Tor: A JAP Replacement

kid_wonder writes "Wired is running an article describing an answer to this previous /. story. Packets are sent through a network of randomly selected servers each of which knows only its predecessor and successor. Packets are unwrapped by a symmetric encryption key at each server that peels off one layer and reveals instructions for the next downstream node. As a 'connection-based low-latency anonymous communication system,' Tor seems to be the answer to JAP to allow anonymous networking activities of all kinds."

Comments

Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

The DoD will just block such methods.!

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Tor Tor Tor and August 5th. The app and date, respectively, that will live in infamy.

Hmm too far for too little? I think so.

Re:Too bad

[Brannoch]

Why would the DoD block Tor when the Navy is the organization funding its development?

Re:Too bad

[gclef]

Ummm...unlikely. TOR was developed at the request of the Navy to help hide the fact that certain activities were coming from Navy devices (like, for instance, they may not want Navy-owned IPs showing up in webserver logs). This is something that the gov't reconnaissance folks will want. The interesting thing is, they *have* to open it, otherwise people will still know it's a government system, since it came from the government anonymizer. If they really want sites to not know that the government is looking at them, they have to let everyone use it, so that the anonymizer is no longer a "government" thing.

Before you know it...

[cytoman]

... the RIAA and the MPAA will be all over this, denouncing it and crying foul!

sigh...

Re:Before you know it...

[jhoffoss]

Well, as it stands, according to the author, if everyone from /. that just downloaded and tried the Tor client used it for P2P file transfer, the existing servers would buckle.

Talk about politically incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

We are REPLACING japs now??!?!?

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

The new version will eventually be called ARAB. One of the security improvements is sandboxing, and when a process begins to misbehave, it's quickly killed.

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the cry of "Tor! Tor! Tor!" has historically been the beginning of the end for Japs.

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[julesreid]

Yes.

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[djocyko]

The japs are not the issue here.

And Dude, japs is not the preferred nomenclature.

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[colmore]

See I was more thinking along the lines of a guy who dumps his irritating New Jersey / Long Island girlfriend for someone better...

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[BillsPetMonkey]

Actually if the grandparent post is acceptably funny (personally I think it's thinly veiled racism), then at least the parent post is historically perceptive if not quite witty.

I do think slashdot's only purpose on the Internet is to aggregate stupidity.

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, still works. Is there a Jewish girl you wouldn't replace with Shannon Elizabeth or Cathrine Bell?

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[generic-man]

If you hire Bill Parcells to name your open source projects, than you should expect to hear such names.

Re:Talk about politically incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

The final version will be called WASP and it will be used exclusively to spread trojans and viruses around the developing web.

Freenet?

[pope nihil]

Isn't this onion routing thing exactly what freenet uses?

Re:Freenet?

[MoonBuggy]

That's exactly what I thought (and I believe that we're right). What's interesting here though is that it claims to be low-latency, a quality rarely associated with Freenet and probably the primary reason that Freenet remains largely used by people who need/want _extreme_ anonymity rather than your average movie downloader wanting to avoid one of those nasty lawsuits.

Re:Freenet?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Freenet remains largely used by people who need/want _extreme_ anonymity rather than your average movie downloader wanting to avoid one of those nasty lawsuits.

Paedophiles trade movies too you know.

The extreme anonymity provided by Freenet is exactly why I'm avoiding it like the plague (and also because it's a Java thing, but that's another problem): unless you live in some dictatorship like China, the only real reason you'd need that much anonymity is for kiddy pr0n...

Re:Freenet?

[elleomea]

As far as I'm aware Freenet stores encrypted content on each node, not just routing requests through nodes.

Re:Freenet?

[Sgs-Cruz]

Which is your right, obviously. But don't be accusing anyone who uses it of trading child porn. I was using Freenet a while back just for the novelty of trying it out -- I found it (much like the Gnutella network) unusable for downloading music/movies so I stopped using it.

But my point is just because it can be used for bad purposes does not mean it necessarily will.

Re:Freenet?

[Wesley Felter]

Freenet doesn't use onion routing (last time I checked), but it does use the concept of sending messages through mutiple hops. But the main difference between Freenet and Tor is that Freenet is an anonymous publishing system and Tor is an anonymizing layer that can work with almost any application.

Re:Freenet?

[HeghmoH]

What a crazy attitude to have. There are other reasons you'd need that much anonymity.

First, your dismissal of people who live in China is incredibly inappropriate. Over a billion people live there, and you just dismissed them out of hand. And then there's the exile situation; what about somebody who's now living in the US who still can't speak out freely because of repercussions on friends/family back home? Do they simply not count?

There are plenty of other reasons, though, all the way from "VP in Fortune 500 company wants to expose toxic waste problems without risking being found out as the source" to "I'm such an incredibly paranoid person that I don't want to risk the wrath of the US government for posting these funny pictures of Bush" all the way to the classic standby, "because I want to".

I don't use Freenet, but I also don't simply assume that everybody who searches for perfect anonymity must be a reprehensible criminal.

Re:Freenet?

[NeoSkandranon]

There are plenty of other reasons, though, all the way from "VP in Fortune 500 company wants to expose toxic waste problems without risking being found out as the source"

Don't you think they'd use something more reputable than a fringe P2P program ?

Re:Freenet?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, yeah, that was what we call a troll. Take note.

Re:Freenet?

[Trejkaz]

Also, what about people who may work for, picking a random company, JBoss Inc., but want to register for multiple forum accounts without getting busted? :-)

Re:Freenet?

[0x0d0a]

Isn't this onion routing thing exactly what freenet uses?

Not in the same form.

Freenet allows posting of data, which does travel through multiple nodes, much like this one. It also allows retrieval of data. However, the two are separate operations. You don't establish a connection between the publisher of data and the reciever, which means Freenet tends to be unsuitable for things that require even remotely interactive latency. I think Tor might wind up being a bit high for, say, SSH, but it could easily be just fine for instant messaging -- two people that don't know each other by anything but pseudonyms and cannot trace each other can conduct conversations.

Re:Freenet?

[Dwonis]

the only real reason you'd need that much anonymity is for kiddy pr0n...

First of all, I disagree that that is the "only real reason" why a person would need that much anonymity, but that's not what I'm going to argue.

Rather, I have a simple question for you: What do you think is wrong with wanting that much privacy, even if you don't strictly need it?

Re:Freenet?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Actually, freenet hides everything so well, that of course people are going to stash rotten files all over it. An anonymous network doesn't have to be so opaque to the users themselves though, only to eavesdroppers listening from the outside. Take my own idea about a network, metanet. It still guarantees a useful anonymity, but being an IP network (and not some asshat file-trading "p2p is the wave of the future" application), most people on it tend to know everything that is there, without spending 24 hours a day searching hashes.
It's not a climate that encourages kiddy porn. We all have persistent identities (note: to those that think anonymity precludes this, think about it. Anonymity is the inability to link such a nickname to the real person), and no one wants to tarnish them.

And by the way, assuming that my guess is correct and that you're in Canada, you're invited should you ever want to try it out. 20 minute install, and pings to the farthest reaches are 500ms.

Re:Freenet?

[jhoffoss]

Read the page for a few seconds; the author gives several legitimate reasons to use this. In addition, the author is paid by the FBI (or some other US three-letter-agency) to write Tor. Ultimately, if enough folks use it, it'll provide sufficient anonymity. Right now (or prior to /.ing), if you see these IPs, you know it's a fed, because they're the only ones using the system right now.

Re:Freenet?

[MacJedi]

Forgive me if I am misunderstanding you, but if it is impossible to link a nickname to a real person, how is that not a climate that encourages illegal activity? Sure, nobody wants to tarnish their online persona, but who says they are limited to only one online persona?

Re:Freenet?

[jcr]

unless you live in some dictatorship like China, the only real reason you'd need that much anonymity is for kiddy pr0n...

That's the only use you can think of for anonymity?

You really need to get out more.

-jcr

Re:Freenet?

[Hobbex]

No, Freenet doesn't use onion routing. Never has and doesn't today. It is impossible to both onion route a query and at the same time route it through a network based on local knowledge (since with onion routing the client has to map out the exact path of message in advanced, and the whole point with Freenet is that the client doesn't know where the message is going to go).

