Bitcoin Forum

It has come to my attention that Sourceforge only does what the U.S.A. government wants, so it isn't the right place to host the Bitcoin client nor the bitcoin.org website.

You can see what i mean here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitelegal/wiki/Terms_of_Use#ProhibitedPersons

It came to my knowledge because of this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37402.0

Probably you guys chosen the wrong place to host such a project.
Free hosting is good, allright, but not when it comes with this price tag ;)

If they let the US government tell them what to do, i ask: What's next? Giving the authorities access to repositories so they can install backdoors?

I think this is a very serious issue and I bet a lot of people will agree with me.

Let the discussion begin!

PS: Sorry for not being eloquent enough but I guess you all understand what I want to say.

Why "remove"? It`s not a Bitcoin way ;) Add some mirrors, diversification will solve the problem.

Do you think it's a good idea to take the risk?

I'm fully aware that the source code is hosted on github, but I'm also aware that 90% or more of Bitcoin installs come from the exe's on sourceforge.

I know I'm not trusting SourceForge anymore...
If they are willing to punish people that live under oppressive regimes just for fear of US law i wonder what else will they do when said law "asks"* them...
*forces them to

This is a requirement by all US based companies. No exceptions, this includes github, googlecode, et al

Yes, yes, but... does it make it right?

Or is Bitcoin also bending over and let the US government do as he pleases?

EDIT: Why doesn't Bitcoin have it's own servers in a less restrictive country and hosts all the code themselves instead of relying in companies that have to follow US rulings, no matter how unfair they are?

Or will they just kill the project as soon as the US government says Bitcoin should die?

No, but your thing about getting it off sourceforge is pointless because it makes no difference.
In any case, the source is out there, so it doesn't matter. SF is just a mirror at this point.

No it isn't... It's the only official place from where people can get compiled binaries.

Why would people be dumb enough to trust compiled binaries? Compile from source, audit the source.

I'm sure 60+% of bitcoiners are dumb enough to use these binaries

I'm about to post a poll in the discussion forum, we'll see

+1 for this post.

There are still too many Bitcoiners who don't realize that in order for Bitcoin to succeed, it MUST be accessible to the general public whose experience with new software is simply download and click-click-click.

Fixed that for ya.

Do you really think it will be hard to put binaries up on a different mirror some day if we need to?

Fixed that for ya

Now on a serious note: Usually I'm not the ultra-paranoid freak type, but do you think Satoshi never came forward with his identity just because? The invention of Bitcoin would be a great thing in anybodys' resume, but he chose to hide because he knew about the powerful enemies he would face if he didn't.
Now, you are giving the power to a US controlled institution to f*** us without us even knowing about it.

Leave the binaries there if you think it's the right thing to do. Move them in a hurry after the trouble comes if you think that's the best thing to do. Just don't say you weren't warned or that you didn't knew about it when it happens.

For a project that is all about decentralization i see it too much centralized in the US, even worse, the source code is hosted in servers under the power of US law.

Let's see how it rolls. After all Bitcoin was like that from the start. Too bad that the only person who seemed to ever think about the dangers of this was the creator, and he's gone.

Sometimes you have to pick your battles.  There are enough other ones looming on the horizon to not give the government this one as an easy excuse to go after the devs based in the USA.   

I do think the distribution is a bit lax.  They should at least be being signed.  This would allow mirrors to be made and a way to still check that what you get was ok.  Once this is done,  the issue should be solvable by people that want to solve it. If that issue is providing more global access to the bitcoin binaries anyway.  Are there any bridge counties?  Like could someone in China download it, then provide it to N Koreans?

We would notice within hours if they did that. You see, the SHA-1 hashes of all official releases are PGP signed by a trusted developer, and people DO check them every now and then. It'd be great if we had a bot check them, though.

I would suggest mirrors in the Netherlands and Sweden.  Both are fairly nonrestrictive countries as far as I know.

Anyone want to volunteer to do this?  I'm sure we could find a host that would accept Bitcoins even, or just do it for free.

Thats good. I was surprised that it seemed like they are not.  Would be good to use two different hashes or at least not sha-1 anymore.  Also, it is not obvious at all from the bitcoin.org page.  I just see link to downloads of the binaries, where are the links to the signatures?

