What are some interesting or exciting technologies that you have heard about recently which you think may be important for online privacy/security in the future?

[exaCORE]

@Regime6045

Hmm that’s pretty cool. Not so much because of the whole security benefits, but because it revive the dream of the “convergent device”

That would be pretty cool, but the inefficiencies of virtualization and the size (and thus hardware) limitations of mobile devices makes it feel like this is still a long way from being realized

[Regime6045]

Exactly, the hardware would have to change. At least 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage as the absolute minimum. (Pixel 8: 8 GB RAM, 128/256 GB storage)

CPU is another problem I guess.

[exaCORE]

@Regime6045

CPU is another problem I guess.

Not to mention a GPU if any kind of graphically intense workload were to be done.

[pinkandwhite (Gwen)]

@archerallstars

If you’re worrying about this, it seems you’re out of touch with the reality and still don’t understand how this actually works.

I didn’t supplicate myself before the altar of cryptocurrency and now you’ve whipped out the ad hominems. You didn’t really address the technical point beyond “but but it requires lots of people!!”. No, it requires specific high-influence people with the pull behind them to turn a fork from a shit coin into the new main branch, that’s why I specifically mentioned Ethereum.

There’s also the whole category of attacks on blockchains that exist like the 51% attack and so on.

@archerallstars

Ethereum is sitting at #2 coin by market cap, which translated to around $272.71 billions USD

Yes, many people are parted with their money very easily, doesn’t mean that ETH or BTC or DOGE or UNIC0RNF4RT actually will retain that value and have staying power – what did ETH and BTC peak at and where are they at now?

And how are you going to actually convert that monopoly money into real tangible items if the exchange owners keep getting arrested for fraud… oops!

And finally, like any other speculative asset, you don’t gain or lose value until you sell because you don’t have anything there, the market cap just reflects what people think ETH is worth much like a company’s market cap reflects what people think that company is worth (see: overinflated Tesla market cap)

@archerallstars

First, how could I lose control of my wallet? There’s no one that could take control of my wallet. Even if there’s a million of successful forks, I can still use my wallet as long as the chain is still running.

That wallet is useless if the blockchain itself has no value to anyone beyond yourself.

@archerallstars

your usual Web 2.0 account

Which Web 2.0 account??? My PG forum account? My Apple account? My [insert big tech company account]? Or maybe you mean my fedi account that I self host? There’s no one Definitive Web 2.0 Account™️

@archerallstars

account/asset management on Web 2.0

My assets are not stored on the web, because that’s stupid. I do this cool thing called “using a bank” and “having title deeds for property in my name/in the name of a company I control”. The chance of [insert crypto here] going bust is probably far more likely than the whole global banking system or my national government going bust, no?

@archerallstars

Currently, Web 3.0 infrastructure is solely based on Web 3 technologies

[Citation needed]

From a quick skim of google scholar, the main application of Semantic Web tech seems to be Google’s Knowledge Graph, alongside some other projects like Wikidata, applying concepts of the Semantic Web using standards from the W3C such as OWL, RDF and so on.

[anon66226834]

Passkeys without a doubt.

[archerallstars]

@pinkandwhite

You didn’t really address the technical point beyond “but but it requires lots of people!!”.

No, I didn’t bring up this point. You’re the one who said if there’s enough people, they could just take a control of my wallet, which is totally ridiculous, by the way :

@pinkandwhite

Enough people were like “oh we don’t like [thing that happened] so we’re going to fork the chain and undo it/do our own thing” and when that has enough backing, oops you just lost control of your wallet/monkey jpegs/online identity.

And this, again, really shows you have zero clue about how blockchain securities work:

@pinkandwhite

There’s also the whole category of attacks on blockchains that exist like the 51% attack and so on.

Before anything else, you should educate yourself with the actual docs referred to this issue:

Proof-of-stake (PoS)

Basically, to even have a chance to alter the chain, you would need at least $34.476 billions USD to even have a chance to do so according to the current stake value of ETH. I believe that this is not a practical value for any random group of people to achieve in reality. In fact, if it’s economical to do so, it would happen a long time ago, why not?

@pinkandwhite

what did ETH and BTC peak at and where are they at now?

Oh, for ETH it used to peak at around $1,300 USD in 2018, or $4,700 USD in 2021, now it’s at $2,300 USD, see: Ethereum price today, ETH to USD live price, marketcap and chart | CoinMarketCap. It’s around $7-16 USD in 2016, though. For BTC, you can see for yourself, the price movement is similar to ETH.

So, what’s your point?

Contrary to typical fiat currencies, which inflate over time, crypto assets rise in value. It seems your point is the other way around.

