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Yes. It's called FreeNet.

http://freenetproject.org/ is what your looking for.

"Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack."

still won't beat the http://freenetproject.org/ that actually nowadays works quite ok, even tough it requires users to set up some things first and then it is a bit slow to use.

at least stuff doesn't get taken down that easily.

You can not get more freedom than FreeNet. Yeah, everybody knows netcraft has confirmed that it is dying but it is still there :)

Use Freenet. They don't (can't) know what their caching (plausible deniability), it's Free (as in speech), and a node can be situated close each cluster of users. If someone were to create an ad-blocking proxy site on Freenet browsing the web would become 3x faster.

One thing Freenet has in common with Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection is friend codes. In both Freenet and Nintendo WFC, you need to add the other user, and the other user needs to add you. So how does one find other trusted users' friend codes in order to connect to the network?

But I noticed that since the last time I checked freenetproject.org, the page Connecting to Freenet has added a few sentences discussing an "insecure mode". Is this any better than just using a system built around eMule, Gnutella, or BitTorrent?

The page also states that it takes a couple days for a Freenet node to get up to speed. Do the developers plan to make Freenet compatible with dial-up or with broadband providers that use PPP over Ethernet, where IP addresses change every 24 hours or so?

One thing Freenet has in common with Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection is friend codes. In both Freenet and Nintendo WFC, you need to add the other user, and the other user needs to add you. So how does one find other trusted users' friend codes in order to connect to the network?

But I noticed that since the last time I checked freenetproject.org, the page Connecting to Freenet has added a few sentences discussing an "insecure mode". Is this any better than just using a system built around eMule, Gnutella, or BitTorrent?

The page also states that it takes a couple days for a Freenet node to get up to speed. Do the developers plan to make Freenet compatible with dial-up or with broadband providers that use PPP over Ethernet, where IP addresses change every 24 hours or so?

Check out Freenet - total anonymity and total encryption is the goal. All that's needed for it to work is for more people to download and run nodes.

Netsukuku and other Wireless mesh based routing protocols nearly all share the same two limitations:

Backbone identification/allocation and latency mitigation...

Sure I can build a wireless mesh that's 500 hops deep in diameter, but if I'm on one edge trying to reach the other edge, even if I'm only 250 hops end to end, what the hell happens?

In most designs, the packet gets dropped somewhere between 50-255 hops...

Even protocols with good testing (OLSR) have problems upwards of 500 nodes.

(Which is why they're designing OLSR-NG)

Doesn't really matter tho, this would require massive adoption, which would require a killer app...

Design it and you create the Napster of the mesh network, except this one would learn from napster/kazaa and be totally decentralized.

If you do that, no oppressor, no law enforcement, and most of all no record company lobbyist, could stop it.

Just remember, it's a virtual pandora's box, if you succeed it's the freenet dilema on a global scale...

Not necessarily.

Since nearly every router can be presumed to have a wide-open (and likely quite fast) pipe to the Internet, there are plenty of ways to get around the need to have a central server. Some others are rather unknown, or even a bit old, but those reasons by themselves don't make them inapplicable to the role.

Storage for all of this can be a problem, but that's an easy one to solve: The small size that such a worm must be combined with the relatively large amount of bandwidth available on each infected host means that only a very small percentage of them need to be able to store a quantity of files for the rest of the network to consume. As luck will have it, a substantial portion of these routers will be connected by fast Ethernet to Windows share, which these days means that there's a good chance of having multiple gigabytes of storage available without anyone ever noticing, let alone anything being logged.

(And, of course, the routers will be able to share and relay different versions of the worm amongst themselves locally over WiFi -- just try tracking that.)

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect the rest of the dots, so I won't bother.

An ambitious programmer of the caliber needed to devise such a beast to begin with wouldn't see much of an impediment with these vast resources. With careful and diverse seeding of the first round of infection, such a worm would be very hard to stop, let alone trace back to its originator.

Uhh so basically http://freenetproject.org/ with major backbones running freenet nodes.

Feel free to download and run FreeNet, too, which (if it ever gets some momentum) will make it exponentially less likely that anybody will be caught.

So therefore, I foresee invitation-only BBS's as it were, with SSL or better connections, with no bandwidth throttling pipes inbound. What, they're going to show that nobody has the reasonable right to connect over SSL to transmit large amounts of data back and forth?

http://anonet.org/ - we'd doing our best to make a new one. Please mod this up.

