BitTorrent launches decentralised crypto-fied chat app BitTorrent has joined the increasingly crowded post-Snowden market for anonymous online chat services with "Bleep", a decentralised voice and text communications platform. The platform uses the BitTorrent network to spread users' voice and text through nodes rather than a centralised server. Project head Farid Fadaie (@ …
Anonymous chat applications would make interception more difficult, but users should not consider these as NSA-busters despite breathless headlines. Any online consumer specifically targeted by a very well resourced adversary should all but consider themselves toast.
Things are never always what they seem ......
amanfromMars [1407310425] … having a say on http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2014/07/identity-intel/Identity intelligence is used, JP 2-0 said, “to discover the existence of unknown potential threat actors by connecting individuals to other persons, places, events, or materials, analyzing patterns of life, and characterizing their level of potential threats to US interests.”Hi, Steven
It should be noted and realised, that not all previously unknown potential threat actors are maliciously cored. There are those and/or there is that who be minded and in virtual machinery, intelligently designed, to be the novel source of intellectual property which is more a treat to be savoured and sated than a threat to be feared and combated, with the significant disruptive difference and destructive force of the mistake that is made in not recognising the former when considering it to be the latter, being a sub-prime result of the lack of advanced and advancing human intelligence in services providing servers and communications and media with greater future intelligence for unit consumption/human understanding/perception absorption.
In worlds which are rapidly evolving and radically changing, it is a fatal error catastrophically damaging to the status quo and mindlessly supportive services, for the status quo and mindlessly supportive services to imagine that the status quo will not be fundamentally altered. Nothing ever stays the same. Everything grows and changes. And it is only natural, and in Global Operating Devices, perfectly normal for IT and Media Command and Control from Cyber Spaced Live Operational Virtual Environments.
Remove IT and Media from the Virtual Reality Picture Show and who Rules and Reigns over Made Worlds and Everything with Simple Instruction Sets?
*COFFEE .... Vorsprung durch Virtuelle Technik
Meanwhile, the BitTorrent protocol itself still lacks the basic ability to authenticate peers and trackers. You can just grab a list of hashes for popular torrents, connect to random torrent clients and start requesting files - even if those clients were using private trackers. Oops.
The stance "if you are a target then this technology won't help you" is red herring.
Of course it will not. If you are targeted then (presumably) you know what you are doing, and know how to protect yourself.
The point of technology similar to this is to thwart NSA-style opportunistic eavesdropping rather than CIA-style targeted operations. As long as it works - job done.
Well, this gives you confidentiality (at least in theory) and integrity (with the same caveat). As far as availability goes, how hard would it be to implement a DoS attack against this kind of traffic? Would such an effort affect everyone with a torrent client or would it be possible to target an arbitrary client?
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