@pinkandwhite

And how are you going to actually convert that monopoly money into real tangible items

Monopoly doesn’t have anything to do with cryptocurrency. That’s what your banks are doing with loan, interest, etc. The price of cryptocurrency is mainly based on demand and supply of the market. Do you have around $3 billions USD in your pocket? If you have that amount of money to buy ETH, then, you can move ETH price up by 1%. And at that time, a lot of people might want to take a profit, and you lost $3 billions instantly

And you would need more money along with insanity to manipulate BTC price

@pinkandwhite

if the exchange owners keep getting arrested for fraud… oops!

Fortunately, no sane person would keep their money in any exchange. Moreover, most crypto exchanges are regulated, just like your banks. But wait! Even banks bankrupt sometime, right?

@pinkandwhite

And finally, like any other speculative asset, you don’t gain or lose value until you sell

What’s your point? Assuming you buy a house for profit, do you always have the money at the evaluated asset value in your pocket? It seems you shouldn’t invest on anything at all.

@pinkandwhite

That wallet is useless if the blockchain itself has no value to anyone beyond yourself.

By no value, do you mean ETH? If yes, then, I doubt it. Compared to 99.99% of all the companies in the world, I would say they would demise before ETH. It seems you’re really out of touch with reality.

@pinkandwhite

Which Web 2.0 account??? There’s no one Definitive Web 2.0 Account™️

Do you know there are more than a few SEO tools specifically designed for this? For example, MASS Gmail Account Creator, GET FACreator - Fast Web 2.0 Account Creator, Mass Web2.0 Account Creator. They pop up in my quick Brave search’s first page.

@pinkandwhite

My assets are not stored on the web, because that’s stupid.

Yet, you’re OK with storing your account on the web Do you know you can use a crypto wallet for your account for free, in which your account data is not stored on the web?

@pinkandwhite

The chance of [insert crypto here] going bust is probably far more likely than the whole global banking system or my national government going bust, no?

Compared to the whole global banking system, maybe yes or no. At least, over 100 banks around the world use one of the crypto network (Ripple) in their infrastructure, including the second-biggest bank in the USA, Bank of America.

@pinkandwhite

[Citation needed]

Top 5 Web3 Applications

The total market size of Web 3.0, including blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, and other technologies, is expected to reach 81.5 billion dollars in 2030.

We will also see more and more best web3 websites emerge that take advantage of the unique features of Web 3.0, such as decentralization and blockchain technology.

Do you still think Web 3 is a meme?

@pinkandwhite

Web3 (not Web 3.0, crypto/blockchain fluff is not Semantic Web) is a meme

[pinkandwhite (Gwen)]

@archerallstars

Monopoly doesn’t have anything to do with cryptocurrency. That’s what your banks are doing with loan, interest, etc.

Yeah okay you’re bringing up the libertarian bs now, I’m out o7

[exaCORE]

@archerallstars

Contrary to typical fiat currencies, which inflate over time

It’s generally considered good monetary policy for currencies to inflate slightly over time, as it encourages spending. When currencies deflate, recession occurs.

[exaCORE]

@archerallstars

Even banks bankrupt sometime, right?

At this point in time, regulations on banks are much more strict than on crypto exchanges. Banks are required to keep a certain amount of capital on hand at all times, also note that consumer accounts are usually ensured by the government up to a certain limit, so even if you bank goes bankrupt, not all your savings will be gone.

[exaCORE]

@archerallstars

What’s your point? Assuming you buy a house for profit, do you always have the money at the evaluated asset value in your pocket? It seems you shouldn’t invest on anything at all.

I think they are trying to point out a difference between fiat currency and cryptocurrency and how crypto functions more as an investment than as a currency.

[pinkandwhite (Gwen)]

yes, that’s exactly what I was getting at

[xe3]

I suggest we refocus this conversation back to the original question, as I think that the current debate is rapidly devolving into:

It feels like there is no space for reasonable discussion and exploration between the pro-crypto hyperbole and anti-crypto hyperbole

Some emerging technologies and standards I’m interested in are:

Privacy enhancing standards and protocols:

1. Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) in combination with DoH3 or DNS over TLS/Quic (Thanks Mozilla, Cloudflare, and others)
2. Oblivious HTTP and Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (Thanks Mozilla, Cloudflare, Apple, Fastly and others)
3. The Global Privacy Control (GPC) (Thanks to many stakeholders! Including Mozilla, the EFF, and California privacy legislation and many others)

Linux Things:

1. Basically everything mentioned in this blogpost from OpenSUSE represents what I’ve been hoping for and working towards for a few years now. Currently it is just a proof of concept VM image, and it will take time, possibly a very long time, before these features are included in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, MicroOS, or Aeon. But still, I am very excited to see more attention being given to pre-boot security, and the TPM.
2. Unified Kernel Image (UKI) and Efistub are receiving more attention and interest. I think they dovetail very well with Secure Boot and FDE.
3. Ubuntu Core Desktop. I know there is some anti-Ubuntu and anti-Snap bias in this forum, but Ubuntu Core Desktop is very interesting to me. Particularly in combination with some other things Ubuntu has been working on (TPM2 backed encryption, and ZFS support, and hopefully in the future measured boot).
4. Progress being made on immutable Linux distros (particularly Fedora’s Atomic distros (along with the Universal Blue project), OpenSUSE MicroOS etc, and Ubuntu Core Desktop)

FIrefox

1. Has recently rolled out a number of privacy enhancements including GPC support, automatically enabling ECH if DoH is enabled, link tracking protection, and a new anti-fingerprinting tool (FPP) that complements rather than replaces RFP which is Firefox’s much more capable and effective antifingerprinting tool, but with significant usability tradeoffs. FPP is more akin to the basic level of protection you would get with Brave browser, as opposed to the more advanced anti-fingerprinting developed by Firefox for the Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser. But it is nice to now have a choice between two levels of protection (and the lower level (FPP) is actively being improved and worked on).

Other:

1. Apple being forced into supporting RCS, and possibly inturn forcing the CSMA to include E2EE in the universal profile (fingers crossed)
2. And just generally speaking, the EU (and California’s) current interest in forcing big tech companies to be at least somewhat less shitty and more user and privacy respecting (and less anti-competitive).
3. GrapheneOS has recently started to support Android Auto (perhaps not officially, but they announced android Auto support was in Alpha last month).

[anon47640430]

I’m definitely interested in seeing more developments towards post-quantum encryption. The back and forth with NIST, Kyber, and the Kyber slash vulnerability has been interesting to follow even if I don’t understand the math very well…

Signal has already rolled out their post-quantum encryption with PQXDH and it looks like Tutanota/Tuta is also working on something similar for email and storage..

It will be cool to see how it long it takes before this kind of encryption replaces the current standards like AES and RSA.

[devious.passenger]

Obviously, one would have to be insane not to see the potential of Passkeys. However, could you elaborate why you think those are such a big deal? You know, not for me, just in case other people might question this…

[anon97654407]

These really are a big deal. It’s inherently more secure than passwords :

1. It’s faster of using a passkey than a password/email.

2. It’s phishing-resistant : Let’s say you create a passkey for your Google account (google[.]com) and then, you receive a phishing email saying that you’ve been breach so you click the link and wanted to connect your passkey, but it will not work because the passkey was created for google[.].com and not goooogle[.].com.

3. It’s more easy to use.

[beantaco]

This kind of answers the original question but is more like what I would like to see (positive ideas) than recent technologies I have heard about or look promising.

• Anonymization network with stronger anonymity and untrackability (is Nym a good example?)
• Adoption and use of self-custodial non-KYC privacy cryptocurrency (many people starting to use Monero maybe?)
• Surveillance and censorship resistant anonymous/pseudoynmous secure messaging and videoconferencing (Session but with perfect forward secrecy?)
• Backdoor and coercion resistant software development and deployment pipeline: open source, reproducible builds, anonymous developers, signed commits and releases, multi-person code review, authenticated censorship-resistant software updates
• Better security in Linux operating systems by default (there’s Qubes but not everyone can use it)
• Smartphones that don’t spy on or track people

I second the post-quantum cryptography post.

@anon97654407

These really are a big deal. It’s inherently more secure than passwords :

Do you mind explaining what Passkeys is?

[anon97654407]

@beantaco

Do you mind explaining what Passkeys is?

Here’s a great video by @jonah

Passkeys explained! My take on Google’s password killer…

[widget]

Floorp (Desktop Web Browser)

here’s hoping servo makes some big progress this coming year

Servo Wikipedia

[zamtron]

@archerallstars

Yet, you’re OK with storing your account on the web Do you know you can use a crypto wallet for your account for free, in which your account data is not stored on the web?

Could you explain how one does this? I would like to learn how.

[resplendent606 (Bryan (he/him))]

I find the future of encryption to be exciting. First, what I find most interesting is how efficient will Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) be at protecting us in the future. Much of the current encryption (like the RSA) could theoretically be cracked by a powerful enough quantum computer. PQC is a new generation of mathematical algorithms designed to be secure against both traditional and quantum computers. I have read about governments and corporations collecting encrypted data they find on the internet with the hope to decrypt secrets once we have quantum computers. Really smart people have created new concepts in math and cryptography that will hopefully protect us in the future.

Second, there is Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Right now to process data (like credit scores), you have to decrypt it first, leaving the data temporarily vulnerable until it is encrypted again. FHE allows for computation to be performed directly on encrypted data, resulting in encrypted data that can only be read by the owner.