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This is quite a concrete illustration of the concept of the perfect being the enemy of the good. Thank you.


No... It's a demonstration of adherence the axiom "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" being misapplied.

The "Good" (VPN) is exactly as imperfect as it's complete abscence. There has been no improvement whatsoever. Literally, as far as Privacy is concerned, nothing short of "No one actor has the capability to sit on a full stream of traffic", will suffice.

Either you're MITM'd or you aren't. Use malicious postmen if it makes it easier.

If you have the same guy come, and all of your mail goes through him, he can reconstruct all conversational state.

Now imagine you get a different malicious postman at random every day. He eacesdrops on every packet, but he's not privy to which of his fellows is scheduled to get the next packet. Therefore, it's not practicable to MITM in any practical way. This all goes out the window when someone controls the malicious postman scheduler, of course, because then they can figure out a map of who to go to to reconstruct your conversation.

The above is the concept behind Tor, and why the only effective counter to it is to run a hell of a lot of entry/exit nodes so you can conceivably time correlate given enough consecutive probe points are hit.


Russia has the ability to drop a nuke in the region you currently live in, so there's no such thing as safety and therefore why do you have locks on your doors?


i find this extremely doubtful. I see the point of your statement, but i'm willing to bet 99% of all the already built nuclear devices wouldn't work today. There's no way that they're all stored in such a way that the delicate mechanisms are protected from the environment and oxidization, moisture ingress, insects, heat and cold expansion and contraction.

That a nation could make a new device is arguable, that a nation could make a device that could be delivered without flying planes over another country is less arguable. Even nukes as they stand would only pose significant threats to certain parts of a country (there was a map floating around the web a few days back of areas of the US most susceptible to the - pardon the pun - fallout from a tactical strike.)


Especially when you consider that what they're really saying is that a VPN won't hide you from a state level actor.

Yeah, of course not, that's not nearly the only reason to use a VPN.




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