Advanced Worm Operations Leveraging (AWOL)

Advanced Worm Operations Leveraging (AWOL) would be the use of robust worms, ideally utilizing deep system insecurities (to lay underneath GRUB or higher-level operating system control), in a coordinated effort to force traffic through specific networks and hold systems hostage (large-scale multi-level ransomware). If you had worm ransomware spreading decently fast, you could use it to force all infected nodes to route their traffic through the ZeroNet or TOR networks for example. The large increase of nodes would also scale network processing and make the network considerably faster. You could then install a robust GUI-based program (with decent UI) on all infected systems that serves as a tutorial for how to un-entrench yourself from the gilded cage you were used to before you had access to free (decen+dist+unperm) systems, this would train normal people to use their new system. The infected system would also brick itself if you tried to remove the worm, making it a, "Freedom or death," worm. My only question is that with the advanced deep-system exploits intel agencies have, why they haven't done this already (they probably have for surveillance software but nothing else)? What do you guys think of this idea? Should I pursue this and write a formal paper on it? Archive of this outline on clearnet: https://privatebin.net/?b27efae48a9f6eca#kPYDwNleflytLIcHq9pfoLufvqLgRV3nsg+uYEOHAoI=

>he infected system would also brick itself if you tried to remove the worm, making it a, "Freedom or death," worm. they would more than likely buy a new system considering the fact that most people buy, (or pay someone else) for the ransomware keys. >My only question is that with the advanced deep-system exploits intel agencies have, why they haven't done this already (they probably have for surveillance software but nothing else)? In intelligence agencies, you want the most bang for your buck, building a super advance malware like that isn't needed when you need small specific intel. I might see Russia, or Korea where they have crime divisions in their intel groups for profit. It is more likely that they would have something like responder inside the network, grap passwords and take the emails and keylog. >What do you guys think of this idea? Should I pursue this and write a formal paper on it? Of course, it seems like an interesting topic!

>>7907 Thanks for feedback. I should clarify what I mean by ransomware - I am not looking at this as a way to extort people or demand an actual ransom; I mean ransom in the idea that the people themselves are the ransom. We are holding their network itself hostage - if the users refuse to turn themselves over (the user is the payment) to free systems, their network is bricked (not just the particular device, but every node on their network). I will think of a less convoluted way to word this if I write the paper. Many people do buy new computers when there is generic ransomware, however they tend to do this because generic ransomware makes their computer unusable (or significantly less featured). My proposed worm would change nothing about the usability of the computer; it would only make the network traffic route through ZN (probably not TOR because TOR can be arbitrarily de-anonymized and it's majority funded by the CIA and the exit-nodes are majority owned by the NSA). There would be a notable decrease in network speeds at first, but the more nodes you add to ZN, the faster the network gets. An alternative would be to have the traffic routed through Mysterium (a decen+dist vpn service) so they still have regular clearnet speeds but at least all their traffic is end-to-end encrypted and anonymized. Another potential network alternative could be a homebrewed decen+dist ZK vpn-like service that allows clearnet traffic at equivalent speeds. There will be a slight haircut on the speed no matter what, so I'm very open to suggestions on this. I'm also an idiot and this is a half-baked idea with no actual research done on it yet (on my part). My same post on ZeroTalk was replied to with this article - https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/07/26/meet-rakshasa-the-malware-infection-designed-to-be-undetectable-and-incurable/ As for the intelligence agencies, I don't mean to say they would use this to monitor people. I'm asking why someone with the means to do this (like the intel community) hasn't already done this to bootstrap the population with software that they believed would propel it in a beneficial direction (being somewhat facetious here, I know why intel community doesn't want network privacy). But imagine being able to infect even 10% of the consumer market (which the intel community can do lol) and arbitrarily re-direct their traffic through the TOR network overnight. Parabolic network expansion of TOR with more than 100x its node count overnight. Or imagine being able to give everyone a Monero (or equivalent dark currency) address overnight and have society leapfrog into a post-bank future. This may seem farfetched (since most people would not be willing to learn a new system), but the point is you could arbitrarily bootstrap a large percentage of all devices on the planet with whatever software you wanted overnight. This is /power/, and aside from obvious reasons of the difficulty of creating deep-system worms, some already exist so I'm confused why this hasn't been used switch the population off of centralized, trust-based, privacy-raping systems and into better options with a permanent boost to those better options.

