An anonymity layer for JXTA service

Open Access Documen

The ontological revolution: On the phenomenology of the internet

Cogitation described as calculation, the living being described as a machine, cognitive functions considered as algorithmic sequences and the ‘mechanization’ of the subjective were the theoretical elements that late heideggerian anti–humanism, especially in France was able to utilize[1], even more so, after the second cybernetics or post-cybernetics movement of the late ‘60s introduced the concepts of the autopoietic and the allopoietic automata[2]. Recently, neurologists pose claims on the traditional epistemological field of philosophy, proceeding from this ontological decision, the equation of human cognition to cybernetic systems. The emergence of the world-wide-web in the 1990s and the global expansion of the internet during the first decades of the 21st century indicate the fallacies of the cybernetics programme to mechanize the mind. We stand witnesses to a semantic colonization of the cybernetic system, a social imaginary creation and expansion within the digital ensemblistic – identitarian organization that cannot be described by mechanical or cybernetic terms. Paradoxically, cyberspace, as a new being, a form of alterity, seems to both exacerbate and capsize the polarization between the operational and the symbolic. The creation of the internet might be more than an epistemological revolution, to use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn. It might be an ontological revolution. I will try to demonstrate that the emergence of the Internet refutes any such claims, since its context and utility can only be described by means of a social epistemology based on the understanding of social significances as continuous creations of an anonymous social imaginary proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997). I will try to explore some social-semantic aspects of the cyberspace as a nexus of social representations of the individual identity that forms a new sphere of being, where the subjective and the objective merge in a virtual subjective objectivity with unique epistemological attributes and possibilities

"Is Reporting Worth the Sacrifice of Revealing What I Have Sent?": Privacy Considerations When Reporting on End-to-End Encrypted Platforms

User reporting is an essential component of content moderation on many online platforms -- in particular, on end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging platforms where platform operators cannot proactively inspect message contents. However, users' privacy concerns when considering reporting may impede the effectiveness of this strategy in regulating online harassment. In this paper, we conduct interviews with 16 users of E2EE platforms to understand users' mental models of how reporting works and their resultant privacy concerns and considerations surrounding reporting. We find that users expect platforms to store rich longitudinal reporting datasets, recognizing both their promise for better abuse mitigation and the privacy risk that platforms may exploit or fail to protect them. We also find that users have preconceptions about the respective capabilities and risks of moderators at the platform versus community level -- for instance, users trust platform moderators more to not abuse their power but think community moderators have more time to attend to reports. These considerations, along with perceived effectiveness of reporting and how to provide sufficient evidence while maintaining privacy, shape how users decide whether, to whom, and how much to report. We conclude with design implications for a more privacy-preserving reporting system on E2EE messaging platforms.Comment: accepted to SOUPS 202

Security and online social networks

In the last few years we have witnessed a sustained rise in the popularity of online Social Network Sites (SNSs) such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Google Friend Con- nect, Yahoo! Groups, etc., which are some of the most visited websites worldwide. However, since they are are easy to use and the users are often not aware of the nature of the access of their profiles, they often reveal information which should be kept away from the public eyes. As a result, these social sites may originate security related threats for their members. This paper highlights the benefits of safe use of SNSs and emphasizes the most important threats to members of SNSs. Moreover, we will show the main factors behind these threats. Finally we present policy and technical recommendations in order to improve security without compromising the benefits of information sharing through SNSs.IV Workshop Arquitectura, Redes y Sistemas Operativos (WARSO)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Risk media and the end of anonymity

Whereas threats from twentieth century 'broadcast era' media were characterised in terms of ideology and ‘effects', today the greatest risks posed by media are informational. This paper argues that digital participation as the condition for the maintenance of today's self identity and basic sociality has shaped a new principal media risk of the loss of anonymity. I identify three interrelated key features of this new risk. Firstly, basic communicational acts are archival. Secondly, there is a diminishment of the predictable 'decay time' of media. And, thirdly, both of these shape a new individual and organizational vulnerability of 'emergence' – the haunting by our digital trails. This article places these media risks in the context of the shifting nature and function of memory and the potential uses and abuses of digital pasts

The death of source protection? Protecting journalists' source in a post-Snowden age

This report by Carl Fridh Kleberg was a result of the Polis/ Journalistfonden Fellowship at LSE. It lays out some of the threats to journalists’ data and sources and presents a range of practical tools to overcome them

Mitigating Intersection Attacks in Anonymous Microblogging

Anonymous microblogging systems are known to be vulnerable to intersection attacks due to network churn. An adversary that monitors all communications can leverage the churn to learn who is publishing what with increasing confidence over time. In this paper, we propose a protocol for mitigating intersection attacks in anonymous microblogging systems by grouping users into anonymity sets based on similarities in their publishing behavior. The protocol provides a configurable communication schedule for users in each set to manage the inevitable trade-off between latency and bandwidth overhead. In our evaluation, we use real-world datasets from two popular microblogging platforms, Twitter and Reddit, to simulate user publishing behavior. The results demonstrate that the protocol can protect users against intersection attacks at low bandwidth overhead when the users adhere to communication schedules. In addition, the protocol can sustain a slow degradation in the size of the anonymity set over time under various churn rates