Imagine that you've taken a bunch of photos on your cameraphone, of a sensitive situation that the government might not want to get out. If you could insert those files directly into freenet without the provider being able to see or log them, the chances of getting the truth out without retribution or much coverup would be much greater.

It is well worth trying out the Freenet p2p network. It is an anonymous distributed data storage system that is ideally suited to filesharing. I have been using it for the past few years and just recently it has got a lot faster and more usable. Music and movies are regularly shared and it can only take a few hours to get a full album. Speeds are slower than bittorrent etc., but that is to be expected - you never get something for nothing.

is to use Freenet at http://freenetproject.org/. It's an anonymous p2p application.

I used to think that Freenet really wasn't that useful, but it's becoming clear that it's necessary as an insurance policy against censorship.

If you think about any law that has been created with regard to the internet, was it to protect and promote it or was it to try to censor and control? What's nice is Freenet was lacking in 'useful' content since the Internet was free enough for the 'wierd' things to be readily available. However, with a crackdown in many countries (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7047336.stm), including Italy (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/27/1137253) there will likely me more and more people who have use and need of Freenet, and thus increasingly more things to do and see.

Have you actually used Freenet recently?

It is true that is it slower that a non-anonymous network, but you will never get something for nothing.

I first tried it a few years ago and it was fairly slow, but it has improved dramatically in the past year or two. Full albums and DVD rips are traded regularly. Freesites (anonymous version of websites) are pretty snappy to load and there is a large and rapidly-growing amount of content.

http://freenetproject.org/

Freenet is stronger than ever at the moment. http://freenetproject.org/

There is a great community and although it is difficult to estimate accurately, the number of nodes on the network seems to have doubled in the past year. It is probably about a few thousand nodes in size.

It is a totally anonymous p2p network with the emphasis on security. Music albums and DVD rips are regularly traded on it. You can usually download a full album in a couple of hours, and a movie in a couple of days, depending on how many other people are also downloading it (the more the faster, like bittorrent).

It comes with a anonymous message board program, called Frost, and a filesharing program called Thaw, and there are also the anonymous equivalent of websites, known as Freesites, that are HTML and you browse through a standard browser.

Bittorrent can be as fast as it is because it has no anonymity whatsoever, i.e. it's concerned with just distributing the file in the most efficient manner possible. To see what happens when you try to kludge an anonymity layer onto it just look at Azereus' i2p plugin : performance sucks and most of the "point" of BT i.e. fast efficient downloads is gone. In theory, reasonably fast and quite strongly anonymous file transfer can be done via clever routing and distributed datastores (see Freenet for a work in progress) but it's a very tricky and as yet not entirely solved problem.

Probably the best compromise for the fair-use-rights enthusiast concerned about this is to just avoid public trackers; they make it trivial for *AA to connect to any swarm and see the peers / what they're doing. Private trackers can be a hassle, but have the bonus of generally higher quality material and seeding rates.

Hey Pirate Bay folks, here's my list of feature requests for the new version of your open source torrent protocol:

ONION ROUTING:
1) Implement Onion routing (aka: Tor / anonymize the sources) as a built in feature.
2) Onion Routing should, where possible, try to use exit points and middle points that have roughly the same amount of bandwidth as you, otherwise torrenting will not become a reality through Onion Routing. So some kind of peer bandwidth algorythm needs to be incorporated.
3) Onion routing should be on by default, and each user should also become an exit point and donate 30% of their bandwidth to this. This will greatly increase the number of exit routers & provide this as a defacto alternative, as opposed to just some obscure security feature for the 31337 (hackers & government homeland types).
4) Individual site upload ratios, should take into consideration that fact that you are an exit point and some portion of that 30% should be counted toward your uploaded bytes ratio (even if traffic is going to other sites)... in other words, help promote torrent security = get bonus points from private trackers.

SIMPLIFY ISP SHAPING BYPASS
Background: Forcing protocol encryption isn't enough these days; some ISPs are shaping or even blocking torrent traffic by methods such as sending TCP RST packets to close a session, or their infrastructure auto-analyzes your encrypted traffic patters and if they are high bandwidth, very encrypted and on for long amounts of time to the same destination you get flagged & shapped (regardless of the fact that you could indeed be doing something legal)

1) There's a page on Wikipedia that lists all the "BAD ISPs" (http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs). This is a list of ISPs internationally that in one way or another shape your bitorrent traffic (Comcast anyone?). We need to be one step ahead of these ISPs and render their multi-million dollars worth of shaping infrastructure useless - sooner rather than later - sooner so that they can't make up for the ROI on all that gear they purchased. If the ROI fails, the next time engineering dept approach CEO for X dozens of millions more, they will get declined and we (torrent community) will win.