People don't care about unentrenching. You just make their life harder and next time they hear about 'privacy' or 'freedom' they think 'oh yeah like that asshole who broke my computer' You can't force someone to be free, you can only tell them about it. >TOR can be arbitrarily de-anonymized and it's majority funded by the CIA and the exit-nodes are majority owned by the NSA Did they come to your house and tell you this? Why did they complain about Tor in their secret documents if they can de-anonymize? Why do they need to run exit nodes if they are downloading the whole internet already?

>>7906 >Should I pursue this and write a formal paper on it? The last one who did this.

>>7910 It explicitly says the functionality of their computer would not change. Nothing 'breaks'. Known vulnerabilities preclude a system from being 'secure'. This - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3qnj/how-the-nsa-or-anyone-else-can-crack-tors-anonymity And this - https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-02/tor-project-almost-100-funded-us-government-report >>7913 I'm not sure you're adding anything useful to the discussion.

>>7916 >I'm not sure you're adding anything useful to the discussion. Try learning something about a topic before running your mouth about it. If you even read the link you posted you would know it's Tor not TOR. >Known vulnerabilities preclude a system from being 'secure'. What "vulnerabilities" are these? Don't just link a 5 year old article you obviously didn't read. Elaborate. >The Tor Project - a private nonprofit known as the "NSA-proof" gateway to the "dark web," >"NSA-proof" Who are you quoting? > turns out to be almost "100% funded by the US government" AND? The US government sponsors Tor because they actually use it. Case closed.

>>7923 Why are we not allowed to capitalize acronyms? This seems like an incredibly petty point to use to dismiss someone else's proposed framework. Do you have anger issues in other areas of your life as well? Therapy shouldn't be dismissed for similarly petty reasons; I wouldn't think less of you if you started seeing a therapist to work on your combative posturing that clearly affects your relations in life. Just looking out for you man. As for the CIA funding - I'm not sure why you want to play this dangerous game of, "yea it's the network all the spooks use, which means I'm way more likely to encounter a spook there, this is why it's safer from spooks!" Sure you will find agents trying to monitor activity on every network, but I'm not sure why it is safer to use /their/ network. This seems overtly counter-intuitive, not that we need to play the game of saving intuitions either, but I don't see the benefit of relaying all your traffic through a network operated by surveillance companies. Even if they cannot in principle surveil you through their network, I'm not sure the /principles are good in themselves/. In the words of autist-god, "My conscience tells me that, if I had agreed to such a contract, the lesser evil would be to defy it and share copies anyway; however, to be entirely good, I should not agree to it in the first place." I do not agree to surveillance-funded networks in the first place.

>>7916 >It explicitly says the functionality of their computer would not change. Nothing 'breaks'. >>7906 >The infected system would also brick itself if you tried to remove the worm, making it a, "Freedom or death," worm. >https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3qnj/how-the-nsa-or-anyone-else-can-crack-tors-anonymity >He set up a fake server and a fake website on the deep web, from which the victim has to download a large file. Embedded in this file is code Stopped reading there. >https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-02/tor-project-almost-100-funded-us-government-report >In a recent blog post The data in that post is 4 years old. Probably older, given how long FOIA requests can take. https://www.zdnet.com/article/half-of-the-tor-projects-funding-now-comes-from-the-private-sector/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/11/tor-lessens-reliance-us-grants/ >Cybersecurity experts have noted for years that while Tor may be technically anonymous in theory - the 'exit nodes' where traffic leaves the secure "onion" protocol and is decrypted can be established by anyone - including government agencies. >Anyone running an exit node can read the traffic passing through it. This is a complete misunderstanding of Tor and SSL. >>7924 >"yea it's the network all the spooks use, which means I'm way more likely to encounter a spook there, this is why it's safer from spooks!" It's a network protocol, not a dinner party. >I'm not sure why it is safer to use /their/ network If they can break Tor, then you're being watched just like you would be on the clearnet. If they can't break Tor, then your browsing is private. There's no reason not to use Tor. >surveillance-funded Tax-funded. What does this even mean? If the principles bother you, you can think of Tor as punching the government in the face with its own money.

