OK, I read the paper.

The money quote is at the end:

The evaluation results from Section 4 show that work still needs to be done before program obfuscation is usable in practice. In fact, the most complex function we obfuscate with meaningful security is a 16-bit point function, which contains just 15 AND gates. Even such a simple function requires about 9 hours to obfuscate and results in an obfuscation of 31.1 GB. Perhaps more importantly (since the obfuscation time is a one-time cost), evaluating the 16-bit point obfuscation on a single input takes around 3.3 hours. However, it is important to note that the fact that we can produce any “useful” obfuscations at all is surprising. Also, both obfuscation and evaluation are embarrassingly parallel and thus would run significantly faster with more cores (the largest machine we experimented on had 32 cores).

Translated into programmer English, a "16 bit point function" is basically a mathematical function that yields either true or false depending on the input. It would correspond to the following C++ function prototype:

bool point_function(short input);

In other words you can hide a 16-bit "password" inside such a function and discover if you got a match or not. Obviously, obfuscating such a function is just a toy to experiment with. "SHA256(x) == y" is also a point function and one that can be implemented in any programming language with ease - short of brute forcing it, there is no way to break such an "obfuscated point function". Thus using this technique doesn't presently make a whole lot of sense. However, it's a great base to build on.

I should note that the reference to AND gates above doesn't mean that the program is an arbitrary circuit - it means that the "program" which is being obfuscated is in fact a boolean formula. Now you can translate boolean circuits into boolean formulas, but often only at great cost. And regular programs can only be translated into circuits at also a great cost. So you can see how far away from practicality we are. Nonetheless, just last year the entire idea that you could do this at all seemed absurd, so to call the progress so far astonishing would be an understatement. Right now the field of iO is developing so fast that the paper's authors note that whilst they were writing it, new optimisations were researched and published, so there are plenty of improvements left open for future work.

The objective of "mathematically proven security properties" via program obfuscation is definitely not achievable. After all, it's a given security principle of "security through obfuscation" is unsupportable. If an adversary is capable of obtaining the executable of a program, they can also reverse engineer that same executable. It may take a lot of effort, but it is always achievable.

That is the standard consensus view in the software industry, yes. I'm afraid to tell you though, that it's wrong.

Last year there was a mathematical breakthrough in the field of what is called "indistinguishability obfuscation". This is a mathematical approach to program obfuscation which has sound theoretical foundations. This line of work could in theory yield programs whose functioning cannot be understood no matter how skilled the reverse engineer is.

It is important to note here a few important caveats. The first is that iO (to use the cryptographers name) is presently a theoretical technique. A new paper came out literally 5 days ago that claims to discuss an implementation of the technique but I haven't read it yet. Will do so after posting this comment. Indeed, it seems nobody is quite sure how to make it work with practical performance at this time.

The second caveat is that the most well explored version of it only applies to circuits which can be seen as a kind of pure functional program only. Actually a circuit is closer to a mathematical formula than a real program e.g. you cannot write circuits in C or any other programming language we mortals are familiar with. Researchers are now starting to look at the question of obfuscating "RAM programs" i.e. programs that look like normal imperative programs written in dialects of, say, C. But this work is still quite early.

The third caveat is that because the techniques apply to pure functions only, they cannot do input or output. This makes them somewhat less than useful for obfuscation of the sort of programs that are processed with commercial obfuscators today like video games.

Despite those caveats the technique is very exciting and promising for many reasons, none of which have to do with DRM. For example iO could provide a unifying framework for all kinds of existing cryptographic techniques, and enable cryptographic capabilities that were hereto only conjectured. For example timelock crypto can be implemented using and iO obfuscator and Bitcoin.

Maybe so, maybe no. The SR forums had people panicking because they discovered IP address leaks several times. It's not exactly unimaginable that SR did indeed leak its own IP address, especially as a comment on the Krebs blog suggests the nginx config was busted.

There's a whole generation of people using the Internet who literally don't know how to browse to a website directly ..... And browser makers increasing trend to monkeying with the address bar's function only makes it worse.

Wait, which is it? Do you want browser makers to try and fix the address bar so more people know how to use it, or do you want to preserve the status quo?

I'd prefer browser makers to radically step up the level of monkeying with the address bar. The address bar is stupid. It's easily the worst part of the web's entire design and has given us a generation of phishing sites and other crap that exploit the fact that web browsers/apps basically dump a part of their internal memory state onto the user interface. No other app does this ..... because it's stupid.

Otherwise, it's just lip service. Your government is already ignoring your Constitution on a large scale, but apparently nobody gives a damn

I am not American, still, I do truly believe that hundreds of millions of Americans do give a damn.

The problem is not giving a damn. The problem is that guns are a stupid way to try and change governments, and everyone there must intuitively understand this. I keep reading comments by 2nd amendment fundamentalists saying they're packing guns so they can overthrow the government .... in case it becomes tyrannical. But this day will never arrive, no matter what the US Gov does.