Yes, I understand that. I also know that people like Dan Kaminsky review the source code or at least did it once and said it was a ugly like hell but very well thought-off and bug-free.
But I also remember this (http://www.h-online.com/news/item/SourceForge-disables-servers-after-break-in-1179756.html) and this (http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20025767-281.html)

I think you guys have a wrong picture about the "development" of bitcoin.
Basically, there is almost no development going on, I would at best call it maintenance.
I don't believe that there are even 10 lines of *code* changes commited on average per day, so one could probably even teach his grandma to review those :)

Perhaps in addition to moving off of SF a yearly audit of the code should be required.

We could make it a contest.  Pay BTC to those who find the most severe security flaws, just like Google does.  I would donate to doing that.

Because people in iran "or any other country's listed" cannot access sourceforge, you want bitcoin not to be hosted on SF?

I would be willing to host a mirror of the executable and I'm sure others would in a similar fashion. The big issue is making sure that all the hosts are trustworthy enough not to compile a trojan version and upload that. One solution is to post the SHA-1 checksum of the legit exe onto the official site, but many people would likely ignore it.

Have you bothered to even read the thread?

mainly because Sourceforge is a puppet on US government hands. For an organization that is said to promote openness they seem to closed to me. And they should to you also.

And is it only Iran? What about Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Syria? Shouldn't it be these people that live under opressive regimes that Bitcoin should help? Or only american and european lazy ass speculators are intitled to use a free decentralized currency?

Maybe you should go live in one of those countries and enjoy their restrictions before you start talking nonsense.

What about the danger that it poses to distribute an essential piece of the project on servers that are owned by a company that will turn in all their logs and HDD's to US government as soon as they ask?

Maybe when the government of the country you live in asks sourceforge for the IP logs that accessed the bitcoin files and yours is among them you will think diferently.

So much for a free internet when people can't see past their belly...  ::)

Yes I read it. Nonsense? It makes sense to me as you want bitcoin removed because iran and no up to good other countries cannot access SF. Why would I care if the US govt seen my ip accessing bitcoin files from SF? Is bitcoin illegal in the USA? I wouldn't trust any of these country's "Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria" either.

I'm secretelly hoping for your country to get into one of those lists. maybe then you will understand that the inhabitants of a country are not the same as their governing powers.

Ask me how i know that... because unfortunatelly my parents lived in a country under an oppressive regime for many years of their life, in fact it was like more than half of their life. All that stopped when the said country army ended that oppressive regime in 1974. If your reasoning were to be correct, then the army would not rebel against the government to free the people, because as you said, those countries(and subsequently the persons that live there, army included) are up to no good.

Grow up dude. and take your head out of your arse, you sure need it.

1 more thing: Bitcoin is not illegal in the US... YET! and i hope when it reaches that point you will be the first person to get arrested and sent to gitmo for the rest of your life

Then go create an opensource website just for those country's.


Right...

What are you talking about?

The proposal is to host Bitcoin project in a more neutral ground where everyone in the world can access its content freely. Not in "up to no good" countries like Iran or USA. (Joking, I love both Iranians and Americans.)

By the way, there was a talk about signing executables and other distributed packages (I still advocate distributing the blockchain as an option) by multiple developers, preferably living in different jurisdictions, so that it won't be enough for "them" to get to one. This may be a different issue, but related.

Honnestly, I'm already sorry that i answered him. I should know better than to answer to brainwashed sock puppets.

Maybe it's because of what my parents suffered before i was born and the way i was raised because of it that i feel it's a great injustice what is being done to the persons in those countries.

Well, there is a slim chance that in the near future my home country could get into those "up to no good" lists. So there indeed will be people who would support legislations that deny me access to Bitcoin. That is indeed interesting to me. I know we are preaching to the choir here, but looks like these two items may not be so obvious to everyone:

• Technologies such as Bitcoin, and free information in general, have a liberating effect. So if you think that people living in these countries are oppressed, it would help them recover. U.S. is not doing this to secure information, but to exert political pressure. There is nothing particularly good about it.
• States have their own agenda. I don't want to get into a debate about why one would think Iran's government is "up to no good" and what the actual threat is here. But we are the the people, there is nothing that binds us to their quarrel. Bitcoin is free and it is ours.

Sourceforge does have Swedish and Swiss mirrors...

Somehow though I bet they still use that same list.

Could someone check that though.

What's wrong with just using SHA-1?

