IS THERE ANYTHING THIS AWESOME KICKSTARTER PROJECT CAN'T DO? Oh yeah, exist.
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1009724580/sever-the-anti-villain-box/
It encrypts your data AND makes your games run faster!
EDIT: the Kickstarter OneBox doesn't actually include the link to the page? WTF! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1009724580/sever-the-anti-villain-box/
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P2P?
Fat chance that will not be painfully slowwhenif the first units get shipped - or ever at all.
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The Scammiest Scam To Yet Anonymity Scam
I'm still holding out for this being a hoax, a big joke, and that they're going to cancel the kickstarter any minute. It'd be quite the cute "lessons learned" about anonymity scams. However, I will be treating it from here on out as a genuine scam.
This absolutely ridiculous thing was brought to my attention by a friend and since it was late at night I thought I must be delirious in how absurdly over the top fake it seemed. So I slept on it, woke up, and found that it had gotten a thousand dollars more funding and was every bit as flabbergasting as I thought it was.
Since I realize that not everyone has spent their entire lives studying computers — and such people are the targets of such scams — I figured I'd throw together a quick list of not even everything wrong with this kickstarter. I am a professional computer security researcher. I care a lot about anonymity and privacy on the internet, and I hang out with the world's leading experts on the topic. I especially care about defeating state-sponsored censorship. That's why I get SO MAD about the series of scams seeking to take advantage of people who just want to be secure. At best they just lose their money, at worst they get a horrible unsafe mishmash of code that makes them worse off than when they started.
Yes, they followed me on Twitter after they caught me calling them a scam. Precious. Orange is in fact the best color but the over-the-top coolness is the first "I have a bad feeling about this" sign. The nearly 1:1 ratio of followers to followed on a scale of thousands is another classic sign of social network fudgery. Whatever. On to the actual kickstarter:
What EVEN! What do I say? Well, first off, everyone who actually knows anything about onion routing knows that the correct way to capitalize Tor is Tor, not TOR. That's a minor, superficial thing that a lot of people get wrong, but if you're claiming to be an expert I expect you to know how to spell the name of the most important piece of software in the field. But. Ten times speed. TEN TIMES SPEED. What is this miracle? How are you increasing speed by adding extra routing steps? Why aren't you in a bidding war between the major ISPs to sell this technology for millions of dollars? It's an absolutely revolutionary breakthrough that could benefit everyone on the planet, and you don't need a kickstarter to license your apparently already working algorithm!
Sever™ is an embedded forced routing,
What does "forced routing" mean? Like this, which "assumes the network is centralized", ie the opposite of peer-to-peer?
peer to peer internet networking device
Tor does this for free
with inherent DNS security protections built in,
Uhh this requires a boatload of clarification. Like, a doctorate's worth.
individual packet encryption,
Lots of things do this for free
a data containment engine,
??? Like a hard drive or...
and IP obfuscation capabilities.
A proxy. This is a thing that many things can already do. The limitations are subtle but important — just ask all the people who've been busted for crimes commited from behind an obfuscated IP.
Its engineered to make what you do online private, faster, and untraceable! Its designed to work with your existing internet hardware and setup takes only minutes.
Hmm hmm. Promising the moon. Dinging one point for "its/it's" confusion.
Sever™ enhances secure network communications, secures wired and wireless devices and networks including mobile devices, PCs, servers, and other Internet Protocol based systems.
You are saying "Internet Protocol" because it sounds impressive.
We're also in the process of building a Sever™ App for your mobile device extending your protection, while away from home. This interconnection will provide security, anonymity,
Oh, tell me more, I'm curious how this isn't going to compromise anything on the anonymity front (this is a non-sarcastic one. Well, half-sarcastic)
and malware protection wherever you are.
W h a t ? That makes no sense. Anonymity and encryption are completely orthogonal to antivirus. They have nothing to do with each other. Where is this mysterious anti-malware coming from?
Cute gif.
Heads up! If you're an online gamer get ready to experience a disgustingly cool boost in network performance. Your data travels faster than theirs!
This makes no sense. This makes no sense. THIS MAKES NO SENSE! You can't add a peer-to-peer anonymity routing system, which adds a ton of steps and overhead to the route your packets take, and somehow get "disgustingly" faster! I asked about this on Twitter and your response was utter gibberish.
