thrwaway1985882
Joined 2 years ago
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Member since
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Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Anybody can sue anybody, and this someone in your example would likely have standing, so why not?
A single person self representing against a company that is essentially one of the largest law firms on the planet, and can outspend them tens of thousands times over - what's to be gained?
Comment · 1 year ago
I'm bearish on introducing noise[0] to resist traffic analysis, and I'm exceptionally bearish when the only layer managing noise injection is "a for-profit entity that can be legally compelled to do things"
But every layer helps; I'd feel more than happy torrenting over Mullvad alone, and I'd definitely use it as an additional layer of defense with other tools to keep me private if my threat model needed to consider stronger risks.
Comment · 1 year ago
> That does not mean there aren't serious drawbacks that are more worth pointing out such as why bother with a very complex and noisy backdoor when you can just covertly create enough nodes to do traffic correlation.
Winner winner chicken dinner.
FVEY's annual budget is $1.7bn + $1bn + $122mm (NZ :3) + $4.6bn + $classified billion.
You think those guys can't mount a Sybil attack against https://metrics.torproject.org/ ?!
Comment · 1 year ago
Some of the prior works in this paper[0] address noise in anonymity networks, but in general: you either add noise at the link level which malicious nodes can identify & ignore, or you add noise by injecting fake chaff packets that are dropped somewhere inside the network which are statistically identified when you look at packet density across the network.
This might or might not extend to VPN nodes depending on your threat model - I'd personally assume every single node offered to me by a company in exchange for money is malicious if I was concerned about privacy.
Comment · 1 year ago
Synchronous packet transfer only solves the problem if you build a truly constant rate network. Traffic monitoring works when variances exist; your flow has to be fully homogeneous to provably secure against it. That means in your model your users would need to transmit and receive exactly 96kbps at all times when on net, and your nodes would talk to each other at 1024kbps at all times when on net. Otherwise, consider A->onion1->onion2->B – an attacker could potentially see the flow from onion1->onion2 decrease to 1 PPS sec when A isn't talking, and increase when A is.
Truly constant rate anonymity networks dramatically add resistance to passive traffic analysis, but they move users from a low-latency/high-throughput network to 56k dialup speeds :) Not only does this suck so most people won't use it, but the people who do chose to use it will glow neon bright to adversaries. The use of the system will be a strong indicator that, even if you don't know what the user is doing, the user is doing _something_ interesting.
And even if there was desire, these networks are intrinsically limited in size and scale if they want to maintain constant rate. Herbivore[0] is an interesting proposal in this space - use a DC-net partitioned into smaller cliques to give in-group anonymity but mass participation. And most use chaff packets – A has nothing to send so sends encrypted random data to maintain the constant rate guarantee... I'm trying to find the paper I read that suggests a global passive adversary who goes "hands on" in the network could use a combination of watermarks generated through packet dropping/artificial queues + knowledge of which packets are chaff to build a trace, but I'm struggling. If I do I'll drop it here.
For fun, go check out https://groups.google.com/g/alt.anonymous.messages – this is probably the classic example of a (very) high-latency but very strong anonymizing mix network.
[0] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/herbivore-tr.pd...
Comment · 1 year ago
The threat actor most use to talk about this is a global passive adversary: a threat actor who can see all relevant traffic on the Internet but who can't decrypt or adjust the traffic.
This adversary would have the ability to ingest massive amounts of data and metadata[0] it acquires from tier 1 ISPs all over the country[1] and the world[2]. They'll not see raw HTTP traffic because most everything of interest is encrypted, but can store and capture (time, srcip, srcport, dstip, dstport, bytes).
From there, it's a statistical attack: user A sent 700 kilobytes to a VPN service at time t; at t+epsilon the VPN connected to bad site B and sent 700 kilobytes+epsilon packets. Capture enough packet flows that span the user, the VPN, and the bad site and you can build statistical confidence that user A is interacting with bad site B, even with the presence of a VPN.
This could go other directions too. If bad site B is a Tor hidden site whose admin gets captured by the FBI and turns over access, they'll be unmasking in reverse – I got packets from Tor relay A, which relay sent packets at time-epsilon to it, (...), to the source.
There's very little you can do to fight this kind of adversary. Adding hops and layers (VPN + VPN, Tor, Tor + VPN, etc.) can only make it harder. It's certainly an expensive attack both in terms of time consumption, storage, and it requires massive amounts of data, but if your threat model includes a global passive adversary, game over.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
Comment · 1 year ago
You did it, you posted the meme.
