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Participating in a torrent is somewhat anonymous in that your peers' identities are not obvious. However there are much stronger anonymizing systems, such as Tor. They list many legitimate users, which may be sending messages, browsing the web or sharing files through Tor.

Even more comprehensive is Freenet, which is used to get around censorship in places like China.

This is why everyone should be running freenet, stick your virtual fingers in the mans eyes. http://freenetproject.org/

Since all the good stuff is outside of Freenet network, what good would using it do?

This is why everyone should be running freenet, stick your virtual fingers in the mans eyes. http://freenetproject.org/

I thought that thing died-out with Newspapers last decade? Or maybe that was netscape? (shrug). It's time soon will come, and it can join the dustbin of history along with horsewhips, candle trimmers, and steam trains.

Newspapers have been (at least here in Finland) busily expanding into the Web, where they adapt an ad-funded "article and comments" -model (just like Slashdot, execpt the articles are actually edited). They are in no danger of dying out.

Neither is Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia might have a different name, but it's the cultural descendant of EB. The various Wikias might spell doom, except that they link to each other and to Mothership Wikipedia everywhere appropriate.

Frankly, what is really needed is splitting Wikipedia into various Wikia wikis, and reserving Wikipedia solely for summaries. Namespaces are awesome, because they establish the context of what is being discussed; trying to cram everything into a single namespace is probably not a good idea.

Then again, as Google and other AI systems evolve, it probably doesn't matter what is stored where, for the relevant info is found anyway.

Ultimately Wikipedia's greatnest weakness is that it is a single Web site. As such, it must lay on some server somewhere. By contrast, Usenet groups don't lay on any specific server or physical location, and neither freesites. The current centralized design of the Web is an anomaly in the history of the Internet, and it causes constant trouble, both from the resource usage and censorship viewpoints. A future Wikipedia should be distributed and versioned, with the client program putting together a version to use.

Groups like this need to be using something like Freenet for their communication, to give them real anonymity. There are a few forum systems on there that would work well. http://freenetproject.org

http://www.kingsbridgelink.co.uk/
http://www.open-mesh.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_community_network
http://freenetproject.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeshBox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking

You know, there's this really neat thing you can do involving hosting Git repositories on Freenet...

What you described is already available in Freenet.

However, Freenet is slow as hell, impossible to use for real-time protocols (eg. games, VoIP, etc), and the only client is written in the resource hogging Java (making it even slower and it's a memory pig).

Not that I have any novel ideas on how that can be done....

How about the protocols underlying Freenet, GNUnet et al? There are actually plenty of anon-P2P proposals and prototypes out there, they're just not as popular yet.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel Why not try out a existing darknet in the form of Freenet http://freenetproject.org/ or i2p http://www.i2p2.de/

IMO the best solution for this kind of thing is a distributed datastore, such as Freenet. To my experience I2P is a really great network, I wish they could have merged when they got the chance. However, it looks like I2P will implement a datastore soon, so there won't be need for Freenet at all.

Over the next month or so we will be implementing some network level changes as we roll out v0.8. There is an actively updated WikiLeaks mirror available over Freenet, which you can find on the index pages.

For those who don't know, Freenet is an anonymous, distributed file-sharing network. Many plugins are available for encrypted communication with trusted peers over this network, including Freemail, FMS (Freenet Message System), Frost/Thaw, jSite, and flip.

There's still freenet! http://freenetproject.org/

Jaaaaaaay! Now we can peer with pedophiles and child rapists just to be able to speak our minds.

I guess this is the time when the veil's opened and we realize that the web designed by Tim Berners-Lee, is dead.

The Internet has stopped being the land of free-speech as we know it. At any time that corporate or government interests are against free speech, they just hit the political off-switch. If someone decides to install internet routers and domain systems in another country, expect that country to be labelled "terrorist" and invaded by those with power.

Expect peer-to-peer information sources and services to be outlawed. Guess the cyberpunks authors got it right after all.

There's still freenet! http://freenetproject.org/

Wasn't Amazon the one that got hit with the 10 gigabit or something insane like that DDOS? I wouldn't blame them - thats an insane amount of traffic they have to handle.

Someone should figure out how to get Wikileaks running in Freenet, build a peer tracker or something, and let the rest of the world play wack-a-mole with the public website, and the real copy of Wikileaks runs encrypted and anonymously.

Damn, I like that idea.

What I don't understand is why doesn't Wikileaks uploads a copy of all that to Freenet?

However that may be, just blatantly disregarding the law is not the solution.

