Proplex, a long-time member of the Tox-Foundation and in charge of both infrastructure and marketing, called out tox devs because the 2 people in charge (irungentoo and stqism) were dealing with money in a shady way and he got suspicious. This lead him to leaving the Tox Foundation Proof: https://gist.github.com/irungentoo/5af26f5edefcdb7eac72
After he went away and stopped to pay for the website and other servers (he hosted everything), Tox devs got angry and tracked his online activity by his browser UA, read his private email sent to his @tox.im address and considered breaking into his VPS account Proof: https://gist.github.com/urras/ba792274f5aaf662a082/5d91d2a78... and https://archive.today/KkSWp
Members of the Tox Foundation such as stqism try constantly to sneak in copyright changes in unrelated fixes: Proof: https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/pull/1219 and https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/pull/1224
irungentoo enforced censorship on his github repo to try to cover everything up Proof: https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1227
After it got out of hand and too many people called out the Tox Foundation, this happened: Proof: http://a.pomf.se/kqwgsg.png
irungentoo claims Tox is secure just because he uses a secure primitive, which is really arrogant and something only a pretentious deceiver would say. This is a crypto 101 mistake. Proof: https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121#issuecommen...
After the points exposed above, the conclusion is obvious, at least for me.
The Tox Foundation claims Tox is completely secure and nobody can break in, not even the NSA. Still, there's been no security audit and it is highly likely Tox isn't completely secure, given it's alpha software. But their website gives the idea people face no risk by using Tox right now. They are deceiving people to believe it is secure so they gain more users at the expense of putting users privacy at risk. Proof: https://tox.im itself. See all security claims even though it hasn't been audited. Saying it's "alpha" doesn't mean to anything to non-tech-savvy, they will think it's missing a feature or two, not that their privacy and security is possibly compromised.
I believe it's my moral obligation, and of everyone's else reading this, not to use Tox. You are contributing to a shady foundation composed of menchildren that don't care about other's privacy, deals with money in a shady way and dox people who go against them. Do not trust the Tox Foundation - this is my personal message.
1. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22irungentoo+enforced+censo...
Edit: I have no affiliation here, just an outside observer. I think it's relevant because, unlike the screenshot of #1228, the still alive 1229 issue (at least) shows that this happened nearly a month ago.
Whether or not the fact that it happened nearly a month ago matters I don't know, but at least it's a bit of extra context/info.
We barely get any donations. We barely have money and we are very transparent about it, look at our donations page.
>After he went away and stopped to pay for the website and other servers (he hosted everything)
He disappeared one day, didn't warn us or anything and took everything (including backups) with him.
>Tox devs got angry and tracked his online activity by his browser UA, read his private email sent to his @tox.im address and considered breaking into his VPS account
Yes because I wanted to know if he had done anything weird on the site. We never considered breaking into his account. His tox.im mail was never remade on the new tox.im mail server so all emails sent to it ended up in our catch all email.
>Members of the Tox Foundation such as stqism try constantly to sneak in copyright changes
I'm a member of the Tox foundation and I don't sneak in copyright changes in my repo. He also didn't try to sneak it in. I never merge pull requests before reading everything first.
>After it got out of hand and too many people called out the Tox Foundation, this happened
Yes and I explained exactly what happened. What is the issue?
>irungentoo enforced censorship on his github repo to try to cover everything up
Because kicking trolls is censorship?
>irungentoo claims Tox is secure just because he uses a secure primitive
Scroll down to my next comment in that thread.
Sorry for my previous comment. This one should be better.
>we are very transparent about it, look at our donations page. That page tell barely nothing and is outdated. What's the money being spent on? Who's the financial manager? As a donator, how can I be sure my money is being spent on Tox and not on personal servers, vacations, etc. by the Tox Foundation leaders? There were rumors about that, and although I don't believe them, this is a serious issue anyway.
>He disappeared one day, didn't warn us or anything and took everything (including backups) with him. And on the same day you started harassing him, without even listening to his side of the story? And what do you mean with backups? You are saying you or other project members didn't keep local backups? That would be an amateur mistake to make.