Comment · 1 year ago
I've only recently started using AI, and have discovered my use or rejection of it is predicated on my feelings for the task. This argument of "authenticity" really resonates.
I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose.
On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting that exists solely to provide evidence for compliance reasons, something out of the CIA's sabotage field manual that David Graeber has probably written about. But is now a thirty second exercise in uploading a transcript to ChatGPT, prompting for three evidentiary bulletpoints, and pasting the output in a wiki no human will ever read.
Comment · 1 year ago
Squint enough and you'll see a cellphone consists of two primary chipsets: a main SOC/stack that runs the operating system, and a modem/software stack that pushes cell packets. Power the phone down and you (may) fully shut down the OS/processor; you likely aren't powering down the modem.
Comment · 1 year ago
"Near a user" is also a big assumption. I'm ~200 miles to ORD and ~500 to IAD, but my ISP's peering & upstream arrangements mean Cloudflare serves my traffic 700 miles from DFW.
But, at the same time: Cloudflare isn't going to serve me a cache from Seattle, Manchester, or Tokyo. Pinning down an unknown Signal user to even a rough geographic location is an important bit of metadata that could combine to unmask an individual. Neat attack!
Comment · 1 year ago
The vast majority of underperformers I've managed are people who are less motivated to perform, less technically skilled, not aligned to the team, have different values, etc. Almost always the answer is to keep them around and try to squeeze what value you can get. One engineer I have really values on-call firefighting which is great, except my entire org is aligned around avoiding that. I'm getting value out of him by letting him do the firefighting he likes, but ensuring he drives the postmortem process so we can avoid fires in the future.
At the end of the day, all I care about is getting an acceptable level of output compared to pay from an employee who knows the business and isn't particularly fussy. So I'll try to find the path to get low performers upskilled, find what interests them, or find another role in the company that fits & do some horse trading. Or I'll let them coast and replace them when it's easier for me to hire.
>> hiring is a goddamn mess right now.
> Any insight you can give on why? I know enough from the hirees end, but how's it on the other side?
Someone smarter than me might know the true answer. I've heard three compelling arguments:
* tons of companies were irrationally exuberant and overhired, cut roles, and now we're seeing the impact of those workers looking for new work
* increasing shareholder greed means running a threadbare team and driving the company into the ground is better than staffing appropriately if it means next quarter looks good
* most companies are big dumb herd animals and hey, if the big guys are downsizing, so should we
But even though the market is saturated, profitability is now king, so if I'm going to hire someone I need to have a compelling answer to finance saying "how does this new role guarantee us ROI?"
All I really know and can see is the knock-on effect: I posted the same role in 2022 and last month. In 2022, I had to recruit like crazy, to the point that I had external vendors placing below-average employees at above-average salaries. Last month I had the pleasure of sifting through 700 applications, and plenty were "pass: overqualified, won't stick around".
So it seems there are tons of people out there competing for fewer roles.
Comment · 1 year ago
> However, deliberately keeping low performers around as a buffer becomes a self-own on a longer time horizon. Smart managers will negotiate hiring exceptions to replace a low performer now rather than keep that headcount occupied for safety.
This is a "the times are good" play, and it can absolutely work. But the real trick is understanding
> Once a company institutes a hiring freeze
that if you as a manager are reacting here, the die is already cast. There are plenty of unofficial "we're frozen but aren't saying it out loud" moves I & peers in other companies are seeing right now: downleveling, additional approval gates added to slow things down to a more favorable time, you name it.
Yes, over a long enough time horizon ballast will weigh down the boat, but theta is on my side right now.
Comment · 1 year ago
This is a great point. Toxicity is entirely orthogonal to performance. And you rarely have to worry about toxic low performers: if you're unlucky enough to hire them, they don't stay around for long.
But toxic top performers are IME one of the biggest challenges a manager will have to deal with. You have to root them out the moment they land in an organization because given enough they'll push out the non-toxic top performers, leaving you with a toxic asshole and a bunch of flunkies. And you have to convince everyone outside the team that yes, they get things done, but they're enough of an asshole that you'd rather risk hiring someone to deliver less but also destroy less.
All this reminds me of the quote attributed to everyone under the sun (Clausewitz, various US civil war generals, Omar Bradley, you name 'em) but apparently was said by Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord[0]
> There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.
Turns out this problem is quite old, indeed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...
As long as the fully loaded ongoing cost of remote workers is lower than the fully loaded cost of in-person workers, you'll still come out ahead to send people an airplane ticket, hotel room, and meals. And long term I fully expect remote hiring/identity validation as a service companies to emerge.