I know it is dead, because I have tried to do it, and I can assure you it is
dead.Text is easy of course I can still blast a simple email out to a mailing
list, I can lay my claims out in 7bit ASCII and let the world judge the merits
solely on this simple medium.But media publishing a story with supporting
images, scans, video or audio it is dead, left only to the elites. And perhaps
worst of all is the promise made by all of you that if you just.... try a
little harder, if you just use this service over here, if you just think about
it another way that it is still possible.It is not.Some time ago as an
experiment I began the process to publish material fully anonymously no
compromises.I obtained a prepaid line of credit, paid in cash, verified with a
prepaid telephone, also paid in cash, and only turned on in an ambiguous
physical location.And I set about to find a Virtual Private Server I could run
a Tor Hidden Service on.My requirements throughout all of this were si
mple: use Tor for everything, pay cash or cashequivalent for everything, leave
no account on a service run by a US/UK/AUS/NZ/CA company, have the VPS hosted
outside the same, pay a reasonable sum.I needed an email of course.Nymservers
like http://isnotmy.name/ or http://mixnym.net should have been the solution
but of course they didn't work.No amount of guesswork or trial and error got me
a nym.Free webmail became the next goal.The more trustworthy (gmail), the less
satisfactorily anonymous it was.The easier it was to register (in.com) the
less trustworthy it was deemed.After signing up for a lowtrust but easytoget
email, I narrowed down my hosting options to a group of VPS in the price range,
hosted outside the 'bad' countries, and whose company itself was also
outside.There aren't a lot.The next problem became finding a VPS I could pay
for.You see, most VPS sellers are small resellers and don't process their own
credit cards they outsource it to a payment processor, usu
ally Paypal. Paypal doesn't work.Paypal or AlertPay too stringent
verification; Liberty Reserve blocks Tor; CashU no easily found online
merchant able to convert from a prepaid Credit Card; one after another all
online payment methods fell by the wayside.You might think 'Bitcoin'.You would
be wrong.No bitcoin service accepts any anonymous funding source most only
accept bank transfers.Apparently people performed chargebacks on credit cards
to defraud the merchants.I can't blame them for this, but it certainly kills
the idea of 'anonymity'.And I don't trust the blockchain to provide
anonymity.After finding one of three or four VPS' I thought I could pay for, I
encountered the next obstacle: MaxMind.MaxMind is a fraud detector built into
WHMCompleteSolution which in turn is the VPS management tool used by every
budget VPS.I set off every detector it had: proxy software, low trust email
account, strange addresses, no valid phone number, etc etc.When I inquired to
one compan
y about this, I was laughed off.Even though I was willing to let them charge
my card and sit on it for a month before providing service no such luck.At
this point, I needed to find a company large enough they processed their own
credit cards, didn't block Tor, and didn't use fraud detectors.I found one, a
competitor to Amazon EC2, that I thought I could fall through the cracks of.It
didn't like my low trust email address, but after enough searching, I found an
ISP I could get an account on without paying.After getting that, creating and
verifying an account, and finally set up to make my payment... the prepaid card
is declined.There's no explanation, it just didn't work.I thought at this
point, perhaps there was a service that could be used.There was an announcement
recently: http://karelbilek.com/anontorrent/ Supposedly this guy will seed
anything until it has 20 seeders of its own.Except the file limit is 50MB.And
you can't upload copyrighted material.How about any of the
muchacclaimed 'leak sites' that spun up after Wikileaks shuttered their wiki
and submission system?Well, I went through all of these:
leakdirectory.org/index.php/LeakSiteDirectory and all of them seemed to be
either wannabes who had never published a thing or news organizations who were
security illiterate and had no way to accept content.Anonymous Publishing Is
Dead.You may seek to respond with the 'right way' to do it, the company you
know will let me fall through the cracks, the trick you use to whitelie your
way through the process.Don't bother.If there is a way through, and I'm not
convinced there is, it is so difficult to find that a technically unsavvy user
would never be able to; and even technically savvy users like myself who
understand all the tricks of firewalling off my machine so nothing but Tor
escapes are groping blindly for it, unlikely to find it.What can be done about
this?What compromises are 'safe'?Is a Hidden Service sufficiently trustworthy
to host
any material, and have it stand up to investigation when the server running it
is in your name?Is the correct approach not to publish anonymously at all, as
cryptome.org does?Should we rely on the Streisand effect, bittorrent,
newsgroups, something else?These are mostly rhetorical questions.My purpose in
this email is to tell you that anonymous publishing is an unsolved problem.Any
solution available today is not robust: it falls down in some situation:
content, capacity, anonymity, or something else.What can be done about it? What
will be done about it?Dear tortalk! Get Yourself a cool, short @in.com Email ID
now!
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