[liberationtech] Privacy, data protection questions

[Brian Conley]

Rich,

Mostly I'm taking issue with your nonconstructive demeanor. I've not seen
you take the Guardian Project to task for trying to solve some of the same
problems. I've not seen you take Tor project or Whisper Systems to task.
You have essentially shat on someone's head who is taking a risk by being
open and asking for feedback.

As this is a LIST that numerous people have mentioned is beneficial to them
as a "place for discussion" one might expect common courtesy to prevail. I
know that is not the general tendency on the internet, where trolls abound.

Perhaps we could all try to be a bit less trollish, and perhaps more
"gnomish."  I would present Steve Weis' critical, yet cordial response to
Crypho on another thread as a good example:

"Hi Yiorgis. The "ways of asserting the authenticity of served
[JavaScript]" always reduce to trusted code executing on the client. You
need to trust whatever is authenticating the served application. You can't
get around it.

This approach always ends up with either trusting the service or running
client-side code. The former is a perfectly fine business model and the
standard for almost all web apps, but you can't make the claim that "the
government and our staff cannot access your data". It's simply not true,
and not just because there might be incidental bugs you're working on
fixing. It's fundamentally untrue.

I appreciate the challenge you are trying to tackle and understand that
delivering client-side code across all browsers and platforms is a
non-starter for an early startup. If it were an easy problem, we wouldn't
be having this discussion. I wish you luck in solving it."

Regards,

Brian

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 5:52 AM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk at gsp.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 04:29:38PM -0700, Brian Conley wrote:
> > Nose to the grindstone Andrew. Use Rich's email to remind you this is
> hard,
> > but its still worth doing.
>
> I've read this multiple times and I still have no idea how your remarks
> relate to what I wrote in re the (in)security of smartphones, the
> resulting pervasive malware epidemic and the subsequent serious
> architectural problems for application developers, including but not
> limited to this one.  ("serious architectural problems" == "you're
> building on enemy territory, this probably won't end well")
>
> Neither coffee nor scotch (both applied liberally) have yielded any
> enlightenment, so I must now ask: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over?
>
> ---rsk
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-- 



Brian Conley

Director, Small World News

http://smallworldnews.tv

m: 646.285.2046

Skype: brianjoelconley
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