There was discussion once upon a time about adding a couple of steps of onion routing before the Freenet routing starts - that would be equivalent to accessing Freenet through something like Tor (thus making things even slower) but leveraging the existing nodes as the mixnet.

All this is rather academic however as Freenet doesn't actually work, and probably never will. But it is nice to see how easy it is to score +5 here by sprouting uninformed nonsense nowadays.

Re:Freenet?

[jrockway]

I agree. Now that I think about it this post addresses the grandparent more than the parent, but that's okay.

First of all, I'll say that I don't care much for kiddie pr0n. But it's not my job in life to tell others what they should be doing. If kiddie pr0n is what makes their life complete, let 'em have it. If it's as bad as we all think, God (or whomever you believe to be the supreme ruler of the Universe) will sort it out. Not me. It's not my job to dictate how YOU live YOUR life.

However, the government has taken it upon itself to dictate how I live. Freenet is the answer to that. There is total Freedom now. You can say ANYTHING you want and there will be no consequences. That is a wonderful thing for society. Of course the children will abuse that Freedom, and will post hateful speech and other "unpleasant" things. But just because you find their views to be reprehensible doesn't mean that they shouldn't be heard.

I logged onto Freenet last weekend, and I was amazed at what kinds of things were on there. Essays about topics that would be taken down from any reputable webserver instantly, etc. But thanks to Freenet, these people finally had the chance to share their life's experiences with the world because they finally had the freedom to do it. If you think that's a bad thing, you need to grow up. Yes, these people committed crimes, and may still be doing it. But there's nothing wrong with them wanting to rationalize their belief system.

Again, it's not your job to tell them that they're wrong; that they can't say what they want. Because they can now, and you can't control it.

Sorry if I'm ranting, but I think Freenet is the best thing to happen to the Internet. True Freedom (of speech) is now achieved, and the government can't take it away. That is a Good Thing.

Re:Freenet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until all the /. readers start using it

Re:Freenet?

[BlackHawk-666]

But my point is just because it can be used for bad purposes does not mean it necessarily will.Yes. It's in the nature of man that anything that can be, wil be used for evil/base purposes. Some examples:

Nuclear physics - could have given cheap clean energy, gave us masss death and paranoia as well.
Telephone/Email - meant for personal communications, now so badly choked with shit/marketing that they are barely worth using.
Guns - meant for personal defense or defense of a nation against attack, mainly used to kill people.
Knifes - meant for cutting up food and stuff, also great for stabbing people.
Rope - good for tying things up, like people who you are assulting.
Telescopes, meant for astronomy, but also superb for voyeurism and stalking.

Bottom line, if it can be used for nasty purposes it *will* be used for that.

Re:Freenet?

[Troed]

Since Freenet does work, what does that say about your last sentence?

Re:Freenet?

[ultranova]

First of all, I'll say that I don't care much for kiddie pr0n. But it's not my job in life to tell others what they should be doing. If kiddie pr0n is what makes their life complete, let 'em have it. If it's as bad as we all think, God (or whomever you believe to be the supreme ruler of the Universe) will sort it out. Not me. It's not my job to dictate how YOU live YOUR life.

The argument against kiddy porn is that it harms the children, and thus your argument is invalid - we lock away murderers because they will harm others if kept free, and child pornographers should be locked away by the same reason.

The real question is does this argument have any validity on a communication medium ? Freenet cannot be used to directly harm anyone; you can't use it to harm a single child. You can harm the children and then spread pictures of it, but does this cause the child any extra harm ? And even if it does, does the existence of Freenet do everyone (even the abused children, once they grow up) more good than harm ?

But your argument that CP is merely a matter of lifestyle choice is invalid, since producing CP is nigh-impossible without harming third parties (children). A bit like being a serial killer isn't just your personal lifestyle choice.

Of course this only applies to actual live photography/video, not drawings or computer graphics. Producing the latter doesn't directly harm anyone.

Again, it's not your job to tell them that they're wrong; that they can't say what they want. Because they can now, and you can't control it.

You do realize that you just infringed on my free-speech rights by telling me I can't tell others to STFU ?

You wouldn't be trying to impose your own morals on everyone else, now would you ?-)

Sorry if I'm ranting, but I think Freenet is the best thing to happen to the Internet. True Freedom (of speech) is now achieved, and the government can't take it away. That is a Good Thing.

Freenet is still in its infancy, and isn't likely to ever be allowed to leave it. Freedom of communication is the worst nightmare of everyone who wants power over others, and governments everywhere are made of people who want power over others. If Freenet ever becomes a serious threat to them, it will be utterly destroyed - remember, Freenet doesn't (can't) hide the fact that you're running a node, it just hides what you use it for.

Re:Freenet?

[Steve Franklin]

"unless you live in some dictatorship like China"

Actually, China is an oligarchy, where a small group of members of a clique rule either collectively or in rotation, as opposed to the Catholic Church, which I would call an "oligarchical elective dictatorship," where the clique elects the dictator and then goes back to being subservient to it.

Re:Freenet?

[SillyNickName4me]

While I agree with most of your post, I felt I had to comment on one thing:

> Guns - meant for personal defense or defense of a nation against attack, mainly used to kill people.

Guns were made to kill, either for hunting or for offense. That also makes them usefull for defense, but that was not why they were invented. I suggest reading up on EUropean history between 1200 and 1600 to see in which environment they came to exist.

That doesn't remove the usability of guns btw, hunting is a very legitimate use of guns, which does include the killign aspect in a very legitimate way. Suggestign that guns were primarely invented for personal defense however is a false argument mostly used by gun fanatics.

Re:Freenet?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The argument against kiddy porn is that it harms the children"

Child-molestation harms children. KP only harms children if the children are identifiable from the pictures. Now, some may say that KP encourages child-molestation. A few weeks ago, a movie was released showing a guy getting his head chopped off. It's possible that its distribution around the Internet will encourage others to chop off people's heads. Does this mean that the distribution of that movie should be illegal, or that people who are found with that movie on their computers should be registered as "violence-offenders" and not allowed near locations where people's heads may congregate? No? Then why should that be the case for KP?

Re:Freenet?

[Chaswell]

Actually, wired did an article on this a couple days ago. I am now using it. Given, I use it to mask my multiple connections to the same MUD so that I avoid getting harrassed by the admins for mutliple play, which is strickly forbidden. But still, I am actively increasing the noise, it was amazingly simple to set up, and performs much better than I expected. Put the wired article together with the slashdot article and I bet the noise level is going way up in the TOR connections.

Re:Freenet?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Anything which a corporation can buy a law against can be illegal, so that's not the best term to use.

Kiddy porn though, is still taboo to all but the sickest fucks. Besides which, anonymous or not, it's still in essence a peering arrangement. If you were to start DDoSing everyone on metanet, the person that invited you would wait about 3 seconds before rescinding your invitation and kicking you out. Do you think they'd be any more tolerant of kiddy porn, of terrorism-related activities?

Re:Freenet?

[ArsonSmith]

The best defense is a good offense.

Re:Freenet?

[Hobbex]

That you and I have different definitions of "works".

Re:Freenet?

[SillyNickName4me]

> The best defense is a good offense.

Nice bit of wisdom that is not very usabel outside the scope of strategy games really.

The best defense is preventing an attack alltogether instead of having to deal with it. For this you seldom need offensive weapons really.

All your reasoning results in is an arms race (regardless of scale), which is not a solution to anything other then the financial balance of arms producers.

Re:Freenet?

[ninejaguar]

Existance is the climate to encourage illegal activity. It also happens to be the climate to encourage innocent acitivity. In America, if you are accused of breaking the law, the state assumes you're innocent until proven guilty. If the state assumes everyone is guilty until proven innocent, you may be living in some banana republic.

Anonymity can be irradicated by implanting an RFID-like chip/LoJack device at birth and tatooing everyone's foreheads with barcodes. Should we? I hope not.

= 9J =

Re:Freenet?

[Troed]

I've run freenet for years. At the moment it works better than I have ever seen it do before. I have no problems whatsoever browsing freesites and using frost.

Now, tell me why it doesn't work.

