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It's undergone some problems, but the IIP would make this project hard to keep going. Link for those interested. It's a neat idea that hasn't gotten much support.

Checkout http://www.i2p.net

and

http://invisiblenet.net/supportMain.php

Invisible IRC

they haven't got into IIRC yet.

Yeah, you'd think someone would've thought of it by now.

Here's some cool darknets being developed:

Invisible IRC Proxy
Its a seperate IRC network that hides the IP of the users and encrypts all the traffic coming in and out. semi-centralized, not totally anon due to small size

Freenet Project
Kinda like a decentralized encrypted RAID + Usenet. High latency, high bandwith. More for publishing than interactivity, although there is a cool BBS prog for it.

Invisible Internet Project
You heard it hear first! I2P, the next generation of anonymous communication, not yet publiclly announced. Its in pre-alpha, but functional and needing good coders. Low latency, high bandwith. Any internet prog should run over it, currently got IRC, NNTP (usenet), HTTP, chessd, Jabber, and experimental Bittorrent. We meet on IIP (above) in chan #i2p

I'm not involved, but I'm a regular user.

I am the opposite in a way, I am not a user at all. But I run a node because I want to support the project and its ideals. Yeah, it uses java, and I am not thrilled about that but I run it and kill and restart it when it spins out of control. I may dedicate a separate machine to it soon. I would run an IIP IRC server/proxy but I haven't read the docs to figure out if that is possible (anyone have the one line answer?)
I have run Grapevine because it looks promising, but as of now doesn't do alot yet. I will also run 6/4, these guys may not have received as much press and recognition as freenet but they have put alot of thought into their license, I would put it in the category of seminal documents that make a stand for freedom like the Magna Carta, US Bill of Rights, GPL... that may seem overreaching, but you can check it out for yourself at 6/4 License

I want to do what I can to support people doing experimentation, sometimes you need stuff running out in the wild to be able to move your project forward. I use plenty of low profile Open Source stuff that is imperfect in various ways. One of the main reasons I use and support Open Source software is to support innovation, freedom and liberty - I don't look at every package as "What can this do for me?" esp since the cost to me of helping out is relatively low compared to people who risk their lives to speak out whether it is standing in front of a tank or publishing articles.

I2P is another anonymous p2p project you should look at. The developers are on the IIP ( http://www.invisiblenet.net/iip/index.php ) network in #I2P. Here are some links to their content, and I believe their network can scale up to 5 million people (or so their documentation says).

I2P Links:

http://www.i2p.net
http://wiki.invisiblenet.net/iip-wiki?I2P
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/i2p/
http://www.invisiblenet.net/i2p/

I2P is another anonymous p2p project you should look at. The developers are on the IIP ( http://www.invisiblenet.net/iip/index.php ) network in #I2P. Here are some links to their content, and I believe their network can scale up to 5 million people (or so their documentation says).

I2P Links:

http://www.i2p.net
http://wiki.invisiblenet.net/iip-wiki?I2P
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/i2p/
http://www.invisiblenet.net/i2p/

http://wiki.invisiblenet.net/iip-wiki?I2P
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/i2p/
http://www.invisiblenet.net/i2p/

http://wiki.invisiblenet.net/iip-wiki?I2P
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/
http://i2p.dnsalias.net/i2p/
http://www.invisiblenet.net/i2p/

invisiblenet

SILC is not anonymous. Try IIP instead.

According to BusinessWeek, "secure" P2P is offered by the following (some use encryption):

Direct Connect
http://www.neo-modus.com/
http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/

Waste
http://waste.sourceforge.net/

Freenet
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
http://jtcfrost.sourceforge.net/

invisibleNET (aka invisibleIRC)
http://www.invisiblenet.net/

BadBlue (commercial product)
http://www.badblue.com

Groove Networks (commercial product)
http://www.groove.net

"It would be nice to have some kind of anonyminity features"

IIP

Invisible IRC is a totally anonymous and encrypted IRC service. You cannot see other peoples IP addresses. There are a lot of people on here, most of which you cannot see because they are private communities hidden in their own little chatrooms. Just run the invisible irc proxy service and tell your IRC client to connect to localhost port 6667 and you are off in your own private Idaho.

Well its definately not hard to crack down on a regular IRC network...but I wonder about "Invisible Irc" which uses p2p routing and a central server that no one knows the address of.

As far as I've understood, freenet is designed to be somewhere where you can access content, as long as somebody has given you the exact address to the file.

The problem I see here, is that there are no easy ways to search for content, except for out-of-band stuff like the web or e-mail, which mostly defeats the entire concept.

There are many ways to get to know keys, several of the index pages on Freenet are a good start. A number of them are generated automatically by crawlers.

Other often used channels are Freenet-based message board Frost and Invisible IRC aka IIP which provides anonymous IRC. Contrary to Freenet, IIP is very quick and interactive - but only for very short messages.

There is a full-text index to Freenet. Definitely out of band (insecure http), so use an anonymous proxy to visit it. Try the JAP proxy for example; powerful concept and acceptable performance.

There's also work being done on making a full text search engine available via HTTP over IIP, which ultimately could be seamlessly accessible from your Freenet client. (Hope to be able to announce a link to this soon.)

