7y ago
S3 is hardly the only example of collateral freedom in China. There are many other cases where the concept works.
28.
by adamfisk 8y ago
Have you tried Lantern? It’s free up to 500MBs per month and works well in many censoring countries around the world. It has lots of features that make it fast, such as automatically optimizing server selection and using BBR, and it does ma
29.
by adamfisk 8y ago
For us it’s hard to conceptually free ourselves from our existing points system with Chase. We spend about $125k/month on our card and get something like 1% in points back. So we blow past the $5k AWS thing (which I agree is a cool con
30.
by adamfisk 8y ago
Yup that’s the type of thing we do with Lantern. In particular we: 1) Bind to a random port 2) Require a securely random base path for all requests. Anything without that path is rejected. The backend just opens the browser at the random po

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