Tor's two sides, Amazon's offline surveillance and how to obfuscate

Interesting links I've read this week:

The dilemma of the dark web: protecting neo-Nazis and dissidents alike (Guardian, 23/8/17)

"Perhaps the most important use of Tor, for many of its users, is simply allowing access to the open web in a protected and private manner. The system works by bouncing a request through at least three relays, with each only knowing the positions next to it in the chain: the entry node knows who is asking for a connection, but not where for; the exit node knows what the connection is to but not who wants it; and the middle node only knows to connect the other two."

Silicon Valley siphons our data like oil. But the deepest drilling has just begun (Guardian, 23/7/17)

"For Silicon Valley, however, anything less than total knowledge of its users represents lost revenue. Any unmonitored moment is a missed opportunity.

Amazon is going to show the industry how to monitor more moments: by making corporate surveillance as deeply embedded in our physical environment as it is in our virtual one. Silicon Valley already earns vast sums of money from watching what we do online. Soon it’ll earn even more money from watching what we do offline.

It’s easy to picture how this will work, because the technology already exists. Late last year, Amazon built a “smart” grocery store in Seattle. You don’t have to wait in a checkout line to buy something – you just grab it and walk out of the store. Sensors detect what items you pick up, and you’re charged when you leave."

How to obfuscate (Nautilus, Issue 49, 29/6/17)

"The solution TrackMeNot offers is not to hide users’ queries from search engines (an impractical method, in view of the need for query satisfaction), but to obfuscate by automatically generating queries from a “seed list” of terms. Initially culled from RSS feeds, these terms evolve so that different users develop different seed lists.

… The activities of individuals are masked by those of many ghosts, making the pattern harder to discern so that it becomes much more difficult to say of any query that it was a product of human intention rather than an automatic output of TrackMeNot. In this way, TrackMeNot extends the role of obfuscation, in some situations, to include plausible deniability."