Path of least resistance? You mean... the entire point of the internet? The thing that engineers and designers have spent the past couple of decades optimizing? Do you even RFC, bro? Do you think that packets are routed around in circles pointlessly for funsies? Do you have some sort of internet laser which bores through time and space? $199 retail suddenly sounds pretty reasonable for that sort of raw unbridled network-defying power.
Let's skip over the spiel about "villains," it's just fluff.
Sever™ is designed to work with your existing internet hardware. It's very easy to use, you simply plug it in with an Ethernet (CAT5) cable between your modem and router. Or you can use Sever™ as a wireless router itself.
Weirdly, I can't find an ethernet port in any picture of the hardware. There's just something that looks like it could be a USB port or could be an HDMI port depending on how you squint.
Features
I had to resort to the website to find entire sentences about what these might mean. For some utterly horrible reason, all the text on the site is an image. There goes all the money I spent on this retina screen!
- DNS Security — Sever™ with DNS protection blocking malware communications dead in their tracks
This appears to be vaguely related to some idea about malware c&c, but this statement itself is meaningless.
- Dynamic Packet Encryption — Sever™ encrypts at payload level rolling encryption protocols throughout the transfer data lifecycle
Did you just open a technical dictionary and pick random words? This says absolutely nothing about the actual encryption.
- Randomized Port Dispersion — Sever™ transmits your information through port dispersion, making it impossible for man in the middle attacks or port congestion
Okay, first off, randomized ports on the client side is something bog standard IP stacks already do. They always have. Your computer is doing it right now. Second, that in no way, shape, or form could possibly stop MITM attacks. They can either intercept you or they can't, and you can hop ports until you're blue in the face. Third, "port congestion"? Is this a problem you think you have? Is port 80 clogged? Pour some draino in there.
- Forced Routing
This doesn't seem to be defined anywhere.
- Unique Peer-to-Peer Network — Sever™ goes far beyond the capabilities of TOR and provides you with optimized throughput for up to 10X your current internet speed.
Absolutely magical. And they call me a witch.
- App Store
Uhh... ... ... ... ... ... what?
Benefits
- Makes you anonymous
- Secures your network
- Increase network speeds up to 10X
- No one can intercept your communication
- No one can track your online purchases
- Protects you from trackers
- Protects against crypto-lockers, malware, and bots
- Access the internet from any country
Deep breath. All right. How, how, how, how, how, how, what, and how? You have solved problems that thousands of brilliant people all over the world have been thinking about for a long time now. They're going to rename the Nobel Prize to the Sever™ Prize™!
The Anti-Villain Box is an open source hardware platform and an open source software platform. We developed a powerful dual development environment using state of the art mini computers capable of running multiple instances of linux. This is one sick open source development platform.
Good luck finding their github though. In fact they seem rather unclear on the concept of open source.
Sever™ allows you to take advantage of anonymity code designed to auto encrypt and hide application payloads as a default. We're opening Sever up to you, the world. So go invent amazingly cool things with it- get crazy - make stuff that no one ever thought possible with Sever™.
Good job thoroughly conflating anonymity and privacy which are different things. Encryption (privacy) does not give you anonymity.
Sever™ shreds your data into billions of tiny data packets,
Are you like encrypting half of a bit per packet or what? I thought you were trying to prevent congestion, not drive it up by orders of magnitude.
encrypts each one with a powerful new encryption algorithm developed to STOP villains dead in their tracks and keeps you, what you do and your data from those you don't want to have it.
Walk up to any encryption expert on the planet. Ask them what the #1 sign of encryption snake oil is.
Spoilers: it's "new, and totally secret, algorithm". Real systems ship publicly peer-reviewed stuff and keep the "new algorithms" in papers for the next conference.
Sever™ will not ask or expect you to share your data with us or anyone else. Its your data, its your children's data and its your business data. Sever makes sure it stays that way. We've designed Sever with up to 10TB of SSD Flash memory.
So everyone was joking that $199 retail is really good for 10TB of flash, which costs many thousands of dollars. Of course, the trick is that the base model is a whopping sixteen... megabytes. This is only mentioned on the website. But — what are the terabytes conceivably for?! It's a router.
