The conversation has landed on cryptome.org and hackerne.ws . The last comment at cryptome.org is interesting for the discussion.
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4184850 Gregory Maxwell <[email protected]> wrote: >On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 4:15 PM, Anonymous Person ><[email protected]> wrote: >> I know it is dead, because I have tried to do it, and I can assure >you it is dead. > >I had a similar experience. > >When I decided to publish a large collection (30gb) of previously >paywalled (but public domain) JSTOR documents[1] I initially planned >to do so anonymously— simply to mitigate the risk of harassment via >the courts. Ultimately, after more consideration I decided to publish >with my name attached and I think it made more of an impact because I >did so (even though quite a few journalists reported it as though it >were a pseudonym)— though if I didn't have even the prospect that I >could publish anonymously I can't say for sure that I would have >started down that road at all. > >I perused anonymous publication for some days prior to deciding to not >publish anonymously and I encountered many of the same issues that >Anonymous Person above named at every juncture I hit roadblocks— >though in my case I already had bitcoins, but I couldn't find anyone >to take them in exchange for actually anonymous hosting especially >without access to freenode. If I'd wanted to emit a few bytes of >text fine— but large amount of data, no. > >It's also the case that non-text documents can trivially break your >anonymity— overtly in the case of things like pdf or exif metadata, or >more subtly through noise/defect fingerprints in images. I think I can >fairly count myself among the most technically sophisticated parties, >and yet even I'm not confident that I could successfully publish >anything but simple text anonymously. > >The related problems span even further than just the anonymity part of >it. Even once I'd decided to be non-anonymous I needed hosting that >wouldn't just take the material down (for weeks, if not forever) at >the first bogus DMCA claim (or even in advance of a claim because the >publication was 'edgy'). I ended up using the pirate bay— which >turned out pretty well, though there were some issues where discussion >of my release was silently suppressed on sites such as facebook >because they were hiding messages with links to the pirate bay, and it >was blocked on some corporate networks that utilized commercial >filtering. > >So I think that the problems for anonymous publication on the Internet >are actually a subset of a greater problem that there is little >independence and autonomy in access to publishing online. You can't >_effectively_ publish online without the help of other people, and >they're not very interested in helping anonymous people, presumably >because the ratio of trouble to profit isn't good enough. > >About the only solutions I can see are: > >(1) Provide stronger abuse resistant nymservices so that things like >freenode don't have to block anonymous parties, thus facilitating >person to person interactions. >(2) Improve the security and useability of things like freenet and >hidden services, so that they are usable for publication directly and >provide strong anonymity. > >I'm disappointed to see some of the naysaying in this thread. It >really is hard to publish anything more than short text messages >anonymously, at least if you care about the anonymity not being broken >and you want to reach a fairly large audience. > > > >[1] https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/ >_______________________________________________ >tor-talk mailing list >[email protected] >https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