The first problem is that if you go it alone, if you're a solo shooter, you can't achieve anything and will be killed immediately, then written off as mentally unstable. This does happen in the USA and in at least one case the shooter did claim they were rebelling against the government. Regardless, such events are zero impact.

The second problem is that if you try to team up with like minded people and form a group of armed citizens who are going to engage in a revolutionary coup, you will need to communicate in order to find such people, and at that point you are very likely to attract the attention of law enforcement who have totalitarian surveillance powers and the ability to move against "cults" or "terrorists". And almost by definition if you're trying to overthrow the government through force of arms instead of the ballot box you can be described as a domestic terrorist. You will end up sitting in jail for many years, and most people will likely never hear of you, or if they do read about your case in the papers they will just forget about you.

The third problem is that if you do somehow overcome the first two problems and succeed in forming some kind of revolutionary militia, taking over some territory and defending it against the US army in a new American civil war, you will need a system of government for that territory. How exactly you prevent that new government from eventually going the same way as the existing government would be an open question - attempting to encode the principles of the new state in a constitution apparently doesn't work very well, and I don't see many other ideas from the "guns give us freedom!!" crowd. This is the problem repeatedly encountered by countries in the Middle East where governments are overthrown (without guns, normally) and then tend to get immediately replaced with something worse.

So for these reasons the notion that Americans are free because of guns just doesn't seem to line up with common sense, to me. I cannot imagine any situation in which civil war in the USA would be allowed to happen - civil war is so universally catastrophic that an overwhelming majority of American's would strongly support forcible suppression of an armed uprising using all the tools of a professional army. Your Glock ain't gonna do anything against a Predator drone.

Occams Razor says ...... networks like Tor which are incapable of handling abuse by design ...... get a lot of abuse! So not surprisingly networks that have advanced anti-abuse controls in place throttle it a lot. Otherwise you're just asking to get crawled by SQL injector searchers and so on. This is not CloudFlare's problem, it's inherent in how Tor works and what it's trying to achieve. Solving it means finding a way to trade off anonymity against accountability using user reputation systems or the like, but the Tor project has shown little interest in implementing such a thing, so all Tor users get treated as a whole.

It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately it's hard to see how it can be. The technology industry has a poor track record of deploying truly strong end to end privacy protections, partly because the physics of how computers work mean that outsourcing things to big powerful third parties that can be easily subverted is very common. E.g. my mobile phone can search gigabytes of email from the last decade in a split second and rank it by importance, despite having nowhere near enough computing capacity to really do that itself, only because it's relying on the Gmail servers to help it out.

That same phone can receive calls only because the mobile network knows where it is. How do you build a mobile phone that is invulnerable to government monitoring of its location? It doesn't seem technically possible. The only solution is to ensure that anonymous SIM cards are easily obtained and used, but many countries have made those illegal as part of the war on drugs.

This trend towards outsourcing, specialisation and sharing of data to obtain useful features is ideal for governments who can then go ahead and silently obtain access to people's information without those people knowing about it. I do not see it reversing any time soon. The best we're going to achieve in the near term future is encryption of links between devices and datacenters, but this doesn't help when politicians are simply voting themselves the power to go reach in to those datacenters.

Ultimately the only long term solutions here can be political, and I fear we will need a far longer and larger history of abuses to become visible before the majority will really shift on this. The problem is a large age skew. Older people skew heavily authoritarian, if you believe the opinion polls, and are much more likely to support this kind of spying. Perhaps they associate it with the cold war. Perhaps the old adage "a libertarian is a republican who wasn't mugged yet" has some truth to it. Whatever the cause, the 1960's baby boom means that demographically, older people can outvote younger people as a block, and for this reason there aren't really any fiscally conservative, economically trusted AND individual rights-respecting parties in the main English speaking countries. People get to pick between borrow-and-spend socialists with an authoritarian bent, and fiscal conservatives with an authoritarian bent, so surprise surprise we end up with people in power who are authoritarians.

whether (in light of what's known) default strong encryption for everything is something users should just get whether they like it or not.

There are many unsolved problems for making strong end to end secured communications work. Key management is only one. A bigger and even more complicated problem is that people derive significant benefits from sharing their message contents with big, powerful third parties, for example spam filtering, importance filtering, ability to search 10 years of email from a cheap battery powered device, ability to receive messages when all personal devices are offline, ability to reset passwords if they are forgotten and so on.

To make truly end to end communication ubiquitous you would have to find a way to recreate all these features in the purely decentralised end to end context. Otherwise "giving" e2e crypto to people "whether they like it or not" is a quick way to find an angry mob with pitchforks outside your house. A lot of people care a lot more about those features than (somewhat theoretical) privacy against the NSA.

Note I said that both of them are living off their credit cards. I'm well aware of the poor state of the UK's finances.