Of course not. Using and helping develop tools that hide your activities, such as Freenet and Tor is. Why fight ogres on their terms when you can simply hide and leave them to starve?

I wonder if there's ever been a time when the Powers That Be - governments, nobility, corporations - have not been the enemy of the people? I guess not.

And all of those cool military gadgets we ooh and ahh over will be deployed against citizens aspiring for freedom.

Whereas the citizens aspiring for freedom will utilize the guillotine.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will simply use various forms of encryption and steganoragphy and escape your notion. We already are, as it happens.

Basically, fuck you. Fuck your master. Fuck anyone who claims control over anything for any reason. I'm already a part of the global community, and will only care about my own country (Finland) if it continues to prove worth it. Or maybe I'll do the really radical thing and demand it'll stay worth it...

What about child porn, offensive content or terrorism?
While most people wish that child pornography and terrorism did not exist, humanity should not be deprived of their freedom to communicate just because of how a very small number of people might use that freedom.

Freenet perhaps? http://freenetproject.org/

Projects like http://freenetproject.org/ will be very very popular soon in France I guess.

Solutions like this provide:
- Encryption
- Anonymity
- Credible deniability
- Darknets

These kind of solutions do not work very fast at the moment because of the limited number of users. There was never really the need. Now there is and people will flock to it in big numbers. As the number of users start to rise, it will become very big, very fast.

Two years from now they will be in exactly the same spot, except they will not even be able to track the problem anymore. A bit of ironic justice I guess...

http://freenetproject.org/

What on earth are you talking about?

Business.

Price is driven by cost of development - of course it is. If it weren't, then companies would be selling a product for a price floated on the market as you suggest, and then finding themselves out of capital b/c their total income would be *less than* their total expenditures.

No. Cost of development is a sunk cost. Once it's paid, there's nothing to do but to try and maximize your income. If the total income - number of units sold * (price per unit - cost per unit) - is less than price of development, then yes, the company will be running a deficit rather than profit on that product. That's precisely why they often conduct market surveys before investing in R&D.

How they recoup their dev costs depends on the business model, but to suggest that dev costs don't impact pricing is just nonsense.

It's math, and unless and until you understand it - and I mean really understand it - you better not try to run a company, for your own sake, because you will fail miserably.

To recap: profit = number_of_units_sold * (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit) - cost_of_development, where number_of_units_sold is a function of price_per_unit, benefit per unit to the buyer and human psychology.

Seriously, all aspiring businessmen: read this and understand it. If you can't, you can't succeed. There is no way around this.

If one company has lower dev costs than another, they have what's known as "competitive advantage" -- they can create new products with equal value to the consumer at a lower cost. That company now has a viable option (not available to their competitor) to float their product to the market at a price lower than their competitor, and still make positive net revenue.

Of course they do. That's perfectly in agreement with the equation and its implications. After all, they make the same profit with less (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit), since their cost_of_development is lower.

However, in the long run, for long-selling goods, the cost_per_unit is the dominating factor. That's why it's often a good idea to spend some extra R&D to make sure your manufacturing processes are as efficient as possible. Experience shows that this is especially true of goods with low cost_per_unit. In the bottom end are Internet-downlodable games, where all of the costs are in cost_of_development, and cost_per_unit is for all practical purposes zero; in such items, it's almost always beneficial to decrease the price, since it increases the sales a lot - a hundred times as many people pay for a $1 game than $10 one, adding up to 10-time profits.

In the very extreme end of this, Girl Genius, Dwarf Fortress and The Freenet Project seem to survive entirely on donations/auxiliary sells. But then again, they are bringing something valuable and wonderful to the Internet, unlike most corporations.

I'll meet you all in the undernet.

The best thing people can do to help wikileaks is by running Tor Relays and Freenet nodes. Just make sure that there is nothing illegal on your computer, because the pigs in ICE have been raiding Tor Relay operators under the guise of fighting kiddy porn.

http://torproject.org/
http://freenetproject.org/

Put Freenet on those boxes and i get what i understand by the term "freedom".

This rallying cry to governments who have something to fear and something to hide means that maybe now is the time for the freenet: http://freenetproject.org/whatis.html

I've never wanted to use it before (to donate some disk space) because I'm darn sure that it will have more hidden porn on it than politically suppressed information, but maybe, if obama's call to action is heeded, maybe I will have to establish a node or two.

I have a few hundred C-64 games in my attic. They won't go out of copyright until, what, 2100? Maybe longer if there are more copyright extensions.

Disney doesn't look like it's going to go bankrupt anytime soon.

