A lawless and shadowy new corner of the internet is about to go online

[SecularMotion]

It's a safe bet that FBI director James Comey and Brian Hoffman would not get along.

Earlier this week, as Comey was testifying to a US House Committee about the risks of encryption letting criminals "go dark," Hoffman and his team were working on a "testnet" release of OpenBazaar — a decentralised and uncensorable online marketplace that can be used by anyone to sell anything without fear of police intervention.

OpenBazaar has been in the works in some form since 2014 when it was conceived by controversial bitcoin developer Amir Taaki. The vision is an online peer-to-peer market, in the vein of eBay or Etsy — but unlike eBay, transactions will take place using bitcoin, and the entire site will be decentralised across the network of people accessing it, making it impossible to close down.

Hoffman subsequently took over from Taaki, rebranding the project as OpenBazaar, and in June 2015 it took a $1 million (£700,000) seed round from tech venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

http://www.techinsider.io/openbazaar-launches-testnet-trial-ahead-of-public-launch-2016-3

[longship]

1. The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it.

The last time the USA tried to outlaw strong encryption, all the encryption code went off shore where it was still available to everybody.

Now there's talk of mandating back doors yet again. I suggest that the folks promoting such a thing speak to those investment banks, that they are so cozy with politically, whether they would obey such a law on their encrypted buy/sell data packets. Then, there are the millions of Internet enterprises which use https to secure their transactions. Should those have back doors, too?

Pretty simple. Strong encryption protects the world economy from collapse. Because if the FBI/CIA/NSA (you name the alphabet soup agency) has a back door, so do all the hackers, foreign governments, terrorist cells, and a whole lot of other folks who would take gleeful pleasure in fucking you up.

It is the strength of strong encryption that prevents that from happening. And let's get this straight. Encryption algorithms are simple. I have a T-shirt with the RSA trap door algorithm on it. Simple equations in number theory that fit on a T-shirt. Knowing the equations does not help one break the encryption because it describes a mathematical function whose inverse function cannot be solved analytically. In order to do that one has to use brute force, which no computer can do in a reasonable amount of time, usually measured in centuries with the fastest computers on the planet. In other words, these algorithms are really secure from any attack.

In the coding for such a simple algorithm a back door is going to stick out like a sore thumb. "Here I am. A back door!!! Come and exploit me!!!"

And who is going to be the first to do that? The FBI? No! Nor any of the other alphabet soup. It is going to be the hackers, the foreign governments, the terrorist cells, or just Joe Bagadonuts living in his mother's basement.

The fools!

[bemildred]

2. Correct.

The point is that if you have an unencrypted internet, running an encrypted one on top of it is easy, all the trouble tends to center around key management and social engineering problems. So anybody who knows the score can do it. So all this resistance to security is just law enforcement wanting to have the old situation where they could beat it out of you back, and where their job did not take them away from their desks too often.