Re:Freenet?

[Hobbex]

I can put up a single Freenet node, insert some data into it, and then request it, and then claim that Freenet "works": but that doesn't mean that it does.

Freenet is working when the network starts displaying the emergent properties that the creators (Ian Clarke, and to a later myself and the other developers) predicted, and it shows the ability to scale in the number of nodes and the amount of data like we promised. I have seen nothing to date to indicate that this has taken place, and while I am not the lead developer anymore, I do feel I have better insight into this than most.

But hey, if it does work then my time wasn't as wasted as I fear.

Re:Freenet?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best defense is preventing an attack alltogether instead of having to deal with it. For this you seldom need offensive weapons really.

HIPPIE!!!!!

Re:Freenet?

[SillyNickName4me]

> HIPPIE!!!!

Or realist. This has nothing to do with pacifism, but with the simple wisdom that prevention is better then a cure. That doesn't preclude using a cure when you did not manage to prevent.

Re:Freenet?

[MacJedi]

I am not advocating eliminating anonymity-- far from it. My only real point was that I do not believe that there can be a truly anonymous environment which also discourages undesirable behavior. Period.

Re:Freenet?

[Troed]

Freenet allows anonymous communication between thousands of nodes - today.

That's my definition of "works".

Re:Freenet?

[Hobbex]

"Thousands" (doubtful) of nodes could have been searched faster by a simple random walk and sufficient caching (all testing showed freenet needs at least 10X caching). So that is no evidence that it works.

But hey, I'm glad that the software I helped write is working out for you. I would like to warn you though that the "anonymity" of freenet is highly tenuous - it is likely not very difficult for a determined attacker to find out what you are surfing.

Re:Freenet?

[amphibian]

That is incorrect. A well-established node can download movie-sized files pretty fast. Latency doesn't matter for such files, and isn't any worse than many other systems featuring "queueing". Bandwidth can reach 90kB/sec. Or at least it could last time Ian tried it. Latency is a problem for freesites, not for big files. Admittedly you need to use the freesites to find the files most of the time, if you don't use Frost.

Re:Freenet?

[amphibian]

At present, no it does not. In future it will be necessary to implement a first stage of onion routing to protect against some correlation attacks, but this is not implemented yet.

Re:Freenet?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

There goes Troed's dream of surfing anonymously without his hated American enemies watching him. LMAO!

Re:Freenet?

[Troed]

It's amazing that you know so little about Freenet :) The number of nodes on stable is estimated at between 6 and 12 thousand atm. I also know a LOT (really) about crypto and security and know that the last bit of your post above is pure nonsense.

Come off your high horses and read up on the current state of Freenet before posting such bollocks again maybe?

Re:Freenet?

[Hobbex]

I have heard the estimates and doubt them, but I don't care to argue.

If you don't believe me about the anonymity, ask somebody who does real academic work on anonymity like Goldberg or Dingledine (the author of the program this article is about) what they think about Freenet's model. Freenet offers considerably less anonymity then Crowds, which is generally considered a very weak solution.

Re:Freenet?

[arodland]

No, it's not. Onion routing is about premix routing, with layered encryption for each step. Freenet is about adaptive "smart" routing to try to find the key you want; this requires less information hiding, so freenet uses only link-level encryption between successive nodes, and the encryption inherent in freenet keys themselves, to hide data.

Freenet theoretically has higher latency but higher bandwidth, and is suited only for fairly static data. Onion routing and things like it give lower latency and more dynamic interaction, but at the cost of higher overhead and higher trust requirements.

Re:Freenet?

[ninejaguar]

I understand. But, the point is that undesirable behavior is part of being human. You won't find any area of human endeavor absent of undesirable behavior. To expect it to be absent from online activities is to put the bar higher than we do for the Vatican, the White House, the military, corporations, and families. Not really fair or even rational.

= 9J =

Re:Freenet?

[kevmit]

"Kiddy porn though, is still taboo to all but the sickest fucks."

Which would explain why everytime "the bad guys" want to take away our, self-granted and self-evident, rights to privacy and anonymity, they always trot out the spectre of "kiddy porn".
Because, after all, what kind of sicko wouldn't be willing to sacrifice all their rights and submit to constant surveillance and monitoring if it means we can naively reassure ourselves that this is going to have any kind of meaninful impact at all on the habits of sexually-deranged pedophiles.

Re:Freenet?

[Troed]

based on the peer data we've collected, we have seen more than 13k unique IP addresses around the world

Taken from Freenet support, today.

I don't believe you regarding your claims of bad anonymity, and I don't need to go to further sources. You don't have anything to back up that claim.

Re:Freenet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol so that's why one of the gateway index maintainers wants shot of his freesite, he should be inserting site navigation as a menu system on the latest dvd everyone wants to watch! that solves two problems in one, every gets a film and can link to other freesites in the process! all at that astounding 90kbps that Ian always manages to get when everyone else struggles to get 56k modem perfomance outta their broadband connections come on toad get your head out the sand, freenets routing has been broken for over 2 years now, the advances you are creating come from the M$ book of if we increase the file size of everything something will get fixed, Newsbyte one of your most vocal admirers last year has started voicing concerns over how the project is going. Long standing freesite authors have bailed out, quite a few actively work for other anonymous networking projects now. Please take a look around you and look at the wide open space that is freenet, that once was populated with opinionated idiots with nothing better to do than troll your devl posts.

hmmm

[SinaSa]

Tor - The internet onion!

No, but seriously, the blurb says this is low latency, how that's the case, I fail to see. First client wants to send a HTTP GET or something similar via Tor, so every packet involved needs that info, plus a little bit extra to get it to the next node, plus a little bit more so the end node knows where it needs to be in the end on the return. So that's two extra little bits, then the stuff gets sent one node across which takes its info off and puts new info on.

Where is the low latency here? All this peeling/adding layers to peel off must be fairly time consuming. I'll admit I quite like the idea, and as soon as I click Submit I'm going to download and try it, but I fail to see how this can be faster than say, InvisibleIRC (IIP) was.

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

*drool* mmm..... onion rings...

Re:hmmm

[dfelznic]

I am using tor right now to read slashdot as well as IRC and GAIM. Tor is not supposed to be as low latency as your normal connection. Security is a trade off the slight degradation in latency is worth the improved anonymity...

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using tor right now to read slashdot as well as IRC and GAIM. Tor is not supposed to be as low latency as your normal connection. Security is a trade off the slight degradation in latency is worth the improved anonymity...

Yes, anonymity is truly worth it... DFELZNIC! ;)

Re:hmmm

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

Where is the low latency here? All this peeling/adding layers to peel off must be fairly time consuming.

Well for what it's worth, the internet already has to work through 7 layers of padding on top of the actual data and no one seems to complain about that too much. Just think about a normal http response at the hightest level, you've got several lines of headers before you even get to the content. And each packet, each frame, each [insert-your-favorite-level's-term-for-chunk-o-dat a] has extra bits wrapped around it.

Now that I think about it, it even goes further: if you think about html itself, all the tags are just meta information, the actual content is much smaller than that. It's kinda frightening when you think about much data other than your content is necessary for everything to work.

Of course with the added encryption, this would be a bit more cpu intensive I suppose. But because of layering in the past I don't see that as a reason alone to not like this model.

Re:hmmm

[Wesley Felter]

Tor is low latency compared to Mixmaster, which has a latency of around 24 hours.

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, he has a slashdot id of 8000 and has only posted 60 times. Thats pretty anonymous.

Re:hmmm

[jhoffoss]

Tor achieves low latency because tunnels are created during connection setup, and that same tunnel is utilized for the life of the connection.

I believe the encryption is layered on from the start, and peeling occurs at each transfer, not peel/crypt/peel/crypt/etc.

I was surprised to see no one posted this earlier; the author of Tor gave a very good presentation at DEFCON last week, and I'll have to get out my CD with his presentation on it, but it's different from Freenet in a few ways. For one, apparently Freenet isn't totally free.

As a side-note, the author is still working on a method to accept/sign-up/recruit primary [trusted] nodes.

