Privacy

Mobile Operating System Consent + F-Droid

The LineageOS installation on my Fairphone 2 was getting really old and the updater wasn’t functioning, so I decided to switch back to the Fairphone operating system.

I’m really starting to develop some significant aversions to applications collecting consent for things. The “consent overload” on the web triggered by GDPR has certainly affected me. I can entirely see the appeal of a coping strategy of ignoring the text of those boxes and choosing the fastest way to dismiss them but that would slowly eat away at me in the longer term.

Exploring Tor Exit Lists and ECC Signatures

At some point, I might write up a series of articles on the Tor Directory Protocol and how it is all working, but first there are some things I’m trying to get my head around in order to finish off a new specification for Tor Exit Lists that will include signatures. Tor Exit Lists are produced by an “exit scanner”. We archive exit lists and use them to provide data for ExoneraTor and Onionoo.

IETF 104 in Prague

Thanks to support from Article 19, I was able to attend IETF 104 in Prague, Czech Republic this week. Primarily this was to present my Internet Draft which takes safe measurement principles from Tor Metrics work and the Research Safety Board and applies them to Internet Measurement in general.

My IETF badge, complete with additional tag for my nick

I attended with a free one-day pass for the IETF and free hackathon registration, so more than just the draft presentation happened. During the hackathon I sat at the MAPRG table and worked on PATHspider with Mirja Kühlewind from ETH Zurich. We have the code running again with the latest libraries available in Debian testing and this may become the basis of a future Tor exit scanner (for generating exit lists, and possibly also some bad exit detection). We ran a quick measurement campaign that was reported in the hackathon presentations.

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
• irlxyz
• irlxyz