Anonymous' WikiLeaks-Like Project Tyler To Launch In December 101
hypnosec writes "A hacker who claims to be a member of the hacking collective Anonymous has revealed that the hacktivist group is working on a Wikileaks-like service dubbed Tyler and that it will be launched on December 21. The Anonymous member revealed that the service will be decentralized and will be based on peer-to-peer service, unlike Wikileaks, thus making Tyler rather immune to closure and raids. The site will serve as a haven for whistleblowers, where they can publish classified documents and information. The hacker said in an emailed interview that 'Tyler will be P2P encrypted software, in which every function of a disclosure platform will be handled and shared by everyone who downloads and deploys the software.'" That sounds like a lot to live up to. Decentralized, attack-resistant and encrypted all sound nice, but I'm curious both about the funding it would take, and whether it matches Wikileaks' own security.
The first rule of Tyler is... (Score:5, Funny)
... you do not talk about Tyler!
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You can talk about Tippecanoe, but not Tyler too.
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At one point most of the high profile hijinks were performed by only about 6 guys, but there is no "anonymous membership" per se.
And I'm not sure why anyone is asking about the cost of running something like this. That's one of the advantages of decentralized, P2P services... there's virtually no cost.
What they should worry about is everyone joining this swarm being labelled a terrorism suspect. The feds have pretty clearly demonstrated that they can track these people down. Nearly all of the ones causing p
It's a trap! (Score:2)
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It could be a government funded honeypot
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The point everyone is missing is that Wikileaks does not just provide a technical service. They go through great lengths to protect the wistleblower by e.g. cleaning documents. Just publishing and keeping things online is reasonable easy. You don't need a technical solution, you need a process and you need to establish yourself as a trustworthy entity to be approached by whistleblowers.
Re:establish yourself as a trustworthy entity (Score:2)
Despite a few humorous news stories, the Feds aren't stupid. So the age of insulting someone by calling them "tin foil hats" is fading. Off and on I am experimenting with pairing news stories with things like this one "Ooh New Shiny Service" with the followup story "Busted".
Having to live through the time delay in real time is becoming exhausting.
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There's a maximum length on the subject line. If you submit too quickly it's easy to miss it.
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Repeatedly on my smartphone. (Antedeluvian froyo device.)
It has problems when text input from the hardware keyboard exceeds a certain threshold in typematic rate, and when certain system background agets feel the need to spam the alert bar. This causes keypresses to either become out of order in the input buffer, or for the content of that buffer to truncate. (The cutoff for typematic rate seems to be around 8 to 10 keypresses per second, and the usual offenders for alerter spam are things like tmobile's wi
Anonymous/Tyler/KKK same thing. (Score:1, Insightful)
Now all you smart
You guessed it, more government, more SOPA. Wise up boys, keep it in your pants.
Help eliminate stupid speeding tickets [wikipedia.org]
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SOPA and friends aren't going to go away if we play nice. We have a choice between a creeping and unresisted loss of freedom, and an outright war where at least we have a chance of prevailing.
There is a reason that even as pacifists we remember Churchill more fondly than Chamberlain, despite the former getting way more of his people killed.
"Information wants to be free" (Score:2, Insightful)
I think this phrase is vastly misunderstood.
People take it to mean, "If there's any information out there that I want, I should be able to have it, regardless of the consequences."
That was never the case, historically. Information wanting to be free means that when market forces restrict our access to factual information, like how a PDP-11 allocates memory, that information should be liberated.
That has nothing to do with piracy, secrets, etc. which have secondary consequences.
Ask yourself: if someone got a
Re:"Information wants to be free" (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not about personal privacy.
This is about governments and other public bodies trying to keep secrets from the people who elected them (or, in some cases, didn't elect them). One could argue that this information should be freely available (with reasonable restrictions) but in an effort to cover up and deceive, governments keep the information secret.
Wikileaks seemed to take a lot of effort to prevent personal private information from disclosure.
Many governments have "Freedom of information" laws which specifically grant access to government information so they do recognize that information should be free. However, there is always a battle about where to draw the line with governments wanting to be more restrictive and "the people" wanting more information.
Re:"Information wants to be free" (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Comparing individual privacy interests with government secrecy is a pretty stupid analogy.
Government are not individuals with inalienable rights. They service (or rather should service) their constituents. The only government secrets that are worth keeping are the ones that revealing would actually harm the people, rather than the government.
In an ideal world, there should be no conflict between the people of a democracy and its government...a perfect government would already be serving its people's interests.