2) This site breaks down "throttling" into 5 different categories or ways in which the ISP can throttle you... each listing the bypass method.
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Avoid_traffic_shaping#Escalation_of_the_crypto_settings
Note that level 5 (the most aggressive shaping method known so far) is only bypassable by a single client today (Azeurus), utorrent to my understanding can not bypass this.

Anyway my point with these above 2 items is that these facts need to be considered:
1. The number of ISPs throttling internationally is already large and growing larger
2. Your new torrent client needs to simplify bypassing these various levels of encryption so that it can be adopted by the masses. If it is not adopted by the masses (rendering ISP throttling useless), the ISPs will have won.

I don't have time to type more, so please research what other clients out there (beyond just torrent) are doing and borrow ideas from them.
Here's a brief list of intelligent encryption/anonymous software out there to investigate:
RODI: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1252232
MUTE: http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
ANTS: http://antsp2p.sourceforge.net/
GNUnet: http://gnunet.org/
I2P: http://www.i2p.net/
FreeNet: http://freenetproject.org/
TOR: http://tor.eff.org/

THanks and good luck!

Freenet is actually a lot faster and leaner than it was a year ago. Full albums can be downloaded in a few hours, and people are regularly downloading 700MB movie files (takes a few days). The size of the network seems to be increasing rapidly too, so it is well worth checking out.

Install the main Freenet node and then look for the message board program Frost, and file sharing program Thaw, which come bundled with Freenet.

http://freenetproject.org/

The problem is that encrypting BitTorrent won't stop Comcast from being able tor recognize BitTorrent traffic. If I were wanting to move files these days I would stick with Freenet. The 0.5 network is running better than ever now that all of the instability from development and newbie floods have moved to 0.7. There's lots of files in freenet and plenty of users willing to insert more on request. Transfer rates have improved also... I've personally seen ~900MiB / day where it used to be a tenth of that. and the security is hard to beat.

Well someone should localize freenet into Chinese and all the problems will be gone ...

http://freenetproject.org/

though it's dog ass slow... and there's always the concern of being sharing stuff you don't agree with.

Yeah, exactly - I can't encrypt my google searches if https://www.google.com/ redirects to an unencrypted URL.

Your best bet is to install, run and support (financially) FreeNet. Unfortunately, that will never happen, because Freenet can be used to bypass "good" censorship (i.e. the kind of content that some random person agrees should be censored) as well as "bad" censorship. The point that too few people seem to understand is that censorship is all or nothing - either everything is on the table to eventually be censored (and we have to rely on the goodwill of our government as well as our unelected "representatives" at AT&T and the MPAA to decide what we can and can't read), or nothing is censored, even if you think it ought to be.

i am certainly not a nascent-japanese-rival-to-the-internet fanboy.

And it certainly wasn't my intention to suggest otherwise - apologies if it came across that way.

what would it be like if we designed the internet today, but with a more "optimistic" approach? i don't know if it would change anything, or if it's even possible, but it would cool to find out.

Well, I think it would be a lot easier to censor, a lot more vulnerable to pharming attacks, less resistant to inter-ISP squabbles where one decides to drop the other's packets, and you'd still have the problem that the "last mile" would be in the hands of either your local phone company or cable TV co, with all the problems that implies.

Which isn't to say they shouldn't do the research; research is always good. But I think it's important to understand the distinction between the protocols the internet runs on, the servers and routers, and the wire used to carry the signal. The "Internet" is protocols and servers and routers. But the problems you've describes are about the wire - and you'll have to use that same wire to connect to any other network, unless you want to spend a lot of money, anyway.

perhaps what is needed (if indeed anything is needed at all) is not a new and separate internet, but a kind of ad-hoc inter-network of peers that is isolated and possibly insulated from the internet, like some sort of giant darknet.

Sounds like you'd like freenet and GNUnet.

So what we really need is an distributed, uncensorable, encrypted network that is really good at distributing small files.

