On Thursday, June 5, 2014 10:51:14 PM UTC-4, Jason Bobe wrote:
-- On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 6:59 PM, Marc Juul <juul@labitat.dk> wrote:On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 3:18 PM, Jason Bobe <jasonbobe@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey All -The Ask a Biosafety Expert (ABE) service by DIYbio.org provides free biosafety advice from a panel of volunteer experts to the DIYbio community. Check it out here: http://ask.diybio.org/
Hey Jason.While I really appreciate the availability of this service,thanksit seems to me that you are potentially setting people up for a visit from the authorities since this service in itself is not anonymous in any way.As it is currently set-up, people can simply submit a question, without providing contact details. They may optionally submit name, email and location. Many people do.Are you most worried about surreptitious tracking of IP addresses, or what?
I think it is potentially important to work on putting together a more secure "anonymous hotline" for people who need biosafety help, but won't ask without a high level of assurance about security/anonymity. However, at this point, we're prototyping on a shoestring and I am more worried about being careful not to oversell the anonymity part, I think. To marc's 1st point, perhaps the right thing to do is to simply put a warning that the service is non-anonymous.
Perhaps there are people who are worried about revealing their IP address, who are not already using Tor, that would benefit from a link on the ask a biosafety officer site. Not sure. Seems simple enough to add a link to Tor documentation. But, I am also a little worried about presenting a false sheen of security by recommending Tor. With heartbleed and the myriad other ways we've learned that we are not secure when we thought we were, I'm reluctant to pretend that the problem is solved by adding a link to Tor. Maybe that is overcautious?
It is possible that identity gets revealed in other ways too. The content of the submitted question itself may have aspects which reveal identity, even for people who believe they are being careful. My favorite recent example of surprising identity leakage is a study published in PLoS: mining facial data from corneal reflections: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0083325
Jason
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