The the signed hash list is right along-side the binaries:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.24/

Dude.  You just crossed your own parody horizon.  I actually can't think of a parody of your position that is even as bizarre as your own statements.

US citizens, residents and companies do not become "puppets" of the government by following federal laws.  We merely stay out of prison.

If someone shows up and wants to host a mirror in a country that we are allowed to export to, and that doesn't itself prohibit distribution to other countries, that person will find plenty of people willing and eager to help set things up.

Well, as far as i know sourceforge redirects download links to the geographically closest mirrors from where the download is requested, but people in those block lists don't even get redirected, they just get the part of their terms that say they are on the "forbidden" list, go figure...

So, i guess what you are saying is not the complete truth. Doesn't matter how many mirrors they have, the result will be the same. Unless you weren't talking about sourceforge in that paragraph and i understood you wrong. If so, I apologize, and ask for clarification about that statement.

Not going to comment on your other paragraphs because I already said too much on this thread and honnestly I don't feel like entering a path that will lead nowhere.

As I said on the OP: I'm not eloquent enough to be the one to put this on the table, but as I didn't see anyone else doing it, I did what i thought and believed was the right thing to do.

Now it's better to leave the persons who are smarter than me to discuss it and reach their own conclusions.

sha-1 was broken about six years ago now, and even if it was not, whatever has it being used could be  broken tomorrow.  So always better for something important to use two very different hashes. The link to those hashes is not obvious at all from the link to the downloads on the main page.  A link to them should be added.

They should sign the binaries with a Bitcoin address

SHA-1 is not broken. It is also highly unlikely it will go from where it stands now to completely broken and unusable for this purpose overnight. That said, I would be in favor of also signing a stronger hash. It is good to stay ahead.

It is broken.  Think it was in '05.  I remember it being a Chinese paper that showed this.   If really need be I can probably dig up the links.

I assume you are referring to this: Collision Search Attacks on SHA1 (http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.885/spring05/papers/wangyinyu.pdf)

This only demonstrates a collision of SHA1 with a reduced number of rounds. Their research does reduce the complexity of an attack on full the 80-round SHA1, but not enough that anyone has been able to produce a full collision.

Scary stuff, and a very good reason to move to something better, but, at least for now, an attacker can't tamper with a file without changing the SHA1 hash.

By the way, I am using the term "broken" to mean that actual collisions have been found or could reasonably be found with current technology. If you use "broken" to mean that there is a known attack faster than a birthday attack, then SHA1 is definitely broken.

That is the right authors, but not the later paper,  they have another one that shows it to be much weaker yet.  Came out about 3 or 4 months later.  Unfortunately, the authors got denied a visa to present it at a conference in the USA.  It would not surprise me to learn they are further along with this now, but have stopped the English papers.    It is not recommended to use sha-1 in any new projects any more.  I personally would use two very different hashing algos to publish official binaries for  something like bitcoins.


I do think we may be using different definitions,  I think you are talking about what I would call cracked, and it is not cracked yet in any public papers I know of.

While we are on this side topic,  I would like to point out that hosting the signature files right along side the binaries is also probably not the best idea.  If I can replace files on sf I would just replace both now.

Since the topic is getting around SourceForge's compliance with US Government policy, I had thought that it was pretty obvious that I was talking about a non-SF mirror.

There are more attack that do make it weaker. Just no collisions yet. But I completely agree that it should not be used in new projects.

Bruce Schneier agrees (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html) with you the this counts as "broken." I am just not a big fan of that specific definition of broken since it would mean that algorithms like AES that are still quite strong would count as "broken."


Sure, you could replace SHA1SUMS.asc, but you wouldn't be able to change it without invalidating the PGP signature.

Should be true,  but where does it show who is supposed to be signing it and the information for me to check it?  Right now if someone else signed it , or it even showed up as an unsigned file, as a user, downloading from the links on the front page, would I ever know? I still need more information from a source that is not sf to test this.

Yeah, I probably inadvertently picked up his usage of the terms, as the first I really learned about this was talking to him at a Usenix conference.

May a bittorent distribution could be used as well?

The simple reality is, if you don't already know who the trusted developers are, how could you trust who the site says should be signing it? Point is, it'd create a false sense of security if the site said who can be trusted to sign the files.

As long as somebody can verify the files as having not come from a trusted developer, the word will spread that SourceForge was hacked. That would be the end of SourceForge.