>>7924 >This seems like an incredibly petty point If you actually read the Tor specs or code or participated in the mailing lists or had any contact at all with anyone involved with the project then you would know how to spell it. Doing literally zero research like this is ridiculous. >Do you have anger issues in other areas of your life as well? Read the rules. >I'm not sure why you want to play this dangerous game of... No one cares about your ignorant opinions. You said Tor has "Known vulnerabilities" and "can be arbitrarily de-anonymized and the exit-nodes are majority owned by the NSA". Prove it. >I do not agree to surveillance-funded networks in the first place. The reason the CIA funds Tor is because they are a humint agency. Their job is to recruit spies behind enemy lines and relay information from person to person. A free, public anonymity network used by random people is an essential tool for getting information out of restricted spaces without raising suspicion or getting caught. It's not rocket science.

I apologize for the wall of text but I think I addressed everything (I probably still missed stuff from earlier). To make clear from the start, I'm aware that many of the known vulnerabilities for TOR are several years old and have been patched out, but that doesn't mean it's been a bullet-proof system and my primary resistance is to the dogmatism around it. >>7925 Bricking and breaking are different words and mean different things. The worm wouldn't break anything unless the user wanted to remove the worm, but of course removing the worm would be to break the new functionality the worm gave the user, so the user is the only one choosing to break anything on their system. I should also clarify that I am much more concerned with the principle issues here, not the practical ones, so I don't see why we would worry about trying to break systems anyways. I am explicitly looking to /fix/ broken systems with this worm; the refusal of which just makes sure the user is willing to be consistent and bite the bullet when they reject freedom. If we wanted to be Stallman-compliant we could even make the worm prompt the user for the replacement network of their choice, allowing for many options instead of forcing one. Whatever, it's arbitrary, the point was whether this is a valid method for sublimating a system or not, not whether one particular network is best (although this seems to be the focus now). >Stopped reading there. Why did you stop reading? An exploit is an exploit. Even sec devs fall for basic engineering tricks fairly regularly. People download large files on hidden services all the time, and you could use the same method in that article on a smaller scale with similar results (it's about 30% less reliable from my own usage but this number goes up the longer a user keeps the site open). >The data in that post is 4 years old. Probably older, given how long FOIA requests can take. This is a good point and while I knew the funding portions had shifted a little, I wasn't aware it was by this much. I'm pretty convinced the decline in funding of TOR by the intelligence community is because they've started diverting funds to alternative networks since there are more efficient network protocols that maintain anonymity now. Conversely, the increase in funding from civilian orgs I suspect is due to the typical corporate lag in cutting-edge security trends. TOR is relatively old in this space and makes for a tried and true means of anonymizing data transmission, good for corporate money. This is mostly speculative, but in either case I don't understand the dogmatic adherence to the TOR network when there are valid alternatives now, alternatives that show more promise in long-term scalability and privacy features (TOR isn't even a decen+dist network, this makes it ancient tech imo). >This is a complete misunderstanding of Tor and SSL. Yea, writers of tech articles tend to be terrible at understanding the tech they write about, but we all already know this, so after the verbal conniption we can still see what is meant and how exploits may be possible by controlling exit nodes. If you believe that no exploits are possible at all in this manner then you've described a principally secure system with no practical exploits. Impressive. But to place a limit on thought is to think both sides of the limit and I think believing in systems /that/ strongly may be deleterious. Even if TOR is principally secure, there are other principally secure systems that, again, offer more privacy features and potential scalability (ZN, I2P, Beaker, some other IPFS implementations, and so on), and while these have their own problems, I still don't understand the dogmatism behind TOR. >It's a network protocol, not a dinner party. True, but it was hyperbole. I just don't understand the defending of the surveillance community going on here lol. Why is the NSA approved™© network the ideal one? I mean how sure are you guys that this is /thee/ network we really want to back for use in the worm here? >If they can't break Tor, then your browsing is private. There's no reason not to use Tor. What if they can't break a dozen other network protocols? Why are all the other options not meaningful for the discussion here? I'm pretty sure the worm routing traffic through ZeroNet would be the best option, ZN even allows you to route all your traffic through TOR as an additional layer of protection, so surely ZN is a fair option here, no? >Tax-funded... If the principles bother you, you can think of Tor as punching the government in the face with its own money. It's interesting to see how privilege plays into people's perceptions of privacy. Not everyone is American and pays protection money to your mob state like you do. Nota bene, I'm not upset that the CIA funds some random project, the CIA has funded plenty of good and useful things, I'm just not sure a network that /needs/ funding to stay alive is a principally secure network anymore. Decentralized+distributed systems exist now and can self-propel without any external funding needed past their primary instantiations. I'm not principally opposed to TOR for taking CIA money, but rather for needing to take money at all; this is a huge issue that I think was only possible to solve in the last seven or so years, long after TOR existed. So it's not TOR's fault, but TOR is now a kind of legacy system imo. >>7927 Why am I not allowed to capitalize acronyms again? Maybe instead of reading TOR docs you should read books on proper uses of English. Singling this point out as a means to get hyper-defensive about TOR and sideline the rest of the conversation makes it seem like you were looking to argue about something arbitrary ab initio, or maybe you're having a bad day and just needed to vent to nerds online, I don't know, but you've been staring at ones and zeros for too long homie. Take a walk and get some fresh air. As for the reasons why intelligence agencies would fund an anonymous network, I totally understand and agree. I still don't see why the network the feds use is the best network of all anonymous networks. There are a lot of alternatives in this space now, and some of them haven't been primarily funded by CIA drug money. :)