>Yes because I wanted to know if he had done anything weird on the site And the NSA just wants to know if we had done anything weird on their country. /sarcasm Do you think that justifies spying on him?
>We never considered breaking into his account But you said the following at #tox-secret on January 14th: "urras, if you want to forcefully gain access to his digital ocean account I can reset his pass" SOURCE: https://archive.today/Y6LEw (line 45)
>His tox.im mail was never remade on the new tox.im mail server so all emails sent to it ended up in our catch all email As soon as he left the project you should have deleted his @tox.im email account or at least temporarily disabled it. It's unethical to keep receiving (and reading) emails that were meant to someone else.
>I'm a member of the Tox foundation and I don't sneak in copyright changes in my repo I never said you did, I was talking about stq, the second in command of the foundation. https://github.com/stqism/ToxCore/commit/bed425598f26938bd54...
>Because kicking trolls is censorship? Tell me, how is this a troll? http://i.imgur.com/HNFtcOG.png Keep in mind the title was defaced (and later on the message) by irungentoo. As soon as dfortner raised up those questions, you locked the issue, edited his messages to say garbage, hurting his image, and banned him from the repository so he couldn't raise the issue again.
>Sorry for my previous comment. This one should be better. This one isn't a blatant rant without content like the other one, it's just some damage control. I honestly don't know what is worse, but I guess you are right on saying this is a little better.
If you actually go and see the "proof" links you'll see most of them are 404 because the OP didn't bother to updating them.
Hopefully I archive most for good measure.
What we have in this forum are achive.org links. Those links contain conversations about breaking into Proplex's accounts and tracking Proplex's behavior. We should not have to filter past this argument of yours.
Your other argument just accuses someone of being a forum troll.
To be less sarcastic: Does it matter who the developers are and how they behave? If the source is open then it can be reviewed by anyone. If it works, there is no reason not to use it.
The guy in question tried to damage the project on his way out so yes I grepped our server logs for his ips because I wanted to know if he had tried anything weird.
This guy posting this comment here is someone who decided to start this war against the project after I refused to kick someone who actually did something from our project. He posts this bullshit everywhere.
Hint: it involves replying to actual concerns rather than ad hominems. I mean, it's not like GP doesn't have any material on you, there's some pretty shitty stuff going on there.
Furthermore, having spent a lot of time researching parsers and how parser differentials can affect the security of systems, I suggested they use some tools, such as protocol buffers, to eliminate handwritten parsing code. The response I got was rather disheartening and downright hostile - it boiled down to the fact that protocol buffers involves C++ code which they are a priori against, without actually engaging in a factual argument (I wrote an article in the current USENIX login/ last years OSDI about parsers for binary protocols for anyone interested in background: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14... and github.com/jbangert/nail)
Clang has some great tools I use like the various sanitizers. Static analysis sucks and almost never finds any real issues but we still use it.
If you think toxcore should use protocol buffers, feel free to port it. This is an open source project and contributions are welcome. If you do a better job than me then I will merge your contribution. We are at #tox-dev on freenode.
Being against C++ isn't inherently a bad thing. For example, Tarsnap probably won't ever use C++ code.
I can't read your PDF because of an SSL certificate error.
As has been pointed out below, there are many C bindings for Protobuf (and my argument was that using something like protobuf allows reimplementing the protocol).
They tried to cover it up by adding onion-routing for friend requests, but ACTUAL MESSAGES are still done directly.
Strong adversaries such as your ISP and agencies like the NSA, the GCHQ, etc. can still collect metadata about your conversations.
The "Tox Foundation" tries to cover this up and pretend that "tox was never meant to be anonymous", but the truth is harsh.
Now, this wouldn't be a problem if the Tox Foundation made this issue clear to its users. This is how P2P works, after all, direct connections, and that's fine.
But the problem is that Tox doesn't make that obvious for non-tech-savvy users.
When they read on the website that they are completely safe from the NSA and whatnot, they won't expect to be in any way exposed.