Re:hmmm

[jhoffoss]

Oh, and Tor is either "Tor Onion Routing" or "The Onion Router" (if I recall correctly.) I checked the site quick, too, and the slides from DEFCON and BlackHat are on his site.

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am using tor right now to read slashdot as well as IRC and GAIM."

And signed-in to slashdot, no less. (don't forget your cookies are supplied as normal when you browse with tor)

I've just installed tor, and using it to browse websites now -- it's pretty fast for an anonymous connection layer! It's quite odd seeing a website which reports your IP address giving a different answer each time you reload it, but certainly something I could get used to!

I would imagine

[AbbyNormal]

our East Asian readers, will readily endorse this new standard...Honestly, I guess not many people think about their acronyms before they are released to the public.

Re:I would imagine

[new account for mod]

Why would East Asians have a problem with an acronym that also refers to Jewish American Princesses?

Re:I would imagine

[edsterino]

# of Japanese that know what the term "Jap" means *
# of Japanese that will ever hear of "JAP" *
# that are actually offended = a real small number (probably)

After all, that story about Woody the Internet Pecker is true, isn't it?

Re:I would imagine

[koi88]

# of Japanese that know what the term "Jap" means *
# of Japanese that will ever hear of "JAP" *
# that are actually offended = a real small number (probably)

#sarcasm# Hey, maybe only a really small number of black people are reading this, so let's call it NIGR! #/sarcasm#
Honestly, what you said is very stupid. I'm not a fan of PC, but the argument "maybe they'll never know it" is wrong. Have you heard the term World Wide Web?

Re:I would imagine

[DAldredge]

Have you heard unedited urban music?

Re:I would imagine

[sharkey]

As a member of the "Kansas Republican's Allied Urologist Technicians", I have to ask you what you mean.

Re:I would imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

George Washington Carver

He is my favorite kind of nigger....a DEAD one!

Re:I would imagine

[GigsVT]

That wasn't his argument at all. Pay attention. He said that few japs would care about being called japs, any more than I would care about being called a wop. It's just not offensive.

Re:I would imagine

[edsterino]

No, that's not what I meant. But thanks for the friendly response. I was trying to point out that there would be a small number of people offended which is a differing point of view from that implied by the parent. I didn't say it was okay.

Re:I would imagine

[Thundersnatch]

I never understood why "Jap" or "Nip" would be offensive to a Japanese person. They're simply abbreviations of "Japan" and "Nippon", the Anglicized and native names for the country.

I mean, I'm not offended by the hordes of Europeans that call Americans "Amis".

I'll grant you that the terms "Jap" and "Nip" had a decidedly negative connotation amongst Americans during and immediately after WWII, but not because the terms themselves were offensive or deragatory in nature. The terms had a negative connotation commensurate with "Japan","Nippon", and "Germany" at the time - simply because the words represented the enemy in a brutal and costly war.

Now, I agree that other Asian peoples should be offended by being called "Jap" or "Nip", as it is inaccurate. It would be the same as a native in Singapore referring to all persons of European descent as "Brits".

Not Like Freenet

[gclef]

Wow. Lots of DefCon related stories.

Anyway, for those asking, no, this isn't quite like Freenet. In TOR, you decide which points you want to send traffic through (and negotiate encryption keys with each one individually), and, unlike FreeNet, you can tunnel existing protocols over it (like, say http).

There's a lot of promise here, but in his talk, he was looking for sites that had at least 1Mbps up & down speeds for nodes. This isn't quite like Peekabooty, in that right now they're not looking for everyone to run a middleman node.

Re:Not Like Freenet

[X]

What it is very much like is Freedom.net from Zero Knowledge Systems. Those guys already provided the patches to Linux to implement it, and had way more sophisticated protections (things to prevent discovery by timing and packet size analysis). Unfortunately, not may people used it, so it went bust. Now ZKS mostly does firewall software. :-(

Re:Not Like Freenet

[gclef]

Yeah, he mentioned ZKS in his presentation. Their disappearing, and taking the network with them, is one of the reasons that he's BSD-licensing the code for this.

Interestingly, one of the other reasons is that he managed to convince the Navy that others would use and trust the code (therefore making the Navy's use of it more difficult to detect) if those others could read the code and implement it themselves. I'm honestly kinda surprised (but happy) that the Navy agreed to it.

Re:Not Like Freenet

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I'm honestly kinda surprised (but happy) that the Navy agreed to it.

Probably a left-hand/right-hand kinda thing. As soon as the office of jack-booted thugs, er homeland security, gets wind of it they'll strong-arm the Navy into shutting it down. Or perhaps something even more idiotic like trying to embedd a "secret" backdoor without pausing to take into account just how well that will work with open-source.

Re:Not Like Freenet

[CRiMSON]

Yup, I remeber the freedom.net launch like it was yesterday, It was truly sad it died. broke a lot of peoples hearts.

- Proud ZKS employee

talk about racist

[Anonymous Coward]

If I called my project NI**ER, it'd never get accepted. Why JAP?

Re:talk about racist

[Trejkaz]

Let's see, which one is more offensive I wonder... Hmm...

Onion routing

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

to help Internet users surf the Web anonymously and shield their online activities from corporate or government eyes. The system is based on a concept called onion routing.

I've just tried to set www.theonion.com:8800 as http proxy but it doesn't work...

Re:Onion routing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Interesting"?

Somebody's browser doesn't process humour tags...

Re:Onion routing

[Hard_Code]

Nurse we need the defibrillator stat! We're about to lose this joke!

Re:Onion routing

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong port, try again.

Re:Onion routing

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, you set that proxy then what next? you're still not encrypted up to that proxy unless its an ssl tunnel.

Why would the government fund something...

[hadesan]

which is completely open source and avaialble to anyone who want's to download it?

If the Navy is funding this project, don't you think they have already found a way of monitoring it?

Re:Why would the government fund something...

[nz_mincemeat]

The fact that it requires at least a few servers in its chain would mean that there are central points of failure.

Any good encryption system is difficult to be snooped, but it's often easier just to deny access to it (the internet equivalent of air superiority). For example, an "arms race" of blocking IPs and new chains of nodes (for totalitarian nation-states), or even just DDoS attacks.

Re:Why would the government fund something...

[tacarat]

Sure, monitor one of the known ends and dumping the packets to file for cracking later. Of course, the main question is how practical would it be to do? If the encryption has a good algorithm, then it could be too computationally expensive to decrypt meaningful amounts of data. If the algorithm is weak, then near real-time monitoring might be practical. Besides, reading the article, it's being set up more to help intelligence spooks do research without tipping everybody else in the world off. Not including terrorists and foriegn goverments, lots of entities would love to know what the US intelligence community finds interesting.
Mind you, it's doubtful the average user would be doing anything that interests the military. If you're seriouly worried about the military/goverment monitoring your home internet sessions, you probably need medication (or a lawyer). With everything else going on in the world, I'm sure even Big Brother needs a reason to focus his all seeing eye towards you...

Re:Why would the government fund something...

[Anonymous Coward]

Like a road.

Re:Why would the government fund something...

[dfelznic]

To quote Paul Syverson from his PET talk:
"The man needs your cover traffic just as much as you need the man for his cover traffic.."

Re:Why would the government fund something...

[darkewolf]

Not including terrorists and foriegn goverments, lots of entities would love to know what the US intelligence community finds interesting.

Your point here is the most interesting. I think you have it right on the ball here. I am sure there are a number of large corporations that would love to know about any potential future flare ups in certain regions so that they can get their tenders in for redevelopment work and other such things in before their competition has even heard about it.

I suspect 20 minutes into the future (poorly paraphrased reference I know) protecting privacy (online and otherwise) and allowing one to be anonymous online will be a lot more to do with stopping corporate monitor and *abuse* of data than protecting people from governments.

The government wants to control you and make sure you don't break laws. Corporations want to make sure they sell something to you before anyone else does. Both are bad, selling tends to be more invasive and insideous (due to be apparent 'innocence').

Re:Why would the government fund something...

[FauxPasIII]

If the navy has figured out how to factor the product of two large primes quickly, then we've got big problems
that reach far beyond this tor thing. If not, then this is probably okay. =)

Re:Why would the government fund something...

[Anonymous Coward]

a number of large corporations that would love to know about...