By the way, Jeff Garzik is a trusted developer.

For those of you concerned about privacy and other stuff,I suggest we try mirrors based on Icelandic or Swiss servers due to good protection (Neither of these are in the EU yet so won't be subject to the monitoring of internet communications laws as such,however this is no guarantee that there won't be these types of laws in the future).I know because I live in a country that's part of the EU.

The bitcoin binaries are now mirrored and available for download on Bitcoin-Central.net

hmm...  http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/sourceforge/2011/01/27/sourceforge-net-attack-update/  they still seem to be around,  also recall issues  7 years or so back.  They also do not need to compromise sf,  just the accounts that can update the bitcoin stuff.  Hopefully it is not the same user  account that can update the binaries and change the bitcoin.org page!



The simple idea is that adding another factor makes distributing compromised binaries a lot more likely to be caught quickly.  It also gives me as a user some steps I can take to try and protect myself, rather then waiting for someone else to maybe verify it.  How often is it being checked really?  When set up properly I should at least know that it required tampering with two sites and/or two different users to spoof me. (of course I need to make sure my dns is not spoofed etc etc.... but this would still be a lot better then how it is right now)

It still all is moot though.  As the bitcoin.org site itself is hosted on sourceforge.  So even now that I know this,  I am still not protected, as you are right I can not trust the site to confirm sf is not giving me bad files, even knowing who's sig to now check.

One issue brought up was what if some government orders sf to plant a tampered binary.  They say give all those Freedoinians this binary instead.  Now  sf sets up geotargeting so they get those binaries and their version of the sf page.  Even knowing to check it with Jeff's signature, they get results that say it is ok.  Odds that the people that do check the signature are in the targeted country are also pretty low.  If the person that can check is not being targeted,  it does not matter that they can check even if they do it ever minute.

May want to add a link to the verification file and the signature to use to verify it.

Would it be possible to use Code Signing to actually sing the executable themselves?  At least on Windows this would be effective as far as I know.

No. I trust myself. If you don't, feel free to check the binaries MD5/SHA :)

Problem Solved?

It is not to protect you.  It is to protect anyone using your download mirror.   Also would help detect if someone changed it on you later etc....   how would someone who cant get to sf check your mirror?
It also would allow someone to double check that the sf binaries were not changed after you fetched them.  Has zero to do with if you trust yourself.    Would just make your mirroring service have a lot more useful by adding a link and a mirror of another small file.     Odd you are so quick to say no.

Lets not be so jumpy here.  I'm sure he means well.

I agree though, it has nothing to do with if you trust yourself.  It is to protect others.

I don't really get it, how can I possibly protect others when the binaries I serve can potentially be malicious and I can potentially have malicious intentions ?

Should I post checksums ? Doesn't work :
 - if I have malicious intentions the checksums will match the malicious binaries.
 - if the binaries get changed without me knowing it means that the server got compromised, the checksums shouldn't then be trusted either
 - if I post a link to SF, that won't help since some users won't be able to access it and it also could be compromised

Let's face it, if you're truly paranoid, you read the source and then you compile it. Oh wait, you'd need to compile gcc too ;)

If you have better ideas than the couple I exposed I'm open. But I'd rather give no checksums than a false sense of security.

Actually I do compile gcc, but not for security reasons, lol.

And you are right about it being better to provide no checkfiles then provide a false sense of security.

What you could do is also mirror http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.24/SHA1SUMS.asc/download and provide a link  to http://bitcoin.org/jgarzik-exmulti.asc which an earlier post said is the right signature to verify.  Now you have not only provided a way to check your mirrored files, but that no one has changed the sf ones since you mirrored them.

The idea is that you would have Jeff's PGP already, and not simply download it whenever you are checking a new binary. When you get the key for the first time, as with all PGP public keys, you should not trust its validity until you are convinced it is correct. You make this decision based on several factors such as where you obtained the key, what other sources agree that this key is legitimate, the PGP web-of-trust, etc.

Jeff's key could use more signatures. Somebody make him attend a keysigning party.

Perhaps he could go to the Bitcoin World Expo in NYC tomorrow.  I'm sure plenty of people there use PGP and could sign his key.

Notepad++ left them for similar reasons iirc.

bittorrent?

DHT?

you can literally share bittorrent with just a URI.