If only such a thing existed.

What is needed is a convenient automatic "trickle backup" system. This will do incremental backups to this service whenever you are online, but which is smart enough to stop if you need your internet connection, or if you disconnect. In such circumstances it will resume the backup process seamlessly once you go back online, or once your upstream is available again.

This seems like an obvious idea to me, and so it may already exist - but if not, I could see it being a very nice open source project. Unfortunately I've got one or two projects keeping me way too busy already or I would consider it.

To do it really-well might require server-side support though, so you could do things like coalescing incremental backups without having to pull the data back to the client and re-uploading.

Why not host your own blog on your own server?

Until you completely shut down internet access, I think you will have a very hard time keeping people from accessing the information they want. There are just too many proxies, mirrors and tunnels that people can use to view 'censored' material. As for shutting off net access... I guess you could try, but with packet radio, satellite internet and IP over carrier pigeon, you're going to have your work cut out for you. For an example of just one of the available tools, take a look at freenet. http://freenetproject.org/

So if a dissident is going to mount a resistance he/she has to be aware who else they're "involunteering", because it won't just be the dissident paying the price.

This is a very good point, and a very good reason to support anonymous free speech. Real rebels wear masks. They are a neccessary safety device. That they are also the tools of trade for bank robbers does not change this.

A way to distribute blog hosting, so that a blog can't be shut down by a strike against a single hosting service. I don't have a solution at hand for that.

What do you mean ? There's tons of distributed hosting solutions out there, from Usenet to BitTorrent.

Heck, if Freenet ever gets its act together and gets over the current "Darknet" fad (which makes it near impossible to get to the network, since you need to know someone already in it, and the end result is a huge hassle with semi-automated IRC bots forming connections) it would be nearly ideal. The routing finally seems to work, and the rising machine power makes Fred's ridiculous inefficiency less of an issue today. There already are several blog-like sites about controversial topics there.

http://freenetproject.org/

Or, install an encrypted overlay darknet on top of the hobbled network and communicate freely. And herein lies the problem - there are solutions to curtail government censorship in existence RIGHT NOW. Unfortunately, they never gain any traction, because everybody seems to support the censorship of something or other because, well, "X is REALLY bad and NEEDS to be censored, whatever the cost." There seem to be very few of us who understand that censorship is all or nothing.

Yeah right
That'll work

That's the principle of apps like freenet. http://freenetproject.org/

Big words from the man who "invented" Freenet. *coughBrandonWileycough*

If your insinuation is that Brandon is the actual inventor of Freenet, perhaps you should take a look at Clarke's original paper on Freenet, written long before your friend Brandon was ever involved.

Never. Why? Because if they did, then the terrorists or the CP enthusiasts would use that same encryption to hide. See? You don't have to be a Canadian conservative to believe that no measure is too extreme, no freedom too precious, no authoritarian state too strict to stop the evils of terrorism and CP. EVERYBODY thinks that (except, I assume, you and me). Freenet is failing for this reason - nobody will run a node because it might be used to precisely those purposes. The problem is, you can't come up with an encryption mode that can work to hide the content you think deserves to be free, but not for the content you think doesn't.

For the majority of apps, OpenMP is enough. That is what this looks like - a proprietary OpenMP. It might make it easier than creating and managing your own threads but calling it "auto" parallelizing when you need to mark what to execute in parallel is a bit of a stretch.

For apps that need more, it is probably a big enough requirement that someone knowledgable is already on the coding team. Which isn't to say that a compiler/lang/lib lowering the "experience required" bar wouldn't be welcomed, just that I wish these people would work on solving some new problems instead of re-tackling old ones.

The main purpose of these extensions seems to be finding a way to restrict the noob developer enough that they won't be able to abuse threading like some apps love to do. That is a very good thing in my book! (Think Freenet, where 200-600 threads is normal.)

A casual googling didn't reveal anything, and I'm feeling really curious about how that happened.

As the above AC said, a lot of the discussion was on Frost, which doesn't have any publicly-accessible archives. You can find the mailing list thread here, though. In particular this and this

Of course, I'm not sure if this really matters that much; last I heard, Freenet was known to be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and fixing it wasn't considered a priority...

A casual googling didn't reveal anything, and I'm feeling really curious about how that happened.

