this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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Privacy
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EU countries are going full on fighting privacy now.
Just makes me want to fight back by helping other people to use Monero, Tor, and other privacy services.
Same.
Monero is not safe, CIA cracked it long time ago
Then why aren't they catching more "criminals"? Also, why hasn't the $600,000 US dollar bounty from the IRS been claimed?
I can't speak to monero specifically
But:
Back in my pure research days it was always fun to guess what the latest "big thing" was actually about. It was especially fun when you would be looking for funding opportunities and see really weird stuff that made no sense for the org sponsoring it but would have made perfect sense for a different 3LA.
It was ALSO real fun to totally never notice when certain funding opportunities dried up and then there was a big push in the news about how we need to outlaw technology those opportunities totally didn't already compromise.
Like, for the better part of a decade The Big Thing was graph analysis techniques. And the number of kids who had no idea they were basically writing algorithms to process social media (especially twitter) was downright sad. And the people who DID realize what their work was geared toward? They applied for jobs where they got paid a lot more to do exactly that without needing to pretend it is actually about data storage technologies or optimizing cell tower load.
And... let's just say that most of those algorithms ALSO apply toward cryptocurrencies and transaction logs (since they had great applications for bank transactions...) and even doing a number on tumblers and so forth.
I too don't know much about monero specifically, however:
Parallel construction is still a thing, yes. But so is spreading the false idea that everything is already compromised so there's no point trying to defend yourself.
No. There is every reason to "defend yourself". The key is to actually be aware of what research and efforts are out there and minimizing your risk profile any time you are dealing with a black box.
I mean, it is known that people can pick locks. Do you plug your ears every time you hear someone talk about how doors can be compromised? Or do you give up on everything and remove every single deadbolt in your home?
Or... do you do a bit of research and figure out what you can do to make your home harder to break into. Whether it is sturdier screws, a reinforced doorjam, or other methods?
Well then, what specific research do you have suggesting that monero has been broken? After all it is not in any way a "black box". The algorithm is well known.
... not that I especially trust Monero much; not even as much as Tor. What I object to is the tendency to be too quick to go ahead with the assumption that it probably has been broken even in the total absence (such as in this thread so far) of any evidence to demonstrate that.
It's the same misguided instinct that leads people to believe that all encryption is futile, that the NSA already knows all the keys no matter what we do. It's not really true. It is true they can easily compromise the security and privacy of any one of us normal people they choose to single out, but for those of us who don't practise unreasonably strict op-sec the point of choosing secure and private modes of communication (including monero if your sense of morality allows for the use of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency) is not to protect one target against all possible threat models. And it's not only to protect against lesser threats. Much of the time the most important thing is to contribute to the effort to make it impossible for anyone to systematically spy on the whole world all at once. Nobody should have that power.
Interesting information, although I'm not the one best suited to process it, I would recommend you posting this to something like the skepticism Sunday threads on [email protected]. If it truly has been broken, they are managing to keep it very quiet. And if it has been broken, then there's a good chance that the vast majority of encryption has also been broken, such as HTTPS.
Source? I don't believe it.
Why else would the US be working so hard to ban it and make it very difficult to obtain?
Makes me feel we are two faced. On the one hand, we are inventing laws to protect privacy of eu citizens. And then stuff like this happens. On the other hand: Just fucked up that the people who use the platform for what is was intended for are now in jeopardy for people who want to look at underage kids, get their SO killed, look at kill cams or buy drugs.
What’s a kill cam?
Kind of like the red room they tell you about on Youtube
Are you being intentionally vague?
I think they are referring to videos of people dying.
Thank you for an actual response.
GDPR only applies to big tech apparently
GDPR explicitly exempts government entities. Still, way better than not having it IMO.
Regulating governmental intrusions into privacy would take a completely separate and probably much larger bill.
EU countries are going full in fighting to protect privacy right now.
Its a battle and there's people in the government in both sides. Germany has actually been one of the best Member States in the EU preventing erosion of privacy.
Governments are made up of many different people, frequently with differing goals