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And when my interests differ significantly from yours, someone is going to be unhappy.
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I'm not sure your point, as it has no bearing on what I said. Are you conflating the interests of the government with the interests of an individual?
As I said, secrets that are in the genuine interests of the people are worth keeping (i.e. true national security concerns). Secrets that the government wants to keep to avoid the embarrassment of officials are not. I'm not sure where the controversy is. I get why officials don't want to be embarrassed but what I don't get are the individual citizens who suppor
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Ask yourself: if someone got a copy of all of your secrets, including your financial records and (lack of) sexual partners, maybe some stuff you'd rather bury for a century or two, and published it, would you be OK with that?
Many governments have "Freedom of information" laws which specifically grant access to government information so they do recognize that information should be free. However, there is always a battle about where to draw the line with governments wanting to be more restrictive and "the people" wanting more information.
Here's a crazy idea... how about governments are only allowed to bury information for 30 or 40 years? In terms of political climate, that's about equal to the two generations that seem reasonable for personal privacy. By that time, any security hazards posed by the information's release would long since have passed, and technology would even progress far enough to make classified military technology obsolete. Anybody who was involved in a particular classified project wouldn't be in power any more anyway, s
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I don't think the problem is with old information.
The problem is with current information that the people in power want to hide. I guess the Wikileaks videos of US helicopters killing unarmed civilians are a good example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik [youtube.com]
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The purpose of publishing such information is to keep the citizentry informed so they can rationally act on it through voting. What's the point of publishing information that's thirty years out of date? "Before you were born, we started a program to torture and assassinate. The eventual disposition of the program is still classified."
Classification schemes create a sort of nobility, entrusted with knowledge of "what's really going on" (tm), while the hoipolloi are told fairy tales designed to keep their pol
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Here's a crazy idea... how about governments are only allowed to bury information for 30 or 40 years?
That's traditionally the way that it worked in the UK and various other countries before FoI laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_year_rule [wikipedia.org]
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It's necessary to keep secrets (Score:2)
That sounds good on paper, but in reality, there will always need to be secrets. Running a spy agency is essential and needs to be secret. Development of new weapons programs need to be secret. There is a lot of data kept by governments which affects individual citizens, local areas or groups, and that, too, should be kept secret.
The "publicize it all and claim it'
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Don't tell the MPAA/RIAA that (Score:3)
Once it is out it is out for good.
Our friends in Hollywood certainly think you can put the cat back in the bag.
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My understanding (which I admit is without context) is that it describes the dynamic between two forces: The effort needed to keep something secret will always be greater than the effort needed to expose that same thing, resulting always in a pressure towards exposure. Now, couple that with our propensity for anthropomorphic explanations, and we get "Information wants to be free".
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Information wanting to be free means that when market forces restrict our access to factual information, like how a PDP-11 allocates memory, that information should be liberated.
Wrong. "Information wants to be free" has nothing to do with "should" any more than "Water wants to flow downhill" does. Both are amoral observations about the world, not a call to action.
It means that it's extremely difficult to keep information contained, because once it gets out, it tends to propagate because there are no natural constraints on its ability to reproduce. e.g. if I tell you a secret, I have forever lost the ability to take it back, and if I don't want it getting out, I have to actively
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Ask yourself: if someone got a copy of all of your secrets, including your financial records and (lack of) sexual partners, maybe some stuff you'd rather bury for a century or two, and published it, would you be OK with that?
I would be very much displeased if someone released information regarding my private life for all to see. However, freedom of information should flow both ways. If information on everyone was released, all sexual partners, all drugs they've done in college, all the strange porn they've looked at on a whim, I expect we could get past this puritanical set of morality that Americans have and realize we're all a bit odd.
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Ask yourself: if someone got a copy of all of your secrets, including your financial records and (lack of) sexual partners, maybe some stuff you'd rather bury for a century or two, and published it, would you be OK with that?
If i found out all your secrets and didnt care, would you be OK with that ?
Privacy/Secrecy is only a problem when everyone else has it and you dont; In an egalatarian society there is no problem with such things.
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December 21? 2012? (Score:1)
Just like the progression of music sharing (Score:2)
15 years ago, music sharing was Napster. Downloading from a centralized source. Ditto for Wikileaks.
Today, music sharing is "in the cloud", decentralized, private, and often encrypted. Seems only natural for Project Tyler (which desperately needs a new name) to do the same.
