Idefence closed Rogue Science

Guest · Sun Mar 13, 2005 12:32 pm

Damn,
Another Great site bites the dust,
What arsehole's, all that work , and time, with no explanation,

I would want to sue, it's just unfair,

Imagine if Idefence had the same thing happen to them,

This is really upsetting to hear the chopping block of anti-free speech is closer than we all think,

I am sure there are things we can all do together, to rememdy this probematic issue,
There are legal activist sites that deal with this kind of persecution,

I suggest we fight back, against this malicious force that thinks that we will just sit here and do nothing, while our very freedoms of free spech are dissolving infront of us,

We must find a way to stop this happening,
Maybee it is up to us, such a group that requires the upmost in freedom.

Denial of service attacks are not uncommon amongst legitimate activist groups, boycotting that particular business, product, or service,

It makes me sick that we can not just discuss what we want, without the risk of bookburning,

Syn

Polverone · Sun Mar 13, 2005 2:28 pm

The site was shut down this past summer when the famously alarmist "cyber threats" company iDefense made menacing noises at roguesci's hosting provider about how dangerous the roguesci site was, and about how arab terrorists were learning information from it. The solution was pretty mundane: move to a different host. Of course moving hosts can be pretty painful.

In the long term, I think a better solution might be moving to distributed systems. If a forum is hosted across dozens or hundreds of ordinary user's PCs, with no central host to take down, it will be much harder to intimidate or hack the host completely. Of course, the problem is that writing scaleable, secure, distributed systems is not easy. And if you wanted people to be able to view such a forum without a special client, you'd need some sort of forum to webpage read-only gateway. There are synchronization issues as well. I know that it can be done, but I don't think it would be trivial.

The bad: it would be a lot of work to create. Users would have to use specialized software instead of a web browser to post. The system wouldn't be as well-synchronized in its updates as a centralized server based system. Without special effort, it wouldn't be easily viewable or searchable from the Web. It might be too slow for dialup users, unless the app is carefully written.

The good: it could be freed from the limitations of web browsers. It would be impossible to censor by shutting down a single host or even a fistful of hosts. It would be much harder to perform server-side wiretapping operations on (including mere tracking of connections). It could be written to make true censorship, even by moderators, impossible. That is, if you set up a system where all edits are nondestructive and only affect standard information display, it could be incorruptible. It would practically beg for encryption of all private information due to its distributed nature, making snooping much harder for governments, nosy moderators, and everyone else who's unauthorized. It could be run without any hosting bills to speak of, beyond whatever its members already pay for internet access.

Guest · Thu Mar 17, 2005 12:59 pm

Yes,
we are just preparing, to use gmail accounts, to share our information,
We are now uploading all our resource files into these accounts
This should be done by tonight, and soon enough, we will all be able to share and distribute, and secure this information,

Yes, I do agree, that it needs to be shared amongst the netwrok, as this
will prevent sever data loss,

We will even put our db file everymonth on it's own gmail account,
It's definately a win,win,win scenerio,Symtriotic, I suppose,

Our bandwidth is minimized, members get their own files, and the data is collectivly stored,
And since Gmail, is still beta testing, they might even approve this method of data exchange,

Great

Good advice Polverone,

syn

nazlfrag · Fri Mar 18, 2005 5:50 pm

Well, there is one truly anonymous free network emerging, it will be difficult 'cos the NSA csn crack not just PGP but RSA, why else is it popular? So we use the swedish IDEA cipher, and hope for tha best... if there is a NSA free public anonymous forum format, we will find it.Leave it 2 me.. Smile

MargaretThatcher · Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:17 am

Guest · Fri Apr 01, 2005 7:08 am

yes, it would not be allowed to be used in the us, if it was not relativly crackable,\

it is a prime number business, nad they all can be cracked,
otherwise government agencies could not spy on you!

syn

IndoleAmine · Dreamreader Deluxe

Speaking mathematically, it is almost impossible to decrypt PGP encrypted messages, due to the use of two keys (public/private), each with a rather big size. Even for the NSA, therefore the US of A don't like openPGP - they can hardly control it.. Wink

The problem that remains is that of artificial loopholes though - commercial encryption offering companies need to give the NSA a backdoor key if they want to sell encryption technique, otherwise it is considered being secret military rocket-science and being a dangerous weapon, thus illegal so sell without permission of the government.... Sad

(lets hope that even the US government has to follow the rules of mathematics Laughing

)

i_a

Polverone · Sat Apr 02, 2005 3:44 am

It used to require extensive permissions to export strong cryptographic systems from the US, if the system were in the form of hardware or machine-readable information (executable or source code). This is no longer the case. Even when the restrictions were in place, it was legal to print and export source code on paper but not in electronic form, so the PGP developers published source on paper, exported, and used OCR to put the source back on computers outside of the US. AFAIK, there has never been any law that compelled commercial cryptography systems to include government backdoors, though it is conceivable that some vendors have voluntarily collaborated to insert such backdoors into products. For this reason, well-studied products with published source code are to be preferred. The Clinton administration did try to promote a "Clipper chip" scheme in the early 1990s which would have established a widespread standard for encryption of communications. The catches were that details of the scheme were secret, and that the government would enforce key escrow (it would keep a copy of all secrets necessary to read any particular encrypted message). Clipper never achieved wide acceptance and the initiative was eventually abandoned.

Trying to control the spread of cryptographic software is like trying to control the secret of gunpowder: the genie is out of the bottle, and there's no stuffing it back in. Placing heavy restrictions on its creation and use by American citizens serves more to reduce American comptetitiveness in high-tech business sectors than it does to preserve the government's ability to read arbitrary communications, which has been compromised since the use of the first strong cipers. It's not necessary to imagine that the government can break strong cryptographic algorithms to explain why their use is permitted, only to realize that the government never had real power to control the spread of strong cryptography.

MargaretThatcher · Sat Apr 02, 2005 3:46 am

The PGP algorithms are very difficult to crack but maybe the services have some advance in number theory that no one else knows. They have large budgets, large teams and a wealth of accumulated knowledge. If they did have such a crack, they wouldn't want to reveal it, and they certainly wouldn't waste it on trivial stuff like clandestine chemists. I think it is unlikely that they do have such a mathematical breakthrough.

Usually, encryption is cracked through weak passwords, memory being paged to disk and so forth. Use long, strong passwords. The acronym method is a good one, e.g:

Think of a phrase that you can remember and use the initial letters/characters to make the password:

George Bush is mildly retarded, has an IQ of 50 and a brain size of 50 % normal!

Gives:

GBimr,haIQo50aabso50%n!

Difficult to crack and fairly easy to remember. Mix uppercase, lowercase, punctuation and numbers. 8 character passwords are not enough, make them as long as you can.

The other thing to remember is that in 20 years time, computers will be vastly more powerful than they are today (maybe they will have working quantum computers) and it may be possible to crack what today is considered bomb proof.

IndoleAmine · Dreamreader Deluxe

Mathematics isn't chemistry, numbers don't behave like molecules, luckily. I doubt that any agency has any mathematical knowledge that isn't known to skilled math PHDs....

"George Bush is mildly retarded, has an IQ of 50 and a brain size of 50 % normal! " hehe, and it would make for a nice passphrase for openPGP encryption too, without using the first letters only! - since the whole phrase is less than 256 letters, which is what you could theoretically use for a password - at least when 2048bit encryption is used (as is the case with hushmail)...

i_a

Lief · Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:02 pm

Damn! I always enjoyed strapping bombs on children and watching them blow up.

IndoleAmine · Dreamreader Deluxe

Oh - you are female? (and I always thought..) Laughing

i_a