This means you can now do some pretty amazing things with your data knowing that your the only one in the world who can access it. Sever™ has built in data analytics. This means your can see your cyber life and do things with it that only you can do. Save money & time while understanding your cyber life like never before.
Not even a sick screenshot of orange and silver graphs of my C Y B E R L I F E? I'm disappointed.
Are you ready to bounce through the secure deflector path?!
I just... I can't. The website ends on the note of pointing out that their dinky Linux router supports PHP. It's like they were specifically trying to make me mad. A Denial of Abadidea Attack.
This is the scammiest thing I have ever seen and their attempts to argue with the grownups are the bright orange icing on the bright orange cake of scam.
But at least their photoshopping is pretty good.
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Bonus Discourse WTF:
In the little green nav booger thing in the bottom right, the "top" link is greyed-out if you're near the top of the page. Ok, sensible. But... the criteria for "near the top of the page" is just hard-coded as "current post < 3". Even when the third post is (as in this thread) really, really long.
Someday I'm going to find something Discourse does that is not totally half-assed. Today is not that day.
(Posting this demonstration of Blakeyrat's Second Law specifically so the thread has 4 posts and I can return to the top of it in two clicks instead of 20.)
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A scam? On Kickstarter? Who would have thought that such a thing could be possible?
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Why do I get the feeling that "forced routing" means "we'll send each packet using a different route through P2P"?
Ok, that would, indeed, make MITM hard.
That's probably where the boost in speed comes in, too! You know, you're not sending all your shit through a single peer and thus are not limited by their connection speed!
Which, of course, makes no sense, because you need to reassemble the stream properly on the other end anyway, and wait for that one packet that got routed through Uzbekistan. Also, I'm sure VoIP and gaming will be faster through a forced TCP connection...
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SOMEONE ACCIDENTALLY THE SHIFT KeY THERE!
Also, a suggestion for everyone: maybe screenshot or copy-paste the tweets as well? I personally hate the screenshot thing, but if that account gets suspended / deleted the thread might lose context in the future.
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Aren't oneboxes discobaked into the post? (I don't have a twitter I could use to try and see what happens, though ...)
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Not sure, tbh. The raw only shows the URL. What kind of discomagic happens on the server is not something I feel like checking, really.
Also, even if so, doesn't protect you from a rebake then, and knowing Discourse it might be possible that forced rebakes would be something required as a part of an update at some point somewhere down the line.
Or I'm just being paranoid. Maybe I need a SeverTM
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Wow, so many bold claims, but I think this one is my favourite:
@riking said:> Benefits
- No one can track your online purchases
No one.
Not even the people you are buying something from!
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If the tweet goes away you'll lose it on rebake. Copy it or http://archive.today
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The replies are neato:
@theroguefoundry God forbid anyone ask you to back up astounding claims while asking for $$$ to implement them...
@theroguefoundry Yeah, but meanwhile you're basically going through the checklist of classic strategies for avoiding real technical Q&A. :(
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But at least their photoshopping is pretty good.
It's nothing compared to their trolling.
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Not even the people you are buying something from!
What about my credit card company? I'm especially interested in them not finding out. Err...I mean...asking for a friend.
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But at least their photoshopping is pretty good.
Is it me, or is this actually a bad sign? I've noticed I've become wary of very slick-looking marketing when it comes to new technology. I'd instinctively trust some scruffy guys in a lab with an ugly prototype full of wires far more than I would slick marketing and pretty pictures, when they are claiming to have invented something.
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a data containment engine,
CONTAINMENT BREACH! ONE OF THE DATAS HAS ESCAPED. MOBILIZE ALL UNITS, IT MUST NOT LEAVE THE COMPUTER.
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You know what? After reading through this, it's obvious kickstarter users are the most gullible bunch of morons you can find online. Let them throw their money away, maybe after 5 or 10 times they'll learn something.
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Let them throw their money away, maybe after 5 or 10 times they'll learn something.
Meanwhile, in the less optimistic place that is this world, I recommend viewing the video in this other thread:
http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/valve-now-allows-selling-of-mods/48154/45?u=pjh
Edit: Which fails to make it to either the quote box, or the expanded quote box...
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I don't think that was kickstartered? That's an EA title, AFAIK.
Maybe you were thinking of War for the Overworld?