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30 years ago, music sharing was copying cassettes...in person. And sharing government secrets was done largely in person, too, spy to spy agency.
15 years ago, music sharing was Napster. Downloading from a centralized source. Ditto for Wikileaks.
Today, music sharing is "in the cloud", decentralized, private, and often encrypted. Seems only natural for Project Tyler (which desperately needs a new name) to do the same.
Sounds good, except Project Freenet came out around the same time as Napster (late 1999, early 2000), and does everything Project Tyler is attempting to do.
The downside to Freenet is that unused content will atrophy -- but supposedly this would work well for leaks, as you'd have a limited time to grab the information that was leaked, but unimportant stuff would eventually expire.
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When you get something that's not written to use a proprietary system like Java, then we'll talk. Till then, "freenet" really isn't "Free" and it's utter shit.
In the same vein, Apple computers are better than Microsoft computers because they can use more than 8.2 characters for filenames...
Really... you HAVE heard of OpenJRE, right? Besides that, ALL software runs on proprietary systems unless you've found a way to actually set up a system with fully open hardware, embedded software and firmware.
Sure, you can have paranoia regarding JRE having a back door in it somewhere... but you could say the same thing about the chips in your computer. It doesn't make Freen
A More Useless Freenet? (Score:3, Interesting)
What will this do that Freenet does not already do?
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Well if freenet manages not to build upon flawed releases of the JVM, I guess it is unbeatable for this kind of applications.
Sounds like Tor (Score:3)
Why not just set up a Tor hidden service and be done with it?
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Re:Sounds like Tor...um no, Freenet (Score:1)
Not Tor. Freenet.
A hidden service in Tor is centralized. Docs on Freenet are decentralized.
This is exactly what Freenet was designed for.
much better idea (Score:3)
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Or you could simply use Freenet as-is.
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"funding" ?? (Score:1)
Decentralized networks don't need "funding". That's the whole point. You install some software and you're a node in the network. Haven't you people ever used Gnutella?
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And then one week later... (Score:4, Interesting)
flooded by gov nodes (Score:2)
Will the secure P2P system be secure if the government happens to be running a significant portion of the P2P nodes? It seems like with Tor, the only hope is that the nodes are trusted. Sure, if only 5% of the nodes are compromised, the chance of hitting enough compromised nodes so the watcher knows where you are is low, but if 50% of the nodes are compromised, your promise of security is broken.
some thoughts... or just odd ramblings... (Score:2)
...I could post this as AC and legitimately claim to be a "member" of the Anonymous collective with no further proof required. Such is the nature of Anonymous. It isn't an organised group, like say, oh, Scientology, where membership is proven with funny handshakes and laminated cards. You get what I mean there. Anonymous is Legion. It's an organic entity brought about by the chaotic actions of many which seems to be working toward a common goal, and someone had the bright idea of calling that organised chao
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once an idea is born it will do one of two things: it will propagate or it will die. This one is doing the former because whatever you think, it is liberating information that people need to know
... such as random website passwords and credit card numbers. Yes, if by "people" you mean "organised crime". There's no other legitimate use for that data.
That's the problem with decentralised undefined social movements with no codes of behaviour - they can easily morph into a random hate mob without even noticing that they have. Anonymous, or factions of it, reached that point about five years ago. Why would anyone want to continue to associate themselves with that?
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It was so nice of you to chip away until only the parts you needed to make your point remained. Now, please put what you quoted back into context and try again.
There's a fundamental difference between "wanting" to know something and "needing" to know something. You do not "need" to know someone else's credit card details. You may very well "need" to know that your GOVERNMENT is committing WAR CRIMES IN YOUR NAME.
So it's like Freenet? (Score:3)
I wonder what the conversation was like between (Score:1)
Funding? What for? (Score:1)
What funding? I'd host it on every device I own. How many more Anons like me are there, again?
Posting signed, wince I'm in Belgium, in a small European country no one really important gives any shit about, and a with laws so localized they don't matter in teh world... I'm untouchable as far as the US DOJ is concerned.
Not that I'd concern them. Not
Tyler exists already (Score:1)
...but under a different name.
You can hook up to it from a tor node, it's easy to find if you really want to see it. It has tons of information on just about anything, it's something of a nightmare as it has way too much info, and the search facilities sucks, but it is really endless. After reading stuff in there, I'm not surprised about anything anymore, sadly...don't go there if you like it where you are now. I wouldn't return there. Sometimes life IS better IN the matrix.