So, I copy them, then what? I have to hang on to them for another 90 years before I can give a copy to a museum to preserve?

Or you could simply screw copyright and put a torrent on the Pirate Bay. If you are afraid of copyright cartels coming after you, you could use Freenet.

Museums are places to keep old physical items; for computer games, the best way is to simply let anyone who pleases copies for themselves and run them with an emulator./p

With networks like Freenet or Tor, these types of laws will be impossible to enforce without an outright ban on strong-crypto. Even if there were such a ban, brightnets like OFFSystem (or even Freenet, if configured in Darknet mode) would be unaffected.

Servers live places. The people who do the uploading live places. The people who run the servers can be punished. The people who do the uploading can be punished.

Where does Tor live? Where does Freenet live?

The horror of horrors to all who dream themselves the master of others: Freedom's here. You can no longer keep us ignorant. Die, shitheads, die and be forgotten!

First we'd need to throw away IP law entirely, which is pretty much the opposite of what is going on in the world today.

Really? Because to me, that seems to be exactly what's going on: nobody cares about copyrights anymore. The ever-more draconian attempts to upkeep the damn thing are failing miserably.

The "rest of us" will have more personal liberties due to the techniques developed by people needing to keep their identities secret. For example, Freenet can handle large files nowadays, even if it's still not as fast as BitTorrent.

One more thing...I checked FreeNet's "About Us" page, and nowhere does it say that FreeNet was created for the purpose of enabling piracy.

Oh, nevermind...I didn't scroll down far enough :-}

That is a problem with opennet mode, but I believe darknet mode addresses that concern. Basically, in opennet you connect to random strangers (less secure), whereas in darknet you only connect to nodes run by people you trust (more secure).

Kind of a pain, though, if you're nomadic or don't have a lot of geeky friends.

Apparently they're just upgrading:

http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17461648435

And even if Wikileaks was to disappear, there's always Freenet if you want to leak something:

http://freenetproject.org/

Of course, you'd have to check your own data to make sure there's no metadata that can be used to identify you. But Freenet covers the anonymous distribution angle.

I never did see the big draw of cloud computing without this. Hopefully this will also provide some needed knowledge to better something like Freenet

When do we finally make the move to a fully encrypted internet? An unencrypted internet made sense in the days that CPU power was expensive and there were no good encryption libraries. Both these problems were solved a decade ago.

Encrypting everything solves only part of the problem.
Big brother can still see which sites you visit, how much traffic is going on between who and who talks to whom.
It also doesn't give you anonymous publishing.

There's solutions for that, though, like http://freenetproject.org/ which comes with a considerable resource penalty, but offers a solution for anonymous publishing.
Of course it's full of kiddy pr0n, that's the other side of the medal... take your pick.

"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"

--Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation

which some cop accesses and is able to track the source down to your node.

To do this on-network isn't easy. You would need to gradually zero in on a node with the key via a "key search attack", then do a correlation attack. This only really works i)on opennet (freenet has a considerably more secure darknet mode) ii)for content that is being actively inserted at the time of the search, with a predictable key. Still, it's a weakness. Premix routing or some sort of tunneling is planned but is technically difficult.

Of course they could just seize your node and check your datastore against a known CP keys list. This might possibly find a few encrypted blocks which, in combination with many others, would make illegal material. However, in a democracy they wouldn't have probable cause to do that - partly because keys you upload/download are explicitly not stored in your datastore, but in a separate "client cache" - and I don't *think* the results would be prosecutable anyway. In less free countries, you run in darknet mode and they never know you're running a node in the first place. (At least that's the idea, steganographic transport plugins are planned to disguise the traffic from the threat of flow analysis.)

if the feds decide to shut down Freenet it really will be easy

Opennet can be harvested, albeit not so quickly and trivially as Tor; they could indeed then take action against the whole open network, if Chinese-style laws had been adopted. Darknet is considerably harder, and intended for exactly that purpose - running in an actively hostile regime.

Still, freenet isn't done yet (it's still v1.0) and the devs will freely admit it has known weaknesses and generally isn't production ready for dissidents. It's being used by them anyway though, since it's arguably better than any of the alternatives at the moment.

While freenet is a great idea, it doesn't seem to be gaining much traction. According to http://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/chat/2010-April/000009.html there's only about 20k users.

On the upside, Freenet contains a distributed Usenet server, which has so far been kept spam-free by the use of trust lists.