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I don't think that was kickstartered?
It wasn't. It was the 'let them throw their money away a few times, they'll learn' theory I was addressing.
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Ah.
Well, the fact that the kickstartered clone just released recently didn't help in discerning that :P
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There's nothing unique about Kickstarter and people doing stupid things. We didn't need a Kickstarter for someone to get rich on selling Pet Rocks or any number of useless things you can find all over the place. Confusing the medium with the baseline element of human stupidity is just expressing the latter in your own way.
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Just report the project for False Claims on kickstarter. (Button at the very bottom)
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Posting this demonstration of Blakeyrat's Second Law specifically so the thread has 4 posts and I can return to the top of it in two clicks instead of 20.
You know you can use the Home key to do it in one click from anywhere in the topic, right? (Assuming you're using a keyboard, of course.)
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CONTAINMENT BREACH! ONE OF THE DATAS HAS ESCAPED. MOBILIZE ALL UNITS, IT MUST NOT LEAVE THE COMPUTER.
Which one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMK-Xn7HZKE
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use the Home key to do it in one click
That doesn't make sense, unless you're on one of those old clackety mechanical keyboards…
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Or they're an on-screen keyboard user.
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Or they're pushing the corner of their mouse onto the key
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A Fistful of Data
Kinky.
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Not even the company that delivers packages to your doorstep from Dildos 'R' Us.
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In fact they seem rather unclear on the concept of open source.
I know how to parse that!
"We use open source for our tool chain so we don't pay anyone anything! We didn't say our code is open source."
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Who do you think those guys in the photo are?
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I have a combined router/modem. How can I connect Sever to it?
LIES!There are a few ways. One, hardwire it and use Sever as a wireless router and turn OFF the wireless of your modem. OR connect Sever wirelessly (like a signal booster) to your wireless signal, then connect to the Sever signal - which is our preferred method. (more secure)
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I have a combined router/modem. How can I connect Sever to it?
LIES!There are a few ways. One, hardwire it and use Sever as a wireless router and turn OFF the wireless of your modem. OR connect Sever wirelessly (like a signal booster) to your wireless signal, then connect to the Sever signal - which is our preferred method. (more secure)
Wonder what response they would have to the fact that using wifi to connect one router to another cuts your bandwidth by 50% at the router at the end. (i.e. it now has use its one radio to communicate to devices connected to it, and then to the upper end router)
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At least they're giving you a clue with their name, Rogue Foundry.
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I'm going to buy 10 and connect them together so I can game 100x faster than my internet connection.
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I'm going to buy 10 and connect them together so I can game 100x faster than my internet connection.
Meh....doesn't reduce jitter.
<or CSS that uses IDs
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No - it's only purpose is to reduce the amount of money in the bank accounts of idiots.
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Wonder what response they would have to the fact that using wifi to connect one router to another cuts your bandwidth by 50% at the router at the end. (i.e. it now has use its one radio to communicate to devices connected to it, and then to the upper end router)
But combined with the Secret Sauce(tm), that would still make everything five times faster.
Even light travels at 3.0x10^10 m/s when it passes near a S3/3R box.
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Even light travels at 3.0x10^10 m/s when it passes near a S3/3R box.
It's anonymous light though - so you won't see it.
Filed under: INB4 pedantry - Yes I know that's not what anonymous means but facts
jokes and it fitted better with it being light
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So. 10x faster.
Tell me, what happens when my data has to go through, you know, the actual internet? Or are they reinventing their own internet? Is that why it's so fast? Because there's only a few guys even using it right now?
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I'm going to buy 10 and connect them together so I can game 100x faster than my internet connection.
If each one increases speed by 10x, wouldn't 10 of them chained together increase speed by 10000000000x?
Paging @ben_lubar, we found something you need!
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If each one increases speed by 10x, wouldn't 10 of them chained together increase speed by 10000000000x?
Yes
It's been a long day.
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Homeopathic internet? Sign me up!
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I though you already had that.
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They also say they are some kind of special anti-terrorist agents.
Also, the hardware will be great because it is produced by graphic designers, video production masters and law enforcement professionals.
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That doesn't make sense, unless you're on one of those old clackety mechanical keyboards…
I'm on a new, non-clackety mechanical keyboard!