Still, unless these non-tech-savvy users "route all incoming and outgoing traffic through Tor" they won't be completely safe and should be worried about metadata leakage and adding people they don't actually know. But such a thing isn't made clear and Tox deceives users this way, only to get more people using it. It's unethical and outright wrong, in my personal opinion.
Full disclosure: Tox has not yet been professionally audited.
irungentoo: tox main developer, head of the Tox Foundation NikolaiToryzin (stqism): second in command, run the Tox Foundation's monetary operation The rest are other developers on the #tox-secret channel.
TRACKING PROPLEX, AN EX-MEMBER OF THE TOX FOUNDATION, ONLINE ACTIVITY THROUGH HIS UA:
irungentoo prolapses phone seems to have a unique user agent
NikolaiToryzin If you tell me it I can make tox.im return stuff to him only
irungentoo 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; SM-N900V Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.69 Mobile Safari/537.36' NikolaiToryzin That'll be fun
READING HIS PRIVATE EMAIL:
irungentoo basically proplex did an email request change on his digital ocean account which means an email containing his ip got sent to david@tox.im which ended up in the catch all email
urras irungentoo: Any interesting emails? irungentoo urras, if you want to forcefully gain access to his digital ocean account I can reset his pass
[...]
NikolaiToryzin But they want his personal info
urras How do you guys know
NikolaiToryzin Emails.
irungentoo comparing himself to the NSA:
irungentoo I feel like the NSA
irungentoo tracking people across ips even without cookies is so easy
irungentoo https://mail.tox.im/prolapse.txt [link now unavailable, but I archived it https://archive.today/KkSWp ]
irungentoo why would I want to go after terrorists?
irungentoo blackmailing people with power is much more lucrative
TRACKING AN EX-DEVELOPER AGAIN:
irungentoo 173.52.122.131 - - [13/Jan/2015:00:33:01 -0500] "GET /User:Proplex HTTP/1.1" 404 3656 "https://github.com/Tox/Tox-Website" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36"
irungentoo interesting
irungentoo I like how he checked if the wiki was up: 96.250.8.105 - - [20/Dec/2014:02:12:30 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 5 "https://tox.im/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36"
irungentoo you really don't need cookies to track people online.
Though to be properly anonymous you would need to run it through Tor: https://wiki.tox.im/Tox_over_Tor_(ToT)
The reason Tox doesn't have built in anonymity is because strong anonymity has a massive impact on quality (especially streaming data like audio/video). Our goal is to steal normal (non-paranoid) users from Skype and get everyone and their mother using strong encryption. In order to achieve that we need to have comparable quality rather than something that feels like you're using a 28.8k modem.
And again, anyone who actually wants anonymity still has that option.
toxuser@toxbox:~$ tox send pg "Hi, YC looks cool!"
Or maybe even crazier like that Zero project thing (I forget what it is called).
That said, good stuff. :)
I have to echo the parent though, getting history from the period you were disconnected is a killer feature of skype that seems to get little or no attention.
It is one of the major things that keeps some of my group chats on skype.
I mean, can you be sure something is secure just because of the crypto lib?
I thought there had something to do with the implementation too?
I ask this because of Tox. The main developer claims Tox is secure because of the crypto library.
It sounds weird to me, so I decided to ask... After all, if it was this easy all programs would be secure, right? Just import a secure crypto lib and it's done? Sounds weird.
https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121#issuecommen...
Looking at some of these [flagkilled] comments... all I can say is... it sure makes me happy to be a part of the HN community and that we have a place which is largely free of that "nonsense" (a much too overly nice way to describe it)
An audit or a bounty with no limitations on rendering the system insecure. An example of how not to do this would be the Telegram contest sham.
[0] - https://tox.im/
Qt client: https://github.com/tux3/qTox
ncurses client: https://github.com/Tox/toxic
metro/windows client: https://github.com/Reverp/Toxy
plain C client (uses xlib/win32 to draw the UI): https://github.com/notsecure/uTox
racket client: https://github.com/lehitoskin/blight
there's also java bindings: https://github.com/sonOfRa/tox4j
etc...
If so, I'm curious about the details like context and experience.
