[extropy-chat] internet search privatizer

[Mike Dougherty]

This is a monumental waste of resource.  I realize the current cost of
bandwidth is negligible whether it is utilized 100% or not at all.  Net
neutrality may change that.  Are you willing to pay for the extra cost of
the "phony data" in an effort to minimize your search signal to noise
ratio?  Do you believe that the resources that can be applied to
heuristically separate the wheat from the chaff are not already powerful
enough to make this a trivial exercise?  If Google/Your-search-engine isn't
already doing it, then a group of merely curious open-source developers
running a distributed cluster project do it for fun - or the us government
decides to feed this stream of garbage to carnivore simply because it has
nothing better to do.

My $0.02 on this problem is to return to the anonymity we had as a faceless
crowd.  If we all were running client software to allow open relay through
everyone else running the client, there would never be a single point of
identity.  Of course if this technique were proven truly effective, it would
also be illegal just to run the client.

On 9/5/06, spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> Hey cool, this is an idea I posted a couple years ago.  Your privacy is
> protected by having a searchbot post a bunch of phony searches, hiding
> your
> real internet searches in piles of phony data:
>
>
> Internet Tool Generates Fake Searches to Protect Privacy
>
> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,211710,00.html
>
>
> They finish with this comment:
>
> "...[TrackMeNot) is also not foolproof. Someone knowing the list of terms
> TrackMeNot uses can simply strip those records out of the databases.
> Developers say they are working on expanding the list."
>
> Easy solution I say.  Search, choose a random site out of the top 10, then
> randomly choose 3 words from that site to form the next search.  Repeat
> once
> a minute as long as the screen saver is running.  I challenge the snoops
> to
> figure out the genuine searches among the thousands of searches thus
> generated.
>
> We could also generate random email traffic from random sentences or
> paragraphs selected from our inboxes, emailed to recipients with
> prearranged
> spam filtering.  Thus our email history could be buried in reams of
> meaningless bits.  It would require a human agent or human equivalent
> intelligence to distinguish the real email from the randomly generated
> variety.
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
>
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