On Wed, 16 May 2012 19:41:57 -0700, Bill wrote: > Does Santiago send messages between people's home computers without using > an email server in between them? This sounds great!
Hi Bill! I think I've done a poor job explaining what Santiago is and does. So, hopefully, here comes a more useful explanation. Forgive me if I generalize things or make issues unnecessarily simple, I'm trying to make this explanation more accessible than technically correct. Also, Bill, I don't think Santiago does quite what you're looking for. You might be more interested in a Jabber server [0] or perhaps RetroShare [1]. Santiago is the old name for the FreedomBuddy system. It's designed to let users negotiate services without interference from third parties, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks by using pre-shared keys. First, a short history lesson in by way of explanation: A few years ago, Comcast started blocking Lotus Notes for no apparent reason [2, 3]. Users were negotiating connections between their computers and Comcast was censoring the messages. To simplify things terribly, Alice would try to send Bob some new notes. Bob would tell Alice to send them along but that acceptance would be censored: Alice never received Bob's reply and notes were never exchanged. Santiago avoids this issue by encrypting the messages that negotiate connections: now, neither Comcast nor your nosy next-door neighbor will know what services you're negotiating, keeping out the people who have no business poking into your business. Securing the connection process allows you to set up an encrypted connection to your friend that other services can use, making it still harder for third parties to interfere in your communication. If you use a Tor hidden service as your Santiago service address, that can act as static IP address, allowing you to negotiate with your friends even as you both move around and change IP addresses. This is no communication panacea, the folks in control of your internet connection could still cut it off for exceeding your bandwidth cap, for example. However, it does make it significantly harder to determine what services are being negotiated. The pre-shared key bit might help to reduce the technical density of the problem, making it more accessible to grandmothers than, say, a custom VPN ethernet interface: people understand identity much better than they understand technical issues. That's not to say that people even understand identity well. But, without going deep into the philosophy, most folks seem to have an intuitive understanding of the subject. Nick 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_XMPP_server_software 1: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ 2: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071021/150541.shtml 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandvine#Comcast_Controversy
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