The US is already using echelon (and other methods) for corporate spying:

From a good Echelon summary

• In 1990 the German magazine Der Speigel revealed that the NSA had intercepted messages about an impending $200 million deal between Indonesia and the Japanese satellite manufacturer NEC Corp. After President Bush intervened in the negotiations on behalf of American manufacturers, the contract was split between NEC and AT&T.
• In 1994, the CIA and NSA intercepted phone calls between Brazilian officials and the French firm Thomson-CSF about a radar system that the Brazilians wanted to purchase. A US firm, Raytheon, was a competitor as well, and reports prepared from intercepts were forwarded to Raytheon.<55>
• In September 1993, President Clinton asked the CIA to spy on Japanese auto manufacturers that were designing zero-emission cars and to forward that information to the Big Three US car manufacturers: Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.<56> In 1995, the New York Times reported that the NSA and the CIA's Tokyo station were involved in providing detailed information to US Trade Representative Mickey Kantor's team of negotiators in Geneva facing Japanese car companies in a trade dispute.<57> Recently, a Japanese newspaper, Mainichi, accused the NSA of continuing to monitor the communications of Japanese companies on behalf of American companies.<58>
• Insight Magazine reported in a series of articles in 1997 that President Clinton ordered the NSA and FBI to mount a massive surveillance operation at the 1993 Asian/Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) hosted in Seattle. One intelligence source for the story related that over 300 hotel rooms had been bugged for the event, which was designed to obtain information regarding oil and hydro-electric deals pending in Vietnam that were passed on to high level Democratic Party contributors competing for the contracts.<59> But foreign companies were not the only losers: when Vietnam expressed interest in purchasing two used 737 freighter aircraft from an American businessman, the deal was scuttled after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown arranged favorable financing for two new 737s from Boeing.<60>

Re:Why would the government fund something...

[hadesan]

Between the GIMPS (http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm) and PrimeNet (URL:http://www.mersenne.org/ips/>) projects being public projects on finding large prime numbers publicly, the government must be building on those projects in-house.

Wouldn't you think the government has had some non-public serious hardware dedicated to this for the past decade? If these are the Top 500 "known" supercomputers (http://www.top500.org/list/2004/06/), where are all the Defense Department listings?

The NSA has "worked" closely with vendors supplying encryption equipment since the 1990s (http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9807/27/securit y.idg/

I would believe the government's NSA hardware is probably around 6-10 years ahead of what is commercially available or even known. http://www.hpcc.gov/pubs/blue94/section.4.6.html

Been around for awhile...

[shadowmatter]

Schemes like this to make p2p anonymous have been around for awhile. The problem is that such systems have very high end-to-end latency, so in practice it's not really ideal for a constantly evolving network -- like peer-to-peer. A scheme similar to this, using mixes, is Tarzan. From its ACM paper:

Tarzan is a peer-to-peer anonymous IP network overlay. Because it provides IP service, Tarzan is general-purpose and transparent to applications. Organized as a decentralized peer-to-peer overlay, Tarzan is fault-tolerant, highly scalable, and easy to manage.Tarzan achieves its anonymity with layered encryption and multi-hop routing, much like a Chaumian mix. A message initiator chooses a path of peers pseudo-randomly through a restricted topology in a way that adversaries cannot easily influence.

Such systems right now have too high a latency and too much overhead (such as a peer sending "noise" into the network when not having the need to send any real data, just to deter packet analysis) that they aren't terribly practical... for now. So you most likely won't see the technology bundled in the next KaZaA, BitTorrent, etc., but we'll see what the future holds.

- sm

Re:Been around for awhile...

[Sajma]

Another of the problems with these approaches (besides the need to send cover traffic, as you mentioned) is that pseudo-random path selection may not be random enough. Certainly an "omnicient" adversary could run various correlations to determine who is sending data to whom, and it becomes very difficult to make convincing arguments as to whether more realistic adversaries can glean information from the traffic they observe. If there's one lesson we've learned from crypto research, it's that smart mathematicians can usually find patterns in pseudo-random data, so the real question is whether a system provides "sufficient" anonymity (since perfection is likely impossible to achieve). Another question is how long that anonymity lasts, say, against offline analyses by semi-omnicient observers (agencies?). Is a month long enough? A year? Or "as long as men are capable of doing evil"? These are not simple questions to answer, unfortunately, as much as we might wish that anonymity were something simple to achieve!

too bad...

[night_flyer]

we did have this back in 1941

lessons from cp remailers?

[astrashe]

What happens when people start doing bad stuff with the tor system? You know it's going to happen...

The model is bad, because the people running the servers (like the old cypherpunk remailers) are supposed to provide services for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, and take the heat when people do malicious stuff with the network.

It seems to me that it's not a bad technical system, but that it fails when you start to think about the social and economic realities of the net.

Re:lessons from cp remailers?

[gl4ss]

like spammers taking advantage of a fairly open email system?
sorry, couldn't resist.

still, email works.

these systems are mostly meant for distributing the possible heat anyways.. and making it impossible to pinpoint it on anyone spesific(because you don't even know what you're routing). the problem is when there's some naive people running these that start crying once they figure out what's anonymity mostly needed for(like freenet, they make a system that's practically meant for distributing banned materials and start crying when they realise that the materia had reasons to be banned in the first place..)..

for a normal user though these just mean assurance of that if RIAA/MPAA starts being veeery aggressive about p2p people will switch to some more advanced version of p2p even if it comes with severe performance(speed) hit.

Re:lessons from cp remailers?

[NanoGator]

"What happens when people start doing bad stuff with the tor system? You know it's going to happen..."

When doesn't it happen? Freedom of Speech comes to mind. It all sounds great until people find out the KKK are protected. Everything's like that. The best you can hope for is it does more good than harm.

Re:lessons from cp remailers?

[0x0d0a]

I'm concerned that negative impacts could be used as ammunition for attempts to ban anonymous systems. I'd rather have a more strongly entrenched group of people using anonymizing software before seeing something released that can be used to attack systems anonymously.

Ah, well.

Re:lessons from cp remailers?

[amphibian]

Whereas if people ARE taking money for it, then firstly they'll have to take very small amounts if you want nonzero usage, secondly there won't be any cover traffic, and thirdly, the jury will automatically assume the node ops are in the wrong - you're MAKING MONEY from CHILD PORN!! :)

You missed some points.

[Positive Charge]

(I know because I submitted this article too.)

1. The Navy is bankrolling the development, presumably to allow government employees to surf around without leaving ".gov" and ".mil" ip addresses in logs.

2. JAP supposedly has a German Government implanted backdoor that this one shouldn't because it's open source.

I think that the US Government is bankrolling it to piss off the Chinese.

Re:You missed some points.

[mjbkinx]

2. JAP supposedly has a German Government implanted backdoor that this one shouldn't because it's open source.

you can get the sourcecode for JAP here.
they were told to record access to a child porn site, which they did (visible in the source). they cought one access to that site, but the data had to be deleted after another court ruling which declared the surveillance illegal.

An Important Message

[Gannoc]

This technology will certainly become a favored tool of terrorists trying to avoid the justice of the Bush administration.

Sincerely,

The MPAA.

Re:An Important Message

[Maxhrk]

since what relate between MPAA and terrorist? :) wait... you mean those cam-recorder terrorists who capture the movies in threater?

Re:An Important Message

[Lehk228]

ugh cam distibutors are terrorists, think about all the time people spend downloading a movie to find out it is a cam, divide by life span and that is how many "people" they have killed by making that shit.

Re:An Important Message

[Anonymous Coward]

This technology will certainly become a favored tool of terrorists trying to avoid the justice of the Bush administration.

Glad to hear, anything that helps them avoid being tortured is good.

Re:An Important Message

[0x0d0a]

What does any of that (even killing people) have to do with the definition of a terrorist: someone who uses force against civilians to produce political influence?

Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I'm too busy updating my NIGGER and KIKE networks to worry about a new protocol.

Who the heck thought JAP would be an acceptable acronym?

Re:Nice Acronym

[trckjunky]

Who the heck thought JAP would be an acceptable acronym?

Someone who's native language isn't English!