>>7931 >I'm aware that many of the known vulnerabilities for TOR are several years old Again, what are these "vulnerabilities"? Do you even know? >my primary resistance is to the dogmatism around it. Asking you to elaborate and not just spill the soykaf is not "dogmatism". To be honest I'm disappointed the mods are supporting such a low quality thread. >An exploit is an exploit. From the very beginning Tor made it clear that a global passive adversary is not part of the threat model so stop making soykaf up. >A global passive adversary is the most commonly assumed threat when analyzing theoretical anonymity designs. But like all practical low-latency systems, Tor does not protect against such a strong adversary. https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-design.html >Yea, writers of tech articles tend to be terrible at understanding the tech they write about, but we all already know this, Why do you use their articles as evidence with no comment or elaboration then? because you don't have a clue either

>>7932 >Again, what are these "vulnerabilities"? Do you even know? I feel bad just linking you to wikipedia, but how much have /you/ read? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Weaknesses >Asking you to elaborate and not just spill the soykaf is not "dogmatism". The pathological desire to see a defense of a particular idea but not others is pretty telling. You immediately jumped on the TOR stuff but not any of the other claims here (of which were even more careless than anything said about TOR). This is pretty typical from TOR advocates; it's overtly dogmatic. >From the very beginning Tor made it clear that a global passive adversary is not part of the threat model so stop making soykaf up. You're very confused. No on ever claimed TOR was designed to defend from a global passive adversary, I do however believe that a global passive adversary should be considered when sublimating the population into secure/private software. So how about you stop subverting the discussion with misdirection and strawmen? Dismissing insecurity because the project itself said it wasn't supposed to be totally secure doesn't make for a good defense of why this is the ideal secure system (and the only interesting thing we could talk about here is what the ideal secure system is, not why TOR works in some now-limited notion of security/privacy). >Why do you use their articles as evidence with no comment or elaboration then? Because most people can directly abstract without explication to do so. Go outside. >To be honest I'm disappointed the mods are supporting such a low quality thread. This thread wasn't about TOR, stop trying to make it about TOR. You're the one that made it such a 'low quality thread', although I'm not convinced you know what quality means, nor that quality really matters on this gay pride forum. The original post was just open questions on deep-system worms, not anything else. Will probably ignore TOR comments now, for sake of /quality/. If I've done a bad job of directly responding to you or giving details, your complete disregard of the properties maintained by the English language is at the very least a fair matching of my failures, making you no better, and at the very most a clear indication that you aren't taking this in good faith and only came here to argue about an arbitrary side point. So let's do a hostage exchange lol, prove to me that it's not proper to capitalize the acronym for The Onion Router and I'll address whatever you want in return. But I want my hostage, failure to capitulate on your part will result in the same on mine.

>>7933 Tor is at least good enough that major crime syndicates are able to avoid being caught by the feds after years of constant use, and probably good enough that real-life spooks use it. It is almost never the weak link in the chain of security. to respond to your OP: this is a stupid idea.