Freenet P2P is unwhackable by design. All whackings can do is drive more users there, and to comparable networks. And Sneakernet is growing exponentially. (USB 3 copies a 700MB movie file in under two seconds.) Ergo, free music and movies are forever. But that's not the issue.

The bigger picture is that the formerly heterogenous landscape of many interconnected information networks (electronic or not) is simplifying into two strata: a highly transparent, legally controlled public zone where you don't really have privacy although many think they do, and an intransparent zone where privacy precludes accountability. Legal and corporate measures against illegal network traffic speed up this divide because they destroy grey areas of the "rules are present but not enforced" type. This is true in many areas, not just filesharing.

The destructing of grey areas makes it harder for cultural norms to shift to legal to illegal and vice versa. This means a lot of decisions about what is legal are being made right now. And these decisions are probably very much long-term.

We need to have a project that aims to unite all the privacy projects out there to make something good come out of it, using the power of the crowd with free software in a privacy respecting matter but in a much more powerful way that can actually serve people...

Here are some projects or ideas that deserves to be noticed:

An openID with privacy features:
http://openprivacy.org/

P2P social networks / research:
http://www.movim.eu/
http://www.peerson.net/

P2P search:
http://yacy.net/

P2P SIP:
http://www.blyon.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/22/p2p-sip-uri-dialing/

Encryption:
http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/

P2P encrypted networks:
http://www.i2p2.de/
http://freenetproject.org/

Augmented reality / group mapping:
http://www.openillusionist.org.uk/documentation/doku.php?id=site:home
http://www.biomapping.net/

Mesh:
http://robin-mesh.wik.is/

I envision a setup where our cell phones or little home servers (open ones, like the n900 or better) can connect to each other via mesh, have open social infrastrcture running on them routed over an I2P layer so nobody knows who is talking to who and you have total control as to who/when/what is seen by your peers.

These setup have cameras that can use such network to create massive collaborative networks to document a situation or location. Be it a manifestation where you relay real time camera from all angles with sound level maps and other sensors to augmented reality group interaction and other crazy ideas.

This is more broad that what is discussed here as it touches all OSI layers and ask for a shift toward a p2p infrastructure at all level respecting and working for the user and independance from middle man as much as we can.
Of course a distributed DNS might have to be worked on too. I think these research are fundamental to the survival of freedom online as we knew it ...

Freenet

The internet genie you refer to never really existed until wireless / anonymous libraries and/or freenet went live. Now it _can't_ be put back in the bottle.

If you truly support freedom of speech and have the resources to do so, run a freenet node.

Wow, you are so far behind the schedule! When's the last time you've been on Freenet?

I say decentralize the web. Make it so that websites are stored "on the cloud", with dozens, or even hundreds, of redundant copies broken into small chunks on random people's computers. Make publishing these sites easy, so anyone can do it, removing the need for centralized holding sites like Youtube, blogspot.com, etc. Reduce ISPs to being a purely city-to-city pipe, with intra-city connections being done through the individual computers themselves.

Freenet is already doing a lot of this, if we can just make it more mainstream...

Just use Freenet. It has both BBS style message exchange and the beginnings of something like smtp.

It's been done already.

>We might see some 'revolutionary' developments in collaboration come from this, hopefully we can all learn from it.

The problem is that we're all using the same tools to achieve different goals. ....
So unless our government gets to be as bad as theirs (and I'm not saying that's out of the question), I don't know what tactics they are dreaming up that are going to help me right now or improve my collaboration. And they don't seem to be writing a whole lot of ground breaking software ... at least not for English speaking only users like myself

Behold: Freenet

Why they don't use freenet for this is beyond me. Yes, freenet is not lighting fast but it's getting better and it would be MUCH more difficult for anybody to get them if they used it.

http://freenetproject.org/

Expect the free net to lose.

And expect the anonymous overlay networks (a la freenet et al.) to replace it. However, we're in a sad state in general when only anonymous speech remains truly free speech.

I, for one, will be using my "end of Cold War" era Yaesu FRG-7700 shortwave radio to search for broadcasts from the Free World

Purely from a technical point of view, one could use such a shortwave radio together with a modem to create a network that could broadcast kitty porn, so, I'm afraid we're also going to have to confiscate that.

We're also going to have confiscate any flashlights you have, so you can't broadcast aforementioned kitty porn in binary signals to your neighbours. You don't happen to own two tin cans and a piece of string? We've had disturbing reports of people luring kitties by mewing loudly into one can.

I hate to say it, but soon the only network free of filters will be something like freenet, but oh snap... The very people this filter is trying to catch already are using this and similar technologies.