Lounge

Mmm... I can see it now... "Hello dear family, friends, acquaintances, and clients, please join me on the dark side of the web. That way, we can commit crimes of privacy without fear of retribution from the thought police." -- Furtive, secretive, conspiratorial... yeah, people would love the idea of that

In an interesting turn since the Edward Snowden revelations and the impact they've had on the US IT giants' revenue streams and increasing legislation globally to reduce their reach and competitiveness is that they're starting to promote end-to-end encryption.

Google: http://boingboing.net/2014/06/04/google-announces-end-to-end-en.html (I prefer Cory Doctorow's more succinct and less PR oriented way of putting things).

Yahoo now offers encryption for it's IM client: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/03/yahoo-unveils-encryption-measures-to-protect-users-data

The campaign for easy end to end encryption: https://www.resetthenet.org/

So far, these tentative steps and browser-based encryption are highly vulnerable to JS drive-by attacks. In fact the security researchers I've seen cited say that it isn't trustworthy at all, i.e. https://mega.co.nz/ isn't as secure as you think it is! However, it may be good enough to prevent most surveillance by the IT corporations... except Apple Inc. who led their users to believe that their IM client was end-to-end encrypted but then people realised that you could recover your old messages even if you lost or changed your phone, meaning that Apple Inc. had copies of your private keys all along and anyone could access your messages with them. The same thing happened with Microsoft.

For the time being, we can assume we can't trust big IT or govt. agencies. We need more client-side software (IM clients) that store data locally, much like the way old answerphones and snail-mail services work, and encrypt all connections with asymetric key pairs, so when they listen in all they get is incomprehensible garbage. However, that doesn't stop them from gathering meta-data which seems to be what they're most interested in for blanket surveillance, i.e. who's talking to who and from where and when. Going via anonymisation services like TOR by default would be a good idea to prevent most meta-data collection but we'd need to beef up the infrastructure on the TOR network significantly for that to be feasible for everyone.

Now that the majority of users have sufficiently fast, always on internet connections, I think it makes sense for people to own their own media and communications servers; a little black box in a corner of your living room/office with all the necessary software for managing your correspondence, contacts, and connecting with your circles of family, friends, acquaintances, and clients via email, IM, VoIP, and persistent group social networking; distributed SNs (e.g. https://diasporafoundation.org/ ) where everyone runs their own SN "node" and has their own backup copy so there's no need for a centralised SN server like Facebook or G+. If your server/internet goes offline fo any period of time, it can automatically synchronise any changes with your peers and keep you up to date. I think there are already BitTorrent based networks that already do this.

Another benefit would be that it's relatively cheap to set up; the price of a small computer in a box without a screen, keyboard, mouse, etc. (all the software's free and open source), and the price of your ISP service that you pay for anyway; and once it's set up, there's nobody else to pay to keep it running. No need for advertising revenue to support the massive data farms that Google and Facebook store your personal data on. If any websites want to attract you, they have to offer attractive, high quality content at competitive prices or supported by advertising of sponsorship; no more taking our own data and selling it back to us (as in selling us out to 3rd parties such as corporations, security agencies, loan sharks, con men, and the like) as entertainment!

Big IT and security agencies would definitely hate something like that... so it must be a thought crime (Why isn't there a "big brother" emoticon yet?)

Just imagine if we could get all Facebook, G+, Habbo, LinkedIn, etc. users to migrate to Diaspora* nodes or something similar? Now how do you convince people who don't know and don't want to know about such geeky things to join you?

Of course, the next stage in state and corporate surveillance and control will more than likely be AI chatbots that befriend users, join their networks, and record everything they do like that. If you suspect that an online entity is a chatbot, you can probably trip them up with Winograd schemas: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/papers/WS.html - More effective and faster than the Turin test.

Tell me, can a crocodile run a steeplechase? Y/N

Well that is the explanation I have seen given, dark as invisible but there was already a word that had been doing the job just fine... "private".

A well known quote from Eric Schmidt whilst he was CEO at Google:

Surely that's what makes it doublespeak.

They could have used words like inaccessible, private or personal which it's difficult to draw negative meanings from but the range of negative meanings you can get from the word dark run wide and deep as the river styx.

"Going Dark" usually means the spy is off the grid and cannot be reached by ordinary means.  Take your cell phone battery out etc.  In "Person of interest" last week the bad guy dropped his cell into someone else's pocket, jammed the radio spectrum and created some noise.  They then followed using a dog to track him.

Here is technopedia's take on this term http://www.techopedia.com/definition/29027/dark-social which actually has some interesting backstory.

"Dark social is a term coined by Alexis C. Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, to refer to the social sharing of content that occurs outside of what can be measured by Web analytics programs. This mostly occurs when a link is sent via online chat or email, rather than shared over a social media platform, from which referrals can be measured"  

I agree with Steve: not necessary that dark = evil in this case.

-Derek