[HN Gopher] Alt.Anonymous.Messages Newsgroup
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Alt.Anonymous.Messages Newsgroup
Author : yamrzou
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-02-12 07:32 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wudewasa.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wudewasa.blogspot.com)
| fdomingues wrote:
| Some time ago I created a chat that uses the same principles,
| it's funny to have some ideas validated by something that has
| been around for over 20 years and that I didn't know existed.
|
| https://github.com/domingues/vortex/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think over 30 years. UseNet is _old_.
| icepat wrote:
| UseNet is "mature technology"
| GJim wrote:
| Over 40 more like. USENET was quite mature in the early
| 1980's.
|
| Indecently, the decline in the popularity of USENET makes it
| much less useful for anonymous messages; it's much easier to
| conduct traffic analysis amongst relatively few users/nodes
| [1] than it was back in the mid-to-late 1990's when USENET
| was at its peak and every ISP provided a feed. These days you
| will stand out if you have (or request) a USENET feed. Back
| then, it was the norm to have one.
|
| [1] Yes, traffic volumes have increased (primarily due to
| sharing binaries rather than text), but the number of active
| users/nodes has certainly declined.
| joezydeco wrote:
| "Increased" is an understatement. If you want to host a
| USENET node now you're looking at nearly 500 TiB a _day_.
| Who the hell wants to handle that?
|
| https://www.newsdemon.com/usenet-newsgroup-feed-size
| GJim wrote:
| > Who the hell wants to handle that?
|
| Those flying the Jolly Rodger. Filter out the binary
| newsgroups (leaving only the text discussion groups) and
| the resulting load is a tiny fraction of that.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I was talking more about the incoming firehose and
| bandwidth needed. Can you filter binary groups out at the
| router level?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| If you control the Usenet servers then you control what
| gets synchronized to your servers. If you filter out the
| binary groups they will never traverse your network
| connections to your servers.
| Tomte wrote:
| You agreed with your peering partners what to send.
|
| See also https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/docs-2
| .7/newsfeeds...
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| usenet was the old way of doing things when i got my first PC
| in 1996. people were impressed that a 11 year old cared
| enough to find them.
| arcade79 wrote:
| It's a bit scary how much of what we "took as granted" in the
| 90s somehow "got lost and forgotten" by most people between
| about 2005 and 2020.
|
| /oldfart
| joezydeco wrote:
| Because your mom and your grandma went and got Facebook
| accounts, since it was easier to share baby photos that way.
| And then everyone just used that to chat with mom and we
| neglected the old systems.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| There is an implicit assumption that average mom and
| grandma were out there using message groups. Either that or
| you are gate keeping moms and grandmas out of the internet.
| I am going to assume the former.
|
| Myspace proved social networking worked. Facebook made it
| easy for non-techies and kicked off the status game.
| Instagram locked in the dopamine loop. TikTok perfected it.
|
| The internet grew because it got commercialized, which also
| meant dumbing it down for non-technical people. Funny how
| that same growth created most of the wealth enjoyed by
| people posting on YC. Always makes me chuckle when I see
| good old days of the internet nostalgia here.
| joezydeco wrote:
| _Facebook made it easy for non-techies and kicked off the
| status game._
|
| That's all I was trying to say. trn was a bit of a
| learning curve for moms and grandmas. And they pulled the
| rest of us along into using Facebook and other social
| media and leaving USENET behind. No gatekeeping or
| whatever you're going on about here.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _It 's a bit scary how much of what we "took as granted" in
| the 90s somehow "got lost and forgotten" by most people
| between about 2005 and 2020._
|
| This is true of a lot of tech dating back to the mainframe
| days.
| exikyut wrote:
| (2017)
| SilentM68 wrote:
| No Linux version available? :(
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would like to see something like this that can scale to 100B+
| messages per day (ie. A world scale messaging app), whilst still
| not revealing who is talking to who.
|
| Clearly the 'send all messages to everyone' approach cannot.
|
| But I wonder if there is an approach that can, with the added
| complexity that the users use mobile devices and care about
| battery life and bandwidth usage.
|
| I suspect there is not a design that can still provide anonymity
| against an attacker who can see all network traffic, but if there
| is, I'd like to know about it!
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| We can call it FidoNet.
| yamrzou wrote:
| So like Monero but for messages?
| grugq wrote:
| There has been some research done on this particular anonymous
| newsgroup.
|
| "Deanonymising alt anonymous messages"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5JBMyxvuH8
|
| The accompanying blog post is here:
|
| https://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
|
| The inherent security of the technique is actually quite strong.
| The tooling is terrible and many other problems exist with AAM,
| but in general the idea of having a shared "inbox" is good for
| anonymity. There is no way to tell which message is intended for
| whom. Receiving messages is unlinked, which is obviously good for
| anonymity. Sending requires a different set of technologies to
| ensure that the message delivery is unlinked. Tor solves part of
| this problem.
|
| AAM had serious limitations. Things fall down a bit with the
| underlying technology for newsgroups and PGP and so on not being
| designed for anonymity, "fail closed" security, or ease of use
| (and difficulty of misuse).
|
| A bespoke system could work, but the limiting factor is selecting
| an "inbox" that is widely distributed and heavily used (the
| anonymity is directly correlated to how many people access the
| inbox/inbox container.)
|
| # Case Study: YardBird's group (mostly) escapes arrest
|
| A similar method for secrecy was used by a CSAM group. It was
| penetrated by the police when they arrested a member who turned
| informant to reduce his sentence. The police monitored the group
| from inside for months (I remember it being over a year). Despite
| having complete access to all the communications _and_ technical
| surveillance data _and_ international cooperation between police
| forces, the majority of the group evaded arrest.
|
| There was a set of operating rules that the group followed and
| everyone who did so escaped the net. I wrote about it in 2013 if
| anyone is interested in digging deeper into the story.
|
| https://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/12/01/yardbirds-effective-...
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(page generated 2025-02-14 23:01 UTC)