Re:Nice Acronym

[jcenters]

I'll never understand why "Jap" is considered a racial slur. Why isn't "Brit" a racial slur?

If I call our illustrious /. editor Michael "Mike," have I slurred him?

And don't even get me started on why "Canuck" or "Yank" is acceptable.

Re:Nice Acronym

[gl4ss]

kinda late on bitching aren't we, taking that this tor system would be to replace the jap?

it's just 3 letters.

Re:Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering it is replacing JAP they should have named it TOR-a TOR-a TOR-a...

Re:Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

World War II.

Re:Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

and it only take two letters to describe your mom >>> starts with an H and ends with an O and nothing in between.

Re:Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

Jap isn't racist.

Re:Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

it's just 3 letters.

I dare you to walk up to Mike Tyson and call him a nig.

It's just 3 letters.

Or better yet, call CowboyNeal a fag.

Re:Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

For the same reason nigger typically is. (Nigger, by some online accounts by African-American organizations, is derived from words like negro, meaning black.) Originally, it probably wasn't meant as a slur, but it through common negative usage.

Such as is the case with the word Jap during WWII.

iow, I don't think it's the origins of the word itself but that's it's been used in such a deliberately negative, deriding light in the past.

I myself agree with you. I don't see Jap as a slur. Or Nip (Nippon). But they are perceived as such. As Bill Parcells found (he described a sneak football attack as a "Jap Attack" and got a shitload of heat) as well as SPIN magazine (some claimed Nips spelled backwards, although I'm confused how that's insulting coming from a music mag), Japanese-American groups dislike the usage. So it stays a slur.

Re:Nice Acronym

[jcenters]

Well, if your military randomly bombs an idle, peace-time military base, I guess you should expect a little hostility.

Well, if we can just randomly select what's a racial slur and what's not, I'm declaring "white" to be a racial slur. I get sick of everyone else getting a special name while we don't one of our own!

From now on, refer to my people as European-American, thank you very much!

Re:Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans (Anglo-Saxons?) can be a very nasty bunch when they set their minds to it. At one point they decided the Japanese are no good (and I mean all Japanese), so jap became a bad word, same with nigger and Blacks, same with paki and South-Asians, same with frog and the French, same with wop and Italians... Americans tend to hate a lot of people based solely on race.

Americans haven't yet decided to hate the British so brit is OK, when they do, believe me, "brit" will become a slur too. Same with "canuck" when they decide Mexicans are no good. ;-)

Re:Nice Acronym

[gl4ss]

doesn't seem to matter to these guys over at http://www.nig.com/

it's just 3 letters, who you call them to and meaning what is what makes them matter.

Re:Nice Acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

At one point they decided the Japanese are no good

I think the precise date was December 7, 1941. Of course, there were 2,150 fewer Americans to take part in the decision, because they were dead. Including my grandfather.

My New Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure yet what it does, but I'm thinking of calling it the Heuristic, Orthogonal, Non-Knuth-approved, Yielding algorithm.

HONKY, for short. I guess that name won't be a problem, will it? I mean, since JAP seems to be okay...

Re:Freenet vs onion routing

[complete loony]

Onion routing does just that, it is a method for picking an anonymous route. Freenet is a distributed database.
In onion routing the client picks N nodes from the list of servers and encrypts using each servers public key. Then sends the data to the first server. In onion routing each packet of data contains the entire routing list, though it is encrypted in such a way that each node can only tell what the next node is.
Each Freenet nodes caches data blocks based on demand. When a request arrives looking for a data block Freenet forwards the request to a node that has similar information until the correct block is found. Each freenet node only knows about the next and previous nodes, and the route is determined by the key you are searching for.

Right hand, talk to left hand please!

[putaro]

I think it's great that the Navy is funding this. Now, where are the wire tap hooks? I always enjoy the way the government exempts itself from its own rules.

Re:Freenet vs onion routing

[dfelznic]

currently N=3 on tor...

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Something named "My own private Idaho", an anonymous remailing software from 1996-1998, did (and is still doing) exactly the same thing, with PGP integration, and server key publication.

Re:Nothing new

[gclef]

This isn't really a mail anoymizer. There are better mail mixers (like mixmaster) out there. Because latency isn't that big an issue for mailers, adding a 3 hour or so delay isn't a big deal to a mail anonymizer. Adding that kind of latency to http is unacceptable, so you can't use the same system to anonymize http as smtp, unfortunately.

Because of that, you can build a better anonymizing system for smtp because you can avoid timing attacks more easily. If you're interested in anonymous mail, though, have a look at mixmaster.

Is the route preselected?

[brett42]

From the couple of days I spent actually working in my highschool cisco class, I remember each router in a path is supposed to be able to optimize the route a packet is sent on by using local information and the packet's final destination. From what I gather from the limited technical details in the article, this protocol would require knowledge of the entire route at the initial node to handle the 'onion layer' encryption.

Is there some way of optimizing a path through a given number of nodes without keeping huge amounts of information about latency on every two nodes, or is this just bouncing the packet around for a while for anonymity and accepting the added latency, plus possibly the time it takes to detect and resend packets when one node in a path suddenly goes dead, making the custom-encrypted packet worthless?

Re:Is the route preselected?

[Wesley Felter]

From what I gather from the limited technical details in the article, this protocol would require knowledge of the entire route at the initial node to handle the 'onion layer' encryption.

Correct. The sender wraps the whole onion, and each router removes one layer.

Is there some way of optimizing a path through a given number of nodes without keeping huge amounts of information about latency on every two nodes, or is this just bouncing the packet around for a while for anonymity and accepting the added latency?

It's more like the latter. Optimizing for performance tends to be at odds with anonymity.

Private Idaho

[Anonymous Coward]

not "My own private Idaho", but "Private Idaho"
URL :
http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/pi.html

Why was this modded down?

[Anonymous Coward]

JA* is a well-known racial slur used against the Japanese people. It was very insensitive of Slashdot to do this and very unprofessional.

Re:Why was this modded down?

[0x0d0a]

Frankly, I don't give a damn one way or the other what someone calls someone else. I'm white. If someone wants to call me "whitey" or "cracker", I might think it's kind of funny, but other than that, it doesn't mean anything to me.

I just don't have any sympathy for people overinduling in their own victimhood. There are people starving around the world, an African continent full of AIDS, people without access to uncontaminated drinkable water, and someone is going to complain about the choice of word that someone uses to describe them, or even more ridiculously, a three-letter-acronym that happens to match up with that word? How can anyone remotely sympathize with someone complaining about this? If they really can't think of a single worthwhile issue to complain about, I'd suggest the upcoming US presidential election, which stands to significantly impact a lot more people than the term that someone uses to refer to a group of people.

Re:Why was this modded down?

[cfuse]

Frankly, I don't give a damn one way or the other what someone calls someone else. I'm white. If someone wants to call me "whitey" or "cracker", I might think it's kind of funny, but other than that, it doesn't mean anything to me.

Don't underestimate the power of words, they are how we communicate our thoughts. What is said and how it is said makes all the difference.

It's funny that, when you are on the top of the pile that names don't bother you. You are white, and I'll guess straight, middle class and probably (some flavour of) christian.

If you have no experience of discrimination then you don't know what you are talking about. Before you argue with me, tell me the last time that you didn't get a job *because* you are white, someone abused you or spat on you in the street, or the last time you were beaten up because of it.

I just don't have any sympathy for people overindulging in their own victim hood. There are people starving around the world, an African continent full of AIDS, people without access to uncontaminated drinkable water, and someone is going to complain about the choice of word that someone uses to describe them ...

Whilst I too have little sympathy for people who won't help themselves, I do have sympathy for those who have to deal with everything that comes with being in a minority. These are not imaginary problems, they are real, and they cause real harm to the people involved. Try to bear that in mind the next time you have to deal with one of *those* people.

a few more missed points

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymity works both ways, and just because something is official government doesn't mean it's always "whitehat". In fact, so far I'd give government at best a 50/50 score on color of chapeaus going way back. The current regime I'd give an 80/20 black to white ratio and heading darker by the minute. Don't trust them, or what they claim in public.

Think "disinformation" "plausible deniability" and take a google gander at "Directive 3600.1: Information Operations"

I've been doing this since August 2003.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Why is this so tough for people to "get" ?