As the above AC said, a lot of the discussion was on Frost, which doesn't have any publicly-accessible archives. You can find the mailing list thread here, though. In particular this and this

Of course, I'm not sure if this really matters that much; last I heard, Freenet was known to be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and fixing it wasn't considered a priority...

A casual googling didn't reveal anything, and I'm feeling really curious about how that happened.

As the above AC said, a lot of the discussion was on Frost, which doesn't have any publicly-accessible archives. You can find the mailing list thread here, though. In particular this and this

Of course, I'm not sure if this really matters that much; last I heard, Freenet was known to be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and fixing it wasn't considered a priority...

A casual googling didn't reveal anything, and I'm feeling really curious about how that happened.

As the above AC said, a lot of the discussion was on Frost, which doesn't have any publicly-accessible archives. You can find the mailing list thread here, though. In particular this and this

Of course, I'm not sure if this really matters that much; last I heard, Freenet was known to be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and fixing it wasn't considered a priority...

Personally I'd put it on the darknets, Tor and Freenet both have sites dedicated to preserving unpopular/threatened/censored information. I'd imagine that I2P would have similar resources although I'm not personally familiar with it.

While darknet sites aren't reachable by the average computer users, this allows the more technically-minded to repopulate the mainstream net with the content when torrents or public hosts are taken down.

Interesting idea. Maybe Wikipedia could be moved into http://freenetproject.org/ I think this would be a benefit for both projects if it is done right.

http://freenetproject.org/

Anonymous, peer-to-peer information net.

Why can't there be a "show relevant ads" button down at the bottom, at least!? When I'm going to buy a $2500 piece of equipment, that click is worth a *lot* of money. Certainly more than I'm willing to donate that often.

Let's try a hypothetical situation: Suppose they did this and they were getting a lot of hits from a major vendor of routers and hardware firewalls - let's call 'em "BizCo" since I don't really have any axe to grind against any router manufacturer

Now, under normal circumstances, BizCo make a lot of sales via their wikipedia page, and that generates a lot of cash for wikimedia and for BizCo both. A win win scenario.

But suppose someone finds a backdoor in BizCo routers? If wikipedia discusses the exploit, they may hurt BizCo sales, and cost themselves money in the process. Supposing it's just FUD spread by a competitor? How can you trust wikipedia's writeup knowing that they make a significant portion of their operating capital from BizCo referrals?

Here's another one: supposing BizCo have a competing startup called "GnuCo": free hardware, GPL software, exemplary secuirity. On the down side, their advertising budget is near almost zero, and they've survived this far mainly on word of mouth recommendations. They have a superior product, but a click on them earns wikipedia nothing. So what do you do?

Do you supply the link anyway, knowing that each click on GnuCo costs wikipedia money, or do you just tweak the seaching algorithms to start shuffling the less lucrative pages down the search order. Bury them on page five or so and most people will never see them.

Or maybe you give them a "related commerical links" page, but the only link there goes to BizCo. Maybe you start to subtly slant the articles against GnuCo - just to preserve cashflow, you understand.

For that matter, what about the non-commercial pages? The ones that cost so much to serve, and which return so little revenue. If you just shuffle them down the search listings, just a little, you could do so much more.... Which is the line of thinking that probably transformed Yahoo! from the Google of its day into the ad-drenched pap-portal we find today.

I'm not saying any of this is an inevitable consequence of taking adverts. But there's no doubt in my mind that advertising would add a whole new set of pressures on a project that already has to work very hard to maintain a neutral point of view. Personally, and maybe I'm being unduly pessimistic, but personally I think it would be a disaster.

Also, I've been thinking about how people could cache Wikipedia, or something, to help bandwidth costs. Like coral cache, but signed like bit-torrent. I currently use less than 1% of the bandwidth I pay for, the other 1.5 TB is available for something like this. Not much alone, but I doubt I'm the only one willing to help.

I like this idea a lot better. I've thought for a while that a lot of the bandwidth problems of popular sites would go away if we used torrent style architecture, and signed packets would make sure that what you got was the same as what was originally sent.

I don't know of anything that does this specifically, but something like Freenet might be a good place to start. Certainly the "internet-within-an-internet" model.

The only SoC project I've been following is freenet, it definetely helped them out with various things e.g. a new portable queued download/upload manager, improved email-over-freenet and network simulations to model routing.

but he claims to be currently looking into the details of safely releasing his details about this

Freenet: It's Not Just For Kiddie Porn Anymore(TM)