>>7933 >I feel bad just linking you to wikipedia, but how much have /you/ read? >weaknesses No. >Known vulnerabilities preclude a system from being 'secure'. What are these "vulnerabilities" in your own words so we can discuss them. >You're very confused. No on ever claimed TOR was designed to defend from a global passive adversary, You didn't even read your own zerohedge link did you?

The hostage exchange failed. Neither of you gave reasons for why I can't capitalize an acronym, but I'm a benevolent god and will respond to your prayers anyways. :) >>7935 >Tor is at least good enough that major crime syndicates are able to avoid being caught by the feds after years of constant use... How do you know this? Give a list of names and addresses as proof if you're serious (joking). >this is a stupid idea. Well if TOR is as good as you say, why don't you think everyone should have that level or privacy? Do you just not believe in an internet where your rights aren't systematically raped? Be particular, what about deep-system worms being used to leverage software adoption is stupid? Do you simply think it's not practical or do you not agree with the principles? >>7936 >What are these "vulnerabilities" in your own words so we can discuss them. Why do they have to be in my own words? I'm not an authority, but neither are you, the difference being that I don't expect you to re-word anything you link. I know you won't like that so I'll play nice - in a very simplified sense, the vulnerabilities as they appear in that list seem to be that IP or specific device identifiers can be attained through various methods of watching the flow of traffic (or bouncing it yourself), de-anonymizing some of the users that connect to or use the network. Further, this appears like it can be done reliably enough that, while trying to target specific individuals is infeasible, mass-targeting is still effective. You can't cast most fish, but if you cast a large enough net, you'll catch some of them (at random depending on the method). As a counter-weight here, I am unaware of similar attacks working on I2P, however I2P's security is not nearly as well researched as TOR's and so I imagine the same or similar attacks may be possible. My reason for saying I probably wouldn't use TOR originally is /because/ it is the tried and true anonymity network. It's one of the oldest and certainly the most well researched network protocols. There seem to be vulnerabilities (as listed on the wiki) that are worth trying to avoid if we want to totally avoid being surveilled. And those are just the published issues; if there are unpublished vulnerabilities for de-anonymizing traffic, then it is far more likely they are for TOR than for other secure/private networks because of how much more adoption there is for the TOR network compared to the rest. Maybe there is no robust exploit at all, which is also just as possible, but to me it's a version of Pascal's Wager at play - we may never know if there is a devastating flaw in a given system, and so it is a far safer bet to believe a flaw exists and the network cannot be trusted tout court. For this reason it seems very obvious to me that layering your security is a very good practice, and with respect to privacy networks, decentralization and distribution are two more layers on top of encryption. TOR wraps packets in layers of encryption (at different network levels too!) which is nice, but the content is still centrally hosted which means that content can (and does) get blap'd when their host servers are seized. If your content can be censored by turning off the power to one dude's basement then that content doesn't seem very secure to me. I know this is a silly reduction but you get my point I hope. So I said ZeroNet would be better because content is /far/ more difficult to censor on that network and further you can arbitrarily route all your ZN traffic through TOR (it's literally a single click on the ZN landing page). This is more layers of protection and is orders of magnitude more secure than TOR on its own. In fact, a ZeroNet + TOR or ZeroNet + I2P pairing seems to solve all potential problems with surveillance and censorship in the general cases I can think of and even solves some of the problems with TOR listed on its wiki article. The Mysterium VPN is also a very big possibility here imo since it is a decen+dist VPN service and treats user traffic similarly to the ZN+TOR combo already mentioned. >You didn't even read your own zerohedge link did you? For all this talk of reading, it might be the case that you struggle more with reading comprehension than I. The point of this thread was not to have discussion about TOR but to have discussion on using deep-system worms to leverage software adoption. The point of the zerohedge article was not to describe TOR as a means to defend from a global passive adversary, but that the majority of its funding (at the time) was from the CIA. I'm not trying to diminish or attack you, I'm just trying to make you aware of what you need to study for if you ever plan on taking the GRE or LSAT. That said, I didn't write the zerohedge article and it was only linked in direct response as 'proof' that the CIA funds TOR. I don't see why you would think anyone (that you are talking to in this thread) would be arguing that TOR was designed to defend from a global passive adversary. To make very explicit here, in anticipation of possible responses, I /do/ believe that the ideal system to implement with the worm should be designed to defend from a global passive adversary. And, again, it may be unfair to force a single option on the users, so the worm may best serve its purpose if it offers many choices to the infected users. Why not discuss /this/ instead? Your continued resistance to discussing the actual thread topic seems odd to me. Here, I'll offer a final olive branch: let's say TOR has no vulnerabilities at all and never will, just for argument's sake. Are you guys willing to forego talk on how secure any particular network is so we can return back to whether or not we should be sublimating large segments of society with security software at all (and whether deep-system worms are a good way to do it)?

