I agree about the arduino and batteries, but this board is a bit different.
It uses external memory which takes more power. It uses javascript which could take much more power. And the wifi also might not be low power. So it's not clear yet how low power it is.
When you can buy something that looks like a decent(512MB, 4.5",dual core) android phone[1] at less than $100, and many similar models are coming from china , why bother with this phone ?
Encryption is basically a tool against wiretappers and men in the middle. But what if you don't fully trust your users, and fear they'll try to add exploits to your software ?
Another high level effort in security is meredith paterson's "language theoretic security"[1] can help you code secure protocols, to fight against this problem.
There's also a tool to help implement it called hammer[2].Not sure if fully developed yet.
Amazon currently plays a dual role; both a traditional retailer and a 3rd party logistics business, and they'll probably be quite good at both of those, see the kiva purchase for example.
I think they could probably beat ebay in this kind of game if they'll be interested.
Political change on it's own won't work. They will still keep the infrastructure in case they need to spy on someone(with a court order). But if they have the infrastructure , conceptually it's just a press of button again to full blown illegal surveillance.
Yes, the transparency does make sense. Maybe the NSA guy didn't tell him anything about the exploits of tor.
But the fact that it financed tor implies heavily that there are such exploits accessible to NSA. And the fact that it is known that tor is sensitive to global passive attackers is another. Even plain me can guess this.
Maybe the calculation favors tor, because if we assume you need to be a global passive attacker to exploit it, this favors large coalitions of many (currently democratic) nations collaborating over you're single repressive regime, and that seems like a reasonable compromise in thinking about a very hard ethical choice.
>> I believe both of them(Nick Mathewson and Roger Dingledine) have very high ethical standards and are great people;
This all issue of cryptography is ethically complex. One the one hand, too much state power can lead to bad things, definetly. On the other, strong crypto/anonymity can be a risky tool at the hands of terrorists. And in reality , terror can cause very bad stuff[1].
Say you are roger dingledine, and a very convincing NSA guy comes to you, and shows you the evidence that some terror act , that killed X people, has used anon-remailers. How would that make you feel ?
Except the guilt, one implication would be that USG would fight hard against mixminion.
And then he offers you to lead tor, with funding, and explains that this is a network that is hard to break ,so even if NSA can break it, it wouldn't do it for silly stuff , only for emergencies.
You don't need to be a bad person to accept. It's seems like a perfectly ethical thing to do.
Regarding bottom-up or top-down:
My guess is that NSA has a top-down strategy regarding cypherpunks.That's the way military forces work. And it would make sense for this tactic to be part of their strategy.
[1]WWI , The iraq war, and the cease of the israeli peace process were all at least partially caused by terrorists. And we still haven't seen WMD based terror.
I wonder if it is used as a pressure release valve for anonymity software developers. That way they focus their efforts on tor, which might be more amenable to USG exploits, than other anonymity networks.
One relevant data point:the author of mixminion remailer is working for the tor project,probably killing mixminion(a far more secure anonymizer).
Another relevant data point(for a similar strategy): Most of the research on JPEG steganography is done on grayscale images, which is mostly useless since mostly nobody sends grayscale images. Alot of What's done on color images is being done in places like iran, china and india(?).
I wonder: can espn , which holds streaming right for most live sports event until 2020 , use that power to start an online subscription service that also includes other content , and become the de facto tv provider ?
Also, most of the research in the field has been done on black and white image, so it not directly usefull.
And come to think on it, if we're talking about image stego, what prevents the NSA from controlling the statistical distributions of output of cameras in such a way that stego will be noticed(even after some image transforms) ?
With laser enrichment, you can do enrichment in a typical house with typical power consumption, so it seems easy to hide.
But building the tech today is quite complicated, and hopefully that stays that way in the future.