Re:I've been doing this since August 2003.

[cuzality]

> Why is this so tough for people to "get" ?

Maybe because you say right on your website, "Don't post this to slashdot. You will murder my cable modem."

Who knows how many truely brilliant ideas have languished in obscurity because their author was afraid of a slashdotting... Surely thousands -- no, millions...

Re:I've been doing this since August 2003.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Some asshat moderated me "Overrated" on it, no less. Way to go loser. You have 4 mod points left, why not mobbomb my other comments too?

Re:I've been doing this since August 2003.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Chances are, you live in the USA as I do. No amount of begging will persuade me to invite you."

Since Since people in the US can not get invited, screw you, I'm posting your cable modem everywhere.

Re:I've been doing this since August 2003.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooo.. How does one get in? ^^

Re:I've been doing this since August 2003.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

People in the US can be invited. I just personally can't do it. Didn't read very carefully, did ya?

Re:I've been doing this since August 2003.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Hanging out at the IRC channel I listed wouldn't be such a bad idea. Doesn't take a stretch of the imagination for me to think some of the people who've done so might have been invited.

If you're somewhere other than the US, ask me. Chances are I'd gladly let you on.

If you're in the US, you could always find that canadian/european buddy from AIM, tell him about it. Maybe if he were to be invited himself, he'd feel grateful enough to invite you. ("Gee, anoncow tipped me off to this, but didn't invite me himself, even though he'd be allowed to... maybe he needs someone to invite him?")

Mixmaster for TCP?

[kinema]

This sounds a lot like an implementation of Mixmaster for TCP.

Re:Mixmaster for TCP?

[Anonymous Coward]

"This sounds a lot like an implementation of Mixmaster for TCP."

Indeed, why not break-up the tedium of reading TFA, by quoting interesting snippets to slashdotters who havent?

Subsequent relay-based anonymity designs have diverged in two main directions. Systems like Babel [28], Mixmaster [36], and Mixminion [15] have tried to maximize anonymity at the cost of introducing comparatively large and variable latencies. Because of this decision, these high-latency networks resist strong global adversaries, but introduce too much lag for interactive tasks like web browsing, Internet chat, or SSH connections.

Tor belongs to the second category: low-latency designs that try to anonymize interactive network traffic. These systems handle a variety of bidirectional protocols. They also provide more convenient mail delivery than the high-latency anonymous email networks, because the remote mail server provides explicit and timely delivery confirmation. But because these designs typically involve many packets that must be delivered quickly, it is difficult for them to prevent an attacker who can eavesdrop both ends of the communication from correlating the timing and volume of traffic entering the anonymity network with traffic leaving it [45]. These protocols are similarly vulnerable to an active adversary who introduces timing patterns into traffic entering the network and looks for correlated patterns among exiting traffic. Although some work has been done to frustrate these attacks, most designs protect primarily against traffic analysis rather than traffic confirmation (see Section 3.1). - Tor design

Anonymous mailer technology

[KillerCow]

This sounds like a reinsertion of all the technology that has gone into anonymous mailers over the years (see MixMaster.) I hope that they aren't re-inventing everything and repeating the same mistakes. The existing technology should be mostly portable from the application layer to the session or layer.

I was at a presentation by the guy behind MixMaster and was impressed by all the thought that has gone into the various generations of the application. They even had it generating fake messages so you can't do traffic analysis.

Re:Anonymous mailer technology

[KillerCow]

grr... reinsertion = reinvention ... which isnt a real word anyways.

Re:Anonymous mailer technology

[Anonymous Coward]

I reinserted into your mother. MOTHER FUCKER

Re:Anonymous mailer technology

[dachshund]

This sounds like a reinsertion of all the technology that has gone into anonymous mailers over the years

Not a reinvention, but it's based on Mix nets. These people have been working on anonymity networks for years, and have done a lot of research into building solid systems from ideas that are largely theoretical or ad-hoc. Look online for Syverson's publications and you'll see what I mean.

idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, j-a-p are the first three letters in "japanese". I know 'jap' was used connotatively when we were in war against them, but I think most people have moved on. That wasn't neccessary, or funny, or cute. cunt.

Re:idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

bitch

Re:I believe suicide would be a great option for y

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, are you a HONKY?

Or perhaps a pissed off JAP, still feeling bitter about Hiroshima?

You certainly aren't a NIGGER, cause they're all too dumb to use a computer.

Oh wait, I know: you're just a BITCH.

Goodness me

[TheKingOfTorts]

No one can replace the Jewish American Princess, what with her snooty attitude and come-hither glances. Come on.. baby needs a new BMW

Re:After Pearl Harbor we shoulda exterminated them

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, just a thought, not that i condone what you just said... but if lightning can make glass fingers in sand, what would a nuke do? anybody need a cheap and effective way to make some more glass? lol

Apparently there's a Japanese version as well....

[flimflam]

called KRAUT.

Onion Routing

[dachshund]

Onion Routing has been around for several years. Tor is an effort to make the original protocol more practical. It replaces several nice features from OR, specifically the notion of "reply onions", which allowed message recipients to route replies back to the sender without learning the sender's identity. Instead, TOR recommends a form of "rendezvous point" where receivers send messages to be routed back to the sender. It's not as elegant, and the security is not necessarily as strong, though it is more practical.

It's important to note that there are some statistical attacks on both of these systems, and none of them are very secure for long communication sessions when group membership churns, as in a peer-to-peer network.

A JAP Replacement?

[Anonymous Coward]

A JAP Replacement? What about CHI? They're cute, too.

Re:After Pearl Harbor we shoulda exterminated them

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have started with sterilizing your mom and cutting off your dad's balls. What an asshole!

I2P has been doing this for some time now

[Anonymous Coward]

It's usable right now, it's much more flexible than TOR but it's not exactly ready for primetime. Despite that you can still browse eepsites, use the anonymous irc and set up any time of transport tunnel you're looking for. Once it hits version .5 there will be more publicity made about it, wider testing, etc.

If you're on freenode.net chat, join #i2p or go to the website right here.

About I2P

False

[Anonymous Coward]

" unless you live in some dictatorship like China, the only real reason you'd need that much anonymity is for kiddy pr0n."

Not true. If you try to contact people the government deems a terrorist, you will simply disappear. You will be sent to Cuba, deemed an "enemy compatant", and simply tucked out of the way.

The Bush administration is openly hostile to habeus corpus. They have secret courts and secret subpeonas. They hold people without a public court appearance.

All it takes, dude, is to be called a terrorist, and your life might as well be over.

I'm not making this up; hell, I'm a 35 year republican, but when a thing is wrong, you've got to stand up to speak out.

And if the guy doesn't want to be labelled a terrorist for his political views, then he has that right.

So stop dragging out kiddie porn; its an old, worn saw, and its used simply to smear people.

Re:False

[nusratt]

I really wish you hadn't posted as AC.
I'd like to make contact with more people like yourself, i.e. moderates and conservatives who dislike the current ragged state of civil liberties in the USA.

Tor for email

[legoleg]

Anyone remembr Private Idaho?

One current incarnaton is here:
http://www.itech.net.au/pi/

It uses remailers and pgp in the same onion scheme for email... for when u want nobody to see ur email.

Re:Tor for email

[Anonymous Coward]

> It uses remailers and pgp in the same onion scheme for email... for when u want nobody to see ur email.

If I wanted nobody to see my email, wouldn't the easiest way be to pipe it to /dev/null instead of sendmail?

Criminal everywhere rejoice

[nasor]

This sort of thing is of little use to anyone but criminals. Yes, I realize that you shouldn't necessarily ban or restrict something that has legitimate uses simply because it's also useful for criminals, but I think it's worth asking whether or not something like this would really be a net benefit to society. I know the Freenet crowd likes to make constant reference to oppressive governments, political dissidents, etc., but does anyone really think that the ratio of illegal porn and illicitly-traded copyrighted material to legitimate use isn't astronomical?

Re:Criminal everywhere rejoice

[Reteo Varala]

*chuckle* You kidding? Something like this would be a boon to IT departments in companies whose edge depends on their communications structure... particularly ones whose salesmen are field agents and road warriors.

