[liberationtech] An interesting anonymous chat project: Invisible.im

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On 07/11/2014 02:15 PM, carlo von lynX wrote:

[...]

> Using ratchets to authenticate at the current point in time without 
> needing an "absolute" identity (the thing about OTR being used in an 
> ephemeral way) is how Briar does it. It makes it harder to reconstruct 
> the social graph as you need to break into both sides of a 
> communication. If you then periodically inform everyone of a new 
> .onion you are about to use, then you make it harder to link a .onion 
> to a person, but you risk losing people if you can't be sure everyone 
> got that address change - and the more friends you have, the lesser 
> that works as a form of social graph protection really.

Well, that last part is a general axiom.  If I push an update to 300 
people on Monday about my skydiving addiction, no amount of briars can 
keep an unregulated insurance industry from adjusting my rates on 
Tuesday.  (At least without also restricting all the other features 
which make a social network more useful than email.)

It only takes one of the 300 recipients to have some ill-considered 
software/os/device settings to defeat the "privacy".

-Jonathan