[HTTPS-Everywhere] persistent user-generated rules

[Claudio Moretti]

Hey all,

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 4:42 AM, John Stinson <johnkstinson at gmail.com>wrote:

> With respect to:
>
> 2. better way to upload rules
>>> I agree with Claudio that email is probably not a great way to do this.
>>>
>>
> Is there a measure of how non-technical / easy the submission of new or
> changed rules should be? It's currently email, would a git repo which
> people could submit pull requests against be too far in the technical
> direction?
>
>
I probably failed in expressing what I was thinking about:

I'd like to present a simple box to the user (like a <textarea></textarea>)
in chich the user can paste the new rule for submission.
Upon clicking "submit", HTTPS-E generates the git-diff and git-commits it
into a write-only repository.

Rule maintainers could then merge the commits instead of having to
copy-and-paste from emails or downloading attachments and then adding them
to the main repo.

Again, just an idea, I didn't actually think about the issues this may
cause and to the technical difficulty in implementing it :)


E-mail is (mostly) not secure in any sense. Other people can read it,
> change it, and see who you are. It really seems like a bad thing, even
> though we seem to be stuck with it.
>

I'm sorry, but I don't understand this point: what does it matter if people
can read emails? Nobody is going to be able to edit my email, unless they
have access to each and every server my email was delivered to and they do
so before anybody could read the original.
If you don't want people to know who you are, you're not going to post
anything on a public mailing list or, if you do so, you can use a
disposable, one purpose email you created just for that.

Moreover, we are talking about an open source project. I really don't see
the point in trying to hide yourself (unless you're somebody from a country
that forbids encryption in some way? In that case, you write your own
ruleset and keep it to yourself, or find a way to distribute it. But if you
live in those countries, you probably know how to hide yourself)


> With the POST idea, you would be using Tor if it’s available, right? On
> the server side, you could do some basic validation on the rules when they
> are submitted; wouldn’t that make it hard to use this system for spam
> distribution or file storage? It would be nice if everyone could write and
> everyone could read.
>

Still, I don't see the point in using TOR: it's not like you're sending out
personal information.
But it could be done like it's done for the Observatory.
If you read my previous posts, I mentioned that one of the requirements of
an automatic submission system would be that the system should be
write-only.
It would be nice to have public access, but (quoting myself)

> It should be "write only", of course, meaning that everybody can write to
> is but only a few chosen ruleset reviewers can read from it (otherwise,
> you'll find your repository being used as a spam distribution point / file
> storage website in a couple hours or less).
>

 How would you propose we avoid a read-write system being used as a "spam
distribution or file storage"?

To try to address the fingerprinting concerns, we could try to check the
> rulesets against what others see. We could do, for rulesets, what people
> already do for certificates:
> - centralised approach: SSL Observatory
>

Cool, but needs maintenance and as Yan said the EFF tech staff is already
overloaded


> - distributed approach: Perspectives [1] – this should have a custom
> notary list, of course


Also really cool, but rules change faster than SSL certificates, so I'm not
really sure how this approach could be implemented effectively.
Remember that we are also focusing on speed, so the overhead caused by
checking rules against notaries every time you open a website might be a
little too much, and it may prove to be far less useful than checking SSL
certificates.

Cheers,

Claudio
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