Teach or be caught
Share your skills so they can’t be used to trace you.
To strengthen the non-technical security of Freenet, we must nurture a culture of teaching and learning.
Style analysis can break every anonymity tech, because it attacks you as a person, not your tool.
Freenet has a long history of recommending to hide your style:
- use short sentences,
- avoid interesting words,
- adapt to your surroundings,
but there are aspects of your style you cannot hide without crippling your own abilities. These aspects are part of your skillset.
To reduce that problem, we recommend using three IDs: public/official, private/for friends, and secret, and to only use your special skills with the public ID. But this is not enough: It still limits what you can do safely.
The only other safe way to use your skills is to teach them to others. Once there are several people who can do the same as you (and do it), you regain anonymity. Your anonymity set when using your skills is then “all people on Freenet, who can use it, too”.
If you can teach your skill so well that every new user could use it, and some actually do, then your anonymity set becomes “all new users plus some old ones”.
So teach your skills to others here.
If someone should then say “you write all your tools in wisp, so I bet you’re the Freenet release manager”, you answer freely “no, I am not, I learned it from this tutorial”. And if people come to me and say “we found that this Freesite is made with wisp, so we think that you’re the author”, I can answer “no, I’m not. They must have learned from my tutorial”.
To improve security, do not just teach (and learn!) generic skills, but also teach best practices. These are just as recognizable as other aspects.
Teach or be caught,
Learn to be taught,
Share your skills,
Improve them together.
Can you make your next Sharesite one which teaches other Freenet users a skill they can use?