Meshnets. Bitcoin Could Change Voting the Way It's Changed Money. There's a sense bubbling up in the cryptocorners of the internet that the trick to bitcoin might be that it doesn't have to be a currency at all.
Maybe cryptocurrency’s fundamental value is as a security protocol—a safe, anonymous, hack-proof network that decentralizes trust and democratizes power. And maybe a hitherto overlooked use of all that is politics, by using the bitcoin precedent to overhaul democratic voting. Political groups and tech startups are beginning to experiment with digital voting systems based on the bitcoin and blockchain protocol. What does voting have to do with bitcoin? For all its appeal, online voting in its current form— which is already being used or researched in several US states and countries overseas—is very vulnerable to fraud, cyberattack, and government corruption. "Just replace a coin in your head with a vote, and run it the exact same dynamic," said Maximiliaan van Kuyk, cofounder of the V initiative, based in New York.
Image: BitCongress. P2P. GoldBug: Secure Instant Messenger. The Free Haven Project. Free Haven's Selected Papers in Anonymity. Bitmessage.org - Wiki. RePress, An Internet Censorship Defeating Plugin For WordPress. Safeconnect, Universities, P2P, Network Security and Risk: The Tangled World of "Policy Enforcement" on Other People's Computers. After months of work, and spurred by an initial report by Professor Ted Byfield of New School University's Parsons New School for Design, we’re happy to report a security vulnerability fix in a product called Safe•Connect.
While the immediate story is good, the underlying context should raise real concerns about the dangers inherent in the ongoing obsession of Congress and the content industry with pressuring intermediaries, especially universities, to use their status as network operators to require individuals to install monitoring software like Safe•Connect on their computers in order to appease the content industry. As Stewart Baker, then the Department of Homeland Security’s policy czar warned during a similar incident involving the Sony Rootkit: "It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. Background Safe•Connect Security Vulnerability Enter Safe•Connect, a product developed by Impulse Point, LLC.
Digital currencies. I2P. BitTorrent. ANONYMITY & PRIVACY. [ English | German ] Protection of Privacy on the Internet JAP (called JonDo in the scope of the commercial JonDonym anonymous proxy servers - AN.ON remains free of charge) makes it possible to surf the internet anonymously and unobservably.
Without Anonymization, every computer in the internet communicates using a traceable Address. That means: the website visited, the internet service provider (ISP), and any eavesdropper on the internet connection can determine which websites the user of a specific computer visits. JonDoDaemon for Debian - JonDonym Wiki. Konspire2b: a revolution in mass-scale content distribution. Judge eviscerates P2P lawyer: "I accepted you at your word" As a lawyer, you know it's going to be bad when a federal judge summons you to his courtroom at nine in the morning to talk about your “ill-considered lawsuit” that has “abused the litigation system in more than one way.”
Federal judge Milton Shadur, who keeps a "Now, 3 for 10¢… Federal Judge! " sign beside him in his 23rd floor Chicago courtroom, summoned file-sharing lawyer John Steele to court this morning with those words. Constructive Direct Action Against Censorship. The past few weeks have highlighted the vulnerability of centralized information systems to censorship: online speech is only as strong as the weakest intermediary.
Sites hosting legitimate speech were caught up in an anti-counterfeiting raid by the Department of Homeland Security, EveryDNS stopped hosting WikiLeaks.org’s DNS, Amazon refused hosting service to WikiLeaks, and independent protesters conducted denial-of-service attacks on businesses refusing service to WikiLeaks. If the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA; the internet censorship bill introduced in the US Senate) or something like it passes, the threat centralization poses to First Amendment-protected speech may be unavoidable. Corrective action — designing, implementing, and deploying robust, fault-tolerant architectures — will improve the security and availability of the internet infrastructure generally, to the benefit of all. Metalinker.org. Software Improves P2P Privacy By Hiding In The Crowd. Software Improves P2P Privacy By Hiding In The Crowd Apr 8, 2009 Fabian Bustamante Luis Amaral Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new “guilt-by-association” threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior.
To thwart this threat, they have released publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification. P2P systems are incredibly popular, enabling new and important Internet applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) and file sharing. “This was particularly surprising because BitTorrent is designed to establish connections at random, so there is no a priori reason for such strong communities to exist,” Bustamante says. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards #0838564 and #0644062. Out in the Open: Teenage Hacker Transforms Web Into One Giant Bitcoin Network.