A project like Freenet will never be fully done of course. But keeping its goals in mind, it's already doing quite a fair job I think. Performance and usability should and will improve of course, but the level of privacy it offers is already outweighing these rawer edges for a significant user group.

Invisible IRC (or IIP) is the perfect complement to Freenet. It's a completely anonymous, distributed chat network that runs as a proxy on your system, to which you can connect any IRC client (just use localhost:6667 for server). If you like Freenet, join us on IIP!

Key indexes were used in the initial freenet versions, but already died while the 0.3 network was running. Content announcement has moved to be mostly in-freenet, via freesites + NIM (e.g. The Freedom Engine) and programs like frost. A lot of keys are also exchanged via IIP.

If you're wearing a tinfoil hat, find a friend on freenet (via iip or some other mechanism) and download from them. (not to mention the absurdity of suing someone for just *using* freenet... that'd get tossed even in a patriot act america)

Some introductory material first:

Projects like Freenet, GNUnet and IIP are creating decentralized, anonymous Peer-to-Peer networks that can strongly resist censorship by any attacker. I believe that if (when?) these kinds of secure networks replace currently popular networks (FastTrack, IRC, etc) as IP infringement tools, your job of effectively finding, stoping and prosecuting IP infringers will become much, much harder, and will require many more computer resources (perhaps impossibly many resources, both in computing time and in network bandwith).

Now my questions:

For how long do you think mass IP infringement will continue to take place in plain view, rather than on decentralized, anonymous, P2P networks?

If mass IP infringment does move to those kinds of networks, what kind of resources will your office be able to expend to attack those networks?

Would you be allowed to attack those networks at all without violating their user's First Ammendment right to anonymous speech?

What changes to IP law do you think would be needed to address decentralized anonymous networks?

I have to point out the Invisible Irc Project as well. It lets any IRC client connect to a secure IRC network, since it works as a proxy/relay system instead of patching the clients.

Don't you worry about being caught and sent to ass-pound prison or anything?

Also, you might want to have a look at The Invisible IRC Project and The Freenet Project if you're looking for a more anonymous/heavily encrypted place. Hell, I think Counterfeiting is one of the few crimes FreeNet doesn't have a page for yet.

This is why it is absolutely critical that we continue to support and develop projects like IIP and Freenet.

Unfortunately, so far Freenet remains slow, crash-prone, and written in Java (at least, in my experience). Hopefully, some of these deficiencies will be fixed soon, though.

And for anonymous chat, there is always the Invisible IRC Proxy. That one actually works pretty well.

So, it would seem that we need a peer-to-peer service that is built with the following attributes:

-completely anonymous users, file transfers, hosts, etc.
-reliable and stable structure
-decentralized topology
-efficient data management
-and complete deniability (I didn't host that file, or I didn't download that file, as member's cant control content on the network)

We do. We have several.
- FreeNet, and similar projects (Publius, FreeHaven) for distributing anonymous files
- The Invisible IRC Project for anonymous, deniable instant messaging
- InvisiBlog for blogging
- MixMaster and Hushmail for email
- Anonymizer and Peek-a-booty for browsing

Anyone care to add to this list? I've only put the ones that immediately spring to mind, but I know there are more distributed anonymous deniable chaffed encrypted file-share programs that I've not tried.

Um, let's not forget that the internet started out as a governmental network. In a sense, it has always been heavily regulated by the government. It only gained the reputation as a place for free speech because the government chose not to do anything about it (in regards to monitoring it) until recently.

Also, on the topic of a secure and anonymous application, I suggest that you use FreeNet and IIP.

We have a nickserv/chanserv clone called Trent

For help: /squery trent help
To register your nick: /squery trent nickreg password
To identify: /squery trent identify password

See also the IIP manual

often they'll go to a hacker chat room, a place on the Web using an Internet Relay Chat which provides them some anonymity [my emphasis]

Real "hackers" use IIP (Invisible IRC Project), which provides strong anonymity on IRC. Another, somewhat related, sweet project is SILC, which, though it doesn't provide anonymity, adds strong crypto to IRC.

Encrypted, Anonymous, Opensource IRC.
IIP

There are some other services like IRC now that are secure and highly available, and have some features that usenet and irc don't have.

Freenet 0.4 is shaping up; expect the final 0.5 release shortly. Try downloading the newest nightly to get on. For those who aren't in the know, freenet is a peer-to-peer encrypted datastore. Each node shares part of that datastore, and freenet efficiently routes and stores data that you insert. Also it is anonymous as you can not easily tell who inserts data and who requests it

Now build on top of that is a program, Frost , that acts like Napster and a message board, a la Usenet. There are different message boards, and all messages are send & recieved anonymously.

Now both of these programs are in beta, but they do work, although large files tend to get lost in Freenet as of yet.

The final project is IIP, or Invisible Irc Project, available at http://www.invisiblenet.net/.

Also available there is a nifty program called "Psst" which allows for encrypted instant messaging. You can use it in conjunction with your normal IM program, and it's really easy to use and install.

One final note is that all of these program are cross-platform, open source, and binaries are available for windows & linux.