dear 1998,

most voting systems in the united states have been digitized though despite years and years of sounding infosec alarms they remain so hackable that we keep finding weird music files in their source code

dear 1998,

we have turned the internet into one of the largest repositories of human knowledge and expression in history but we have also paywalled the shit out of it. people have been killed attempting to liberate this data while other artifacts have been barred from distribution entirely because our legal systems can't decide who should profit from the works of the dead

dear 1998,

separatists have held secession referendums in what have been called illegal elections. they distributed voting materials over the darkweb which have since been labeled illegal numbers.

point of order: wtf is the darkweb besides a buzzword?

@garbados what *are* "loteks"?

@hirojin term bitten from the gibson movie "johnny mnemonic" referring to technologists that primarily use scrap and junk to facilitate technical infrastructure. in this case i suppose i mean the muzak itself as being scrap.

@garbados what is "the muzak"?

@hirojin like elevator music or music developed specifically for ads. kinda soulless tunes.

@hirojin vaporwave also uses a lot of jazz that definitely isn't soulless so it's not an entirely fair characterization of the genre

@garbados @hirojin muzak was also specifically the name of a company that produced and licensed (not sold, though) background music

and then it became a generic term for elevator music, bc that was one of the places background music stuck around

(muzak sold lots of products to factories etc, interleaving up/downbeat music to Improve Productiveness of workers listening, ppl found that out, got angry about being subconsciously controlled, got it kicked out of lots of places, now listen to their own music)

@garbados @hirojin whoops i said sold at the end even tho i specified they only ever leased at the start

@garbados is this real bc im honestly not surprised

@kity yeah unfortunately https://www.unicornriot.ninja/2018/hackers-discover-chinese-music-hidden-in-us-voting-machine-software/

@garbados jesus fucking christ

@garbados tfw the machines you use to vote for your fucking government are less secure than an android phone from 6 years ago

@kity democracy is rigged in so many ways it's comical

@garbados honestly it's comparable to a flip phone from the early 2000s

@garbados because telecom companies care more about getting hacked than the US government

@kity and even they're pretty meh about it tbh

what i love most is the marketers who spin breaches of their own data to increase sales

@garbados tor-based piracy/porn/illicit goods markets basically I think?

@theoutrider like, tor specifically? when i see it in marketing i just have no idea what mediums they mean

@garbados fairly sure it's all but synonymous with tor in most mainstream reporting

either that or IRC

@theoutrider irc is the darkweb lmao

@garbados Any place on the internet that search engines don't index. So TOR, but also unlisted Facebook groups, certain types of forums, JSTOR, university databases....

@Canageek yeah alright, that fits my reflexive understanding of the term

@garbados @Canageek nah, that's "deep web"

"deep web" = not indexed by search engines, maybe you have to log in, maybe it just disallows robots

"dark web" = not available over http ("clearnet"), requires connecting to some alternative network protocol, not necessarily illegal

@trwnh @garbados Opps

@Canageek @trwnh @garbados If it is not http, could this be called "a web"?

Onion sites, for example, do use HTTP, so they could qualify for "dark web" though.

@saper @Canageek @garbados To be precise, exit nodes can bridge you to the "clearnet" over HTTP, but the internal network uses its own protocol at the application layer.

Another term for "clearnet" is the WWW, because that's really what most people connect to: HTTP over TCP port 80 (serving HTML); HTTPS is served over port 443.

In contrast, onion sites are served with TOR over TCP ports 443, 9001, 9030 (also as HTML).

@trwnh @Canageek @garbados I am a bit confused now :)

Even a hidden service is accessed using HTTP (is this what you mean with "TOR over TCP")?

My understanding of Tor is that it just tunnels a connection byte stream making sure only the exit node can decrypt a whole thing, without disclosing other details like TCP connection metadata.

If used within a browser, the byte stream contains a HTTP request.

@Canageek @garbados I've never heard JSTOR called the darkweb before but now any time I hear any academics using JSTOR I am absolutely gonna give them a shifty look and say "I see... browsing the darkweb, eh"

@Canageek @garbados also I fucking hate the term "darkweb" for like 10 different reasons

@Canageek
I thought the difference was darkweb = not accessible except by special means (onion) and deep web = unlisted http(s) sites, like private fb groups, anything that requires a login to access, etc
@garbados

@joamo @Canageek so like... dat is the darkweb?

@garbados
Based on these definitions, I guess so? Dat isn't scary though. It's more like the party web.

I think there's also an association with security/privacy with the dark web, like it's the upside down and no one knows who's actually on it or whatever.
@Canageek

@garbados @Canageek
I can only think of two situations where knowing the difference matters. The one we're in, and for writing some fiction with characters in the situation we're in. Dat alone makes it more ambiguous, zeronet is prolly dark tho

@joamo @garbados You might be right?

@garbados
Anything not routed through cloudflare or linked off facebook. :p

@garbados it can mean just typically inaccessible or private servers but colloquially it refers to TOR or the onion network which allows access to some less than legal content (at various levels of gray morality)

@garbados
More info on this?

@joamo oct 1 referendum in catalonia http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=54133

@garbados also there was the whole deCSS thing

@garbados Illegal Prime Numbers etc

@theoutrider i learned about this as of this morning actually lol

@theoutrider @garbados who called them "illegal prime numbers" and not "arrested for prime crime"

@theoutrider
@garbados

Prime number apartheid:

Keeping those not using illegal numbers and those using tor and friends separate.

#idiocracy

@garbados killed?

@devurandom aaron swartz

@garbados thought he committed suicide...

@devurandom tomato tomahto imo. he had been hounded, haunted, and intimidated by prosecutors for years at that point

@devurandom but then my take on suicide is that even if you kill yourself it can still be someone or something else that murdered you

@garbados I completely agree with this take. People generally don’t just take their life for no reason. It’s often the result of years of abuse that had been eating away at them.

@devurandom
Driven to suicide should still count.
@garbados

@garbados
There is always the vast repository of mostly useless knowledge that is free...and cat pictures...