Did you just claim that mass shootings at schools in the USA happen less frequently than nuclear meltdowns?

Ouch. I've seen quite a few family breakup analogies, but this is the first time I saw Scotland be the child instead of the spouse.

If we're going analogise a country to a person, actually I'd say it's pretty natural to seek out unions even though they involve giving up some independence. That's why people get married. That's why the EU keeps growing. Even the most perfect couples don't always agree all the time, but they find ways to figure it out because it's better together than apart. Divorces are universally considered a tragedy in our culture exactly because we recognise that unions bring strength: when one partner stumbles, the other is there to help.

Salmond's behaviour with Scotland has been like going to a wife in a working marriage where decisions are taken together and telling her constantly, repeatedly, that she's too good for the man she's with. That her husband treats her unfairly. That she's oppressed by him. That everything wrong in her life is her husbands fault. She didn't get the promotion she wanted? Husband's fault. She doesn't get enough attention? Husband's fault. She can't afford the clothes she wants? Husband's fault. He's just so unfair. How could she not be better off without him? She's strong and pure and good and she needs to break up with this loser.

Oh, the husband objects? He doesn't want a divorce? That's just bullying. He's promising to give her more say? It's just lies. He's asking how she'll pay the rent without him? Scaremongering. Of course you can pay the rent. Sure you may not earn enough to pay all the bills each month and you've both been relying on the credit card, but selling off the family silver will take care of that.

I could go on but you get the idea. The ultimate legacy of Salmond's failed campaign is that a significant chunk of the Scottish population has bought into the idea that they're somehow superior or morally better than the emotionally deformed English, whereas such feelings were not previously widespread. This is a toxic legacy that could take generations to resolve. It will certainly not make anything easier in future.

Most importantly the Parliament Act allows the Commons to force a bill through Lords if it's been sent back twice already, regardless of what the Lords want. Therefore the most the HoL can do is slow things down.

Given this fact it's probably not surprising that nobody cares much about reforming it. It's another check/balance and all it can ultimately do is throw sand in the wheels, it has no real power.

it's sad that the concept of independence and sovereignty boils down to mere money for some (or most) people.

Why? Scotland is not oppressed, it does not have severe racial/religious/ethnic divides with the rest of the UK. It was not conquered by England. Nobody has family members that have died because of the Union. In fact the Union has been ruled by Scottish PM's twice in recent history.

That makes splitting it out into a new country a largely technical matter of economics and future government policy. It's quite dry stuff. The Yes campaign chose to ignore this and attempted to whip up a notion of Scottish exceptionalism through the constant "fairer better society" rhetoric, but ultimately they lost because when people asked questions about the technical details of why Scotland would be better and whether it'd be worth the cost, they had no answers. Given that the primary impact of independence would be economic, this lack of planning proved fatal.

How would that split have worked out in the end? The UK would swing wildly right... Quickly get involved in lots of wars, crack down on "terrorists" etc... Scotland would have swung wildly left, and quickly bankrupted themselves with social programs. Balance is a good thing, even if you're currently getting the short end of the stick.

Just because historically politics has been dominated by two bundled sets of largely unrelated policies doesn't mean it has to be that way.

In a post-independence UK, the rUK would have been temporarily dominated by the Tories until Labour, freed from the need to constantly try and drag their Scottish MPs away from hard-socialist economics, found a new voice for themselves that didn't easily pigeonhole into left vs right. For example they could have campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility combined with pacifist policies, pro EU integration and raising taxes specifically for the NHS. That would likely have been an appealing combination even to many existing Tory voters. It'd be difficult for them to take up such policies with credibility because in fact the UK was taken into the Iraq war by Tony Blair, a Scottish Labour PM. And Cameron's similar attempt to go to war in Syria was rejected by a coalition Parliament. But staking out pacifism as a policy seems like such an easy win it's surely only a matter of time until Labour gets a leader with vision again and they try something like this.

With respect to Scotland, I suspect they would have ended up following economic policies closely aligned with that of rUK despite all the rhetoric about building a "fairer society" (means taxing the rich more up there). For one, they already have the power to raise income taxes even without full independence and they haven't actually used it. Actually the SNP's only post-independence tax policy they formally adopted was lowering corporation tax to try and grab businesses from the rUK. There are no socialist parties in Scotland with any real heft, so after the post-independence street parties died down the Scots who all voted to build a "fairer society" would have discovered that the neoliberal consensus is called a consensus because it turns out a lot of people agree with it.

Anybody who wants secession is just bad at economics.

Maybe. But I read that Congress has a lower approval rating than cockroaches. I doubt economics is the only thing they're thinking about. Much like the Scottish case, this 25% is being driven by disdain with Washington politics. And remember, when Salmond got started support for independence was only about 20-25% in Scotland too (maybe a bit higher, I forgot, but it definitely wasn't 50%). So watch out!