Going Back To The Past of the Internet

*no comment* writes "deadly.org currently has a story about a new grassroot network springing up. It consists of free shell access, and is trying to revitalize the olden days of the Internet. Free speech, free information are the key features, but I wonder if this is jsut another free DDoS drone as well."

Comments

You can never go back

[sane?]

That country does not exist, its faded; been erased from you memory.

You can never return to the past, instead live in the present and create the future.

Take what was good and move on.

Re:I'd be wary....

[dattaway]

A great advantage of using wireless is the ability to put up a box for learning without using internet bandwidth. Put up a tall mast for your antenna, open all the ports, and watch the fun begin! More fun that any lame net honeypot for everyone.

Going Back To The Past of the Internet...

[BrookHarty]

Humm, The good ole days.

1. People on IRC who talked about things other than mod chips/xbox/playstation isos/porn/divx/mp3s...
2. Usenet newsgroups without spam, and the occasional flame war.
3. No Private message forums, only Usenet (sorry Slashdot)
4. Email without spam.
5. Shell accounts used for ppp emulators (no thanks!)
6. More than one tcp/ip stack choice.
7. Any web browser could display a website.
8. FTP search engines that worked.
9. No paying to download files (ala like Fileplanet)
10. The age of unencrypted innocence.
11. No pop ups ads.
12. No mass free-email accounts.
13. Letting the Internet regulate itself, no Government interference.
-

Read at your own risk - Open Letter to America from a Canadian

Re:The Glory Days of USENET ...

[GuyMannDude]

IMHO, the spamming of USENET has been one of the great tragedies of the popularization of the Internet. There was once a time when a young 13 year old girl who had just been molested/raped by a trusted uncle or family friend could go to alt.sexual.abuse and find comfort that she was not alone. That others had suffered as she had. Find a place where she could talk with people who understood and could relate to her. She could have posted using the anonymous server in Norway (wasn't that where it was?) and felt secure that her real identity would never be uncovered. Nowdays, because of rampant spamming done on any newsgroup with the word 'sex' or 'sexual' in the title, a young rape/incest victim would go to this newsgroup and, instead of finding a supportive atmosphere, be bombarded by ads along the lines of "Cum see young teenage cum sluts who desparately crave cock!" or "Lolitas who can't get it often enough in the ass!".

I haven't perused USENET in years and I have no plans to return. The spamming is terrible.

GMD

Why does it have to be so primitive?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The reason the internet was great back then, wasn't because it took 48 hours of hair pulling to get your DOS ip stack configured correctly.

It was because dumbass politicians and greedy politicians hadn't touched it. They've spent the better part of a decade proving to us, that it wasn't because they couldn't.

But what if we could build a network that was extremely difficult for them to mess with?

What if it offered the same services as the regular net, fully routed static IP, DNS, and no restrictions. No one coming after you for posting files, building a website, or registering a domain name that some corps find offensive.

And as a side bonus, it might be just as complicated to get connected to it, as the internet originally was...

Read my unfinished webpage about it.

Re:Why does it have to be so primitive?

[flonker]

And please, if you want to criticize do so, this is a bare outline of an idea, not a carefully crafted thing. Point out the flaws, and offer solutions, if they occur to you.
Of course. That said, here's my take on it.

Your system looks very strong, and very robust. It lacks deniability, and decentralization is difficult, but otherwise, it works. I'm a bit tired right now, so I'll probably think of things later, and add them to my system, and tell you of them, assuming this conversation is still going.

Routing is an incredibly delicate process. Routing without a central authority is damn near impossible. The Internet uses ARPA to distribute IP addresses, and thusly, they can track down each IP to its owner.

With the VPN system you propose, you still need a central authority to allocate IPs. A central authority is a single point of failure, if you haven't gotten that yet. It's a single point of accountability. If you can get away from that single point, then you open yourself up to spoofing, spamming, authority hijacking, and all sorts of bad things. (This is a point of weakness, fill it in, and you'll have a much stronger system.)

The current method of anonymous routing is P2P flooding. This, obviously, doesn't scale well. I haven't figured out anything better. Freenet has a significantly optimized flooding algo, but it still relies on flooding to some extent. O(log n) compared to O(n) or something along those lines. IP is much closer to O(1), although you could make an argument for it being O(n/c) with a very large c. (That would mean that the IP wouldn't scale well for values that are orders of magnitude higher than c.) No rigorous proofs here, so keep that grain of salt handy.

The thing that gets me, is what sort of social policy should there be?

This relates strongly to a project I'm thinking on right now. It (obviously) isn't anywhere near complete. But you may be able to cull some interesting ideas from it. I hope you find it helpful.

Assuming an anonymous network, create "virtual countries" with laws of their own. You create an anonymous virtual identity. That virtual identity can be a citizen of a virtual country. By being a citizen, you gain access to the resources of the county. (Bandwidth, access controls, distributed content, etc.) This makes virtual citizenship more of a choice matter, than a "That's where I happen to live" matter.

Assuming some kind of enforcement mechanism for the laws, and access treaties, you can develop a nice system. Virtual Country A has laws against spam. Virtual Country A agrees to exchange traffic with Virtual Country B, as long as Virtual Country B doesn't send any spam to Virtual Country A. You've got a nice trust system. A Virtual Country is responsible for the actions of its citizens, and thusly has a collective bargaining strength.

You also can create Virtual Countries with strong Intellectial Property laws, and enforce that with treaties. If a country wants to ignore IP, then they lose access to the websites of that country that enforces IP with treaties.

And you'd be able to enforce things like your "emergency broadcast system" service. inside a specific virtual country (and, again, by treaties, if necessary.)

I haven't gotten into the punishment for breaking laws yet. All I can think of is rescinding citizenship. This, obviously, doesn't provide enough granularity. And creating a new identity is also a rather difficult problem.

You are making a common mistake, I think...

[mwillems]

...in not recognising that the useful 1% of a godzillion megapieces of information is a hell of a lot more useful than 99% of 100 www pages.

I, too, grew up in the early days and I recall them well. No noise, you could use newsgroups, and receiving email was a real event. Archie, remember archie? And Gopher? Veronica?

BUT... in those days I could not do a tenth of what I can do now. Not one hundredth. Use google. Use google groups (nee dejanews). Look up song lyrics. Bank online. Download videos. Find any company I do business with. And P2P (ha ha... 1200 bps modems, remember those??)

So, the noise is despiccable but do realise it is a side phenomenon of the great cyberworld we are creating.

Give me today's 'net anytime!