Business is cutthroat. Communications in one company, if intercepted, can give other companies the edge. One layer of protection isn't enough, but then again, encrypting everything in one layer gives the would-be cracker that much more difficulty getting to the valuable blood of business.

This, combined with IPSec, such as OpenS/WAN or KAME, would make a relatively formidable ground level to build up from.

Re:Criminal everywhere rejoice

[PureFiction]

LIBERTY IS OVERRATED.

please to trade my freedom for the appearance of security...

Re:Criminal everywhere rejoice

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmph.

First of all, fuck the idiot(s) who moderated the parent as insightful.

Secondly, fuck the idiot who posted the original comment. You're a frightened little child with no desire for personal freedom and no regard for your own liberty so you obviously have no business commenting on the rights of others. From the sounds of it you're probably a politician. Crawl back in your little hole and STFU.

Re:Criminal everywhere rejoice

[0x0d0a]

but does anyone really think that the ratio of illegal porn and illicitly-traded copyrighted material to legitimate use isn't astronomical?

That means little.

The same is true of P2P networks.

P2P file distribution is simply both cheap and an effective way of offloading distribution costs onto all consumers -- it is as elegant a concept as the free market.

Currently, much of the use of P2P file distribution happens to be for copyright-infringing content and porn. This is not because of anything inherent to the technology, but because there is a good deal of demand for such content without the overhead of high distribution costs. So the first things to hit P2P were, naturally, porn and copyright-infringing content.

Eventually, as more people understand how to use and take advantage of P2P distribution, it will be incorporated more and more into "legitimate" practices.

The same thing is true of anonymizing stuff. Remember the people who post complaints about someone on, say, Yahoo, and then that person gets a court order to find out who they are? This lets people be truly anonymous if they so desire.

Re:Criminal everywhere rejoice

[nasor]

sigh

Any time a new technology or device is created society has to decide whether or not it should be legal. The only way to do this is to weigh the possible harm that could come from illegitimate use vs. the benefit of legitimate use. Even most die-hard libertarians acknowledge that there has to be some limits to what people are allows to own. The most extreme example of this would probably be the fact that you can't own a nuclear weapon, since the possible harm from illegitimate use is very high and the possible legitimate use is almost nonexistent. A more reasonable example would probably be a silencer for a handgun; most people can't own handgun silencers because the possibility for harm done through criminal misuse is far larger than the possible benefits that society could derive through legitimate silencer use. So keep in mind that there clearly is some threshold where the law can say that people shouldn't have something because the possible harm far outweighs the possible good. I'm not saying that this anonymous network routing technology necessarily meets that threshold, but I do think that it's an issue worth seriously considering. Like I said before, I realize that there are legitimate uses for this sort of technology; but many people here at slashdot seem to believe that any shred of possible legitimate usefulness is enough to validate a technology, no matter how potentially harmful it might be.

Re:Criminal everywhere rejoice

[PureFiction]

The only way to do this is to weigh the possible harm that could come from illegitimate use vs. the benefit of legitimate use.

and also if there is practical enforcement. there is no practical enforcement to prevent mix networks and onion networks unless we go to a fully monitored and actively filtered internet. not going to happen (this would be a different argument).

the benefits of anonymous communications for preserving liberties, privacy, and the public good are well established. publius! :)

hmmm-They went, all those ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...this raises a side question. Can Linux bind different stacks to different devices? For example: eth0 could be your standard stack with the regular firewall. eth1 could be an encrypted stack with routing over a P2P style net. eth2 could be...you get the point. Note that ethx doesn't actually have to be a physical device.

Re:hmmm-They went, all those ways.

[SpaceLifeForm]

Check out LARTC.

Oh, for God's sake...

[andymurph]

... The Register broke this story ages ago: Here and Here. Why is /. so reluctant to credit these guys for the tech stories they so often break? Jealousy?

Do you mean this?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-04/gear_01.html

How do I use this behind a firewall?

[phantasma6]

Can someone please instruct me on how to set up Tor when I am behind a http proxy which requires a username and password?

(And before you say RTFM, I already have, and I couldn't find anything relevent.)

Re:How do I use this behind a firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

can't be done directly.

look for documents describing "firewall piercing"

The Japanese are not a race.

[Blaede]

They are a nationality.

Freenet?-TRUST US!

[Anonymous Coward]

"But my point is just because it can be used for bad purposes does not mean it necessarily will."

That's why the US should, increase research into biological weapons. Don't worry people. I have it on good word that it will not be used for bad purposes.

Re:Freenet?-TRUST US!

[FauxPasIII]

> That's why the US should, increase research into biological weapons. Don't
> worry people. I have it on good word that it will not be used for bad purposes.

Apples and oranges. If you don't believe me, then try to name 3 _good_ uses of biological weapons.

Go on, I'll wait.

Re:Freenet?-TRUST US!

[fatman22]

If your goal is to spread panic and fear throughout the enemy's civilian population as well as tie up their medical resources, biologicals are hard to beat. They're not very practical on an active battlefield though. Too slow acting and the bugs don't do IFF.

Re:Freenet?-TRUST US!

[SillyNickName4me]

> If your goal is to spread panic and fear throughout the enemy's civilian population as well as tie up their medical resources, biologicals are hard to beat.

If your goal is to blast them off the planet, nukes are very usefull... that doesn't mean that nukes are generally usefull or desired or such. They serve no purpose other then destruction and thread of destruction. Come back when you can point us at positive contributions of either biological or nuclear weapons (threatening peoiple is not positive, constructive or anything like that, eventho I do agree it is at times usefull)

Anonymous P2P networks serve purposes that are generally considered good, such as protecting freedom of speech (regardless of your country and government)

I don't think your comparison is a good one really.

A better one would be to compare it with knifes, and ban all knifes since they are made for cuttign things, and that allows peopel to kill eachother, which they undoubtedly will do with at times usign a knife (and thereby disregarding all other uses)

Re:Freenet?-TRUST US!

[Anonymous Coward]

#1: Killing Japs.
#2: Killing niggers.
#3: Killing sand niggers.

Benjamin Franklin

[Anonymous Coward]

They that can give up essential latency to obtain a little temporary anonymity deserve neither latency nor anonymity.

I need my data at the speed of light, bitches!

Onion-skin-routing not new

[0x0d0a]

Zero Knowledge Systems provided commercial onion skin routing for quite some time.

Since heavily-used onion-skin-routing can make traffic analysis a pain and is one of the best anonymity mechanisms we have, I'm certainly cheering Tor on. If you don't like your network usage being monitored, be it web browsing, newsgroup reading, email, or chatting, onion-skin routing is a Good Thing.

Re:More Useful Acronyms

[rossdee]

"wtf is a pom?"

Slang for someone from Britain, at least in Australia and New Zealand.

I believe the american term is "Limey"

Good Post.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of uses for this, many of which are stated right in the article too:

Developers say Tor can be used to prevent websites from tracking their users; block governments from collecting lists of website visitors; protect whistleblowers; and circumvent local censorship by employers, ISPs or schools that restrict access to certain online services.

The Navy is financing Tor because it wants to hide the identity of government employees who have long used anonymous communications systems for intelligence gathering and politically sensitive negotiations.

Who do you work for?

[nasor]

If you think that your business competitors can break modern encryption algorithms like AES, I'd be really curious to hear what sort of business you're in.

Re:Who do you work for?

[Reteo Varala]

Well, first of all, nothing is truly invincible to a determined person. AES is currently a real bitch to decode, but it's a fallacy to assume that because you have AES, you'll never need to worry about security again. DES would have stumped the hell out of anyone during WW2 days; it's not impossible these days, especially with smaller bit sizes. AES is the trend du jour of encryption algorithms... but only until it's broken. If someone breaks the first encryption algorithm, I want the "plaintext" to be as unreadable as the "cyphertext." Who knows, maybe they'll think they failed?

Second, my point is based on what you're saying. An unsecured communications infrastructure in any business can cause irreparable competitive harm, especially in the case of startups where, say, entrepreneurs use their laptops in a booth in a cafe, within the vicinity of their competitors establishments, having done some "shopping," working on their business plans that