Silk Road forums

Tor doesn't require root, but the transparent proxy stuff does (to the best of my knowledge).  So basically the tor app runs exactly like it does on your PC, and your browser uses it exactly like on your PC too.  By way of analogy, Tails would require root permissions because it fucks with the kernel NAT stuff.  Er, that's ambiguous... not in a hacking way, in a "uses as designed," way.

Ah yeah, that's what it was. In cases where the app doesn't have configurable proxy settings, you'd have to transproxy the connections by running Tor as root. So I wonder if Red Phone has configurable proxy settings.

Tor I'm pretty sure is too slow/laggy for voice. I don't even think Jondonym mixmaster would work with RTP packets fast enough to not just hear echoing static.

People have had success with Mumble servers. The main issue seems to be the lag between each person speaking, so they recommend using control words ("Roger, over").

Take a look at

https://guardianproject.info/2013/01/31/anonymous-cb-radio-with-mumble-and-tor/

I've also heard some chatter about running Jitsi over Tor. It shouldn't be much worse than the few seconds delays you see when someone is being interviewed by satellite from a remote location.

I think it's an acceptable trade off for the privacy that Tor provides, compared to routing your communications through open clearnet infrastructure.

I wouldn't root your phone either, if in the future it might be seized. You can bypass encryption, unlock screens and a whole bunch of evil with a rooted phone. Check out secdroid on XDA developers it's a pretty good replacement for standard carrier installs

As opposed to the LE backdoors that they will download to your unrooted phone?

It's probably better to use the regular Redphone app though and not your own server and private app to connect to it.

The TURN servers are just relaying encrypted RTP packets from one device to another, and the more you get lost in a bunch of other Redphone traffic the better so they can't prove you talked to somebody.

Depends. If your phone is rooted and you run your own app over Tor, they may not be able to tell that you are communicating with anyone at all.

I don't have a need for it, personally, but the more services we run in onionland, the more people will use Tor.

Nice. I'll be making a hidden service for it.

There is the danger of too much centralization over time with the bitcoin miners if the bar for mining gets too steep. Ideally every bitcoin client should double up as a lightweight miner or something. Realistically today if you are doing bitcoin mining and you don't have ASIC or better mining equipment then you're not in the game. One problem is that there is only three or four ASIC producers, which makes a bottleneck the government could control in theory. Having one dominant mining pool probably would be a bad idea as well, although I'm less clear on what effects that would practically have so long as they were profit oriented, higher transaction fees? In any case any centralization leads to the chances of a malicious actor like the FBI taking over becoming higher, that much is certain.

Ironically, Litecoin would be much easier to control since it takes less hashing power overall. The government can run 10,000 regular CPUs, if they can run a bunch of ASICs.

One guy 51 percent-ed Feathercoin and stole 40K FTC. These smaller currencies are much more vulnerable to attack than Bitcoin.

The other issue is, if you make a million alternate cryptocurrencies, you dilute the value of all of them. These coins are only valuable if they are limited.

I know it seems like a minor tweak to the bitcoin concept, but nearly all technical innovations are evolutionary in this way, or to put it another way, everybody is a copycat if you look closely enough. Bitcoin itself is merely the composite of several different ideas thrown together. What is unique about its creation, is that SN saw the possibility of integrating them, not the ideas themselves, which are quite old. Bitcoin is a collage, not a creation.

Bitcoin slapped together existing ideas, like public key crypto for addressing and hashing for proof of work, but it did so in a way that nobody had done before. Litecoin is just a tweak in comparison. Zerocoin is a truly innovative idea that adds zero knowledge proof-based anonymity to Bitcoin.

Keep in mind that if the product costs $155, the commission isn't 6%.  It's

$50   * 0.1     = $5
$100 * 0.085 = $8.50
$5     * 0.06   = $0.30

For a total of $13.80, which would be 8.9% in this case.

Yeah, I heard a long time ago that carriers can push hidden apps to your phone, which will record sound and video, and continue to work even when the phone is turned off. Only way to protect against it is to root your phone or take the battery out.