>>7937 >Why do they have to be in my own words? Because when people comment on the links you post you are confused because you didn't read them. > the vulnerabilities as they appear in that list seem to be that IP or specific device identifiers can be attained through various methods of watching the flow of traffic (or bouncing it yourself), de-anonymizing some of the users that connect to or use the network. Now read >>7932 again. >I am unaware of similar attacks working on I2P Probably because you don't know anything about I2P either. Since all I2P nodes are also routers, a global passive adversary can log systems simultaneously disconnecting from the internet and leaving the I2P network to correlate identities. That's why the general advice for Tor users to never run an onion site and a relay on the same node. >So I said ZeroNet would be better because content is /far/ more difficult to censor on that network Zeronet is just html over bittorrent. You're essentially broadcasting your browsing history to the world via the DHT (maybe try adding Zeronet to your list of things to learn about before creating a thread like this). When you use Zeronet + Tor it's actually Tor that's providing the anonymity, privacy and censorship resistance. Zeronet doesn't add anything except alleviate the need for a central server. >a ZeroNet + TOR or ZeroNet + I2P pairing seems to solve all potential problems with surveillance and censorship Why don't you add a VPN and 7 proxies while you're at it. Seriously you're not over 18 are you. >Neither of you gave reasons for why I can't capitalize an acronym >>7913 already told you why, it betrays your ignorance. A mature person would have taken the advice and switched to Tor instead of having a tantrum and doubling down on the incorrect usage. Out of all the soykaf in the this thread, that's the only thing the mods deleted? And the personal attacks in >>7924 is completely fine? Don't bother responding I'm giving lainchan /sec/ a break. This thread breaks almost every rule of the site and the only posts to get warned/deleted were mine.

>>7937 >How do you know this? there are vendors who have been actively shipping bulk drugs for 8 years. That is just the stuff I know about. >Do you just not believe in an internet where your rights aren't systematically raped? I think enforcing your ideology on people, and taking over their computers, is much more of a systematic rape of their rights than anything else. >Be particular, what about deep-system worms being used to leverage software adoption is stupid? it would not make anyone sympathetic to the cause, and it would be a waste of a good exploit. I think it is not practical and I also don't agree with the principles.

>>7938 >Zeronet is just html over bittorrent. You're essentially broadcasting your browsing history to the world via the DHT (maybe try adding Zeronet to your list of things to learn about before creating a thread like this). ZeroNet doesn't use DHT, it uses traditional trackers for peer/content discovery specifically so it can integrate with TOR. For how much you tell other people to read you don't seem very well-read. Maybe I'm the idiot and I can't tell that you're just lying about stuff to troll me, so I'm ignoring you unless you prove that it's not proper to capitalize acronyms. I'm re-instating the hostage exchange lol. >I'm giving lainchan /sec/ a break. Probably a good idea! >>7939 >I think enforcing your ideology on people, and taking over their computers, is much more of a systematic rape of their rights than anything else. A good point, which is why I'm not proposing taking anything over or forcing /my/ ideology. No functionality is changed on the end of the user, the only functionality that would be lost is the surveillance functions of those external to your system. And again, lots of options will be given, and they can always choose to deny the worm altogether. Nothing is forced on them, just on their networks, and by passively removing the force on their networks with this worm, the users are allowed a privacy they weren't before. This isn't even my ideology, it's just a way to make sure people are consistent - either they want private networks or they don't, and this ensures the choice is actually followed through with. To be clear, in anticipation of links to older posts than this one, I don't actually think the worm should brick their system, I was being somewhat sensationalist, there's no actual reason to waste that much hardware, but I do believe a prompt for security networks with a button that says, "No thanks, let me be surveilled," would have interesting results. Further, the 'let me wear my chains in peace' button could be supported with additional surveillance software. If the state gets to see everyone's information, then to be consistent, the rest of us should be able to see the same information. So if someone wants to press the 'surveil me daddy' button, the worm can ensure that they do in fact get surveilled. Again, I just want people to be consistent with their worldview here. Either they choose freedom/privacy or they choose to get surveilled. But it would be a choice and the worm would make sure they actually follow through on that choice. >it would not make anyone sympathetic to the cause I don't really think most people sympathize with reason, and people definitely don't like talking for ten plus hours in a single sit-down to really explore all their options when it comes to rights, especially theirs, so instead of trying to reach individuals about these issues, I'm just proposing we bring them their rights, even if they fight it. Imagine being the first one out of the cave and the blindness from the first sunlight you've ever seen wears off and you learn things about the world outside the cave only to go back in and have everyone think you're insane for knowing what the world is actually like. These people like the cave, they don't want to leave it, they don't have the same ambitions or desire for knowledge that you do, and as sequela they don't want rights. Think about having to literally fight people to give them rights lmao. Like the American revolution but for network infrastructure. You have to literally fight people to give them their rights. Neither of you wants to fight, but if rights are meaningful to have, or are important in any kind of way, then you /ought/ to fight for them, no? >and it would be a waste of a good exploit. If you think it's a good exploit then it's hardly a waste. The code would be public of course, so anyone that wanted to bootstrap any software with the worm could modify the code arbitrarily and do whatever they wanted with it. The exploit will be an exploit for everyone, again I don't think we're limiting anyone here but instead providing them with many more options than they had before, including the option to use the worm in any other way they want. The only value-level work I'm trying to do here is to get people to be consistent with their views on rights, and the way to do that seems to be to remove limitations on the main medium of communication that we use to discuss whether or not we even ought to be consistent with our views on rights. This should be considered apodictic at this point, for if the limitations on what we can say are not removed in this manner, then we also no longer maintain any sort of authority in saying we shouldn't follow through with this worm. >I think it is not practical and I also don't agree with the principles. I agree with the practical part, this is highly impractical; I'm seeing whether this /can/ be done more than if it /will/ be done. I suppose I'm also trying to see if it's /good/ to do more than what particular software is good itself. To simplify the last couple of points I tried to make here, it might be said that I don't think we are free to discuss whether freedom is really valuable until the systems we use to discuss it on are free themselves. Man is born free, yet everywhere we find he is in chains. I think that while it may be the desire of man to chain himself, there isn't much we can meaningfully say about it while he is still in them. This is like a pathological form of slave morality, I don't think much mental labor really gets done on those terms. So maybe this is /forcing/ choice on the slaves, but slaves cannot allow themselves choice to begin with; this is why we call them slaves. I don't see any other way to switch a population over to a free/secure/private system without giving them the choice to do so. I also don't believe most people have the capacity to allow the choice themselves since most people don't have enough free time to learn or don't want to learn about this stuff anyways. This is also why I asked why the intelligence community hasn't already attempted something like this - they definitely know this problem exists and a lot of people that work in intel orgs really do want good for the world. So unless we want to just speculate conspiracy where a dozen dudes at the highest end of the pyramid are marionette'ing the intel orgs into /only/ spying on people, it seems like there has been ample opportunity to do the opposite and sublimate networks in the way I've described. This is an empirical issue too, we can investigate and see if there's signs of this being done before, which is partly what I wanted to explore in my original post. Maybe I'm not being direct enough, so I'll say outright that I believe this has in fact been done before, and the list of vulns for the intel chipset for example paired with the inability to disable intel's 'security' features from phoning-home seems like a grounds for fuarrrkery. You can at least disable AMD's Trustzone in the UEFI, and while Trustzone doesn't actually phone-home, it /can/. So in either case, why do you suppose that is? I know this isn't /proof/, but it is /evidence/; this is something we would expect to see in the world if the hypothesis is true that the intelligence community uses deep-system worms to leverage software adoption. If you disagree with me here, then you will probably be a good partner for writing the paper with since you will have an actual counter-position I can address. Do you kind of see what I'm trying to saying with all this or do you just repudiate everything I've said?

Am looking forward to a response from >>7939 about >>7941. If it goes a full week without response, then I'll start writing without exchanging info.

I should've locked this thread already. This is a poor starting topic and the discussion has been bad. >>7938 I regret that you feel this way. I let this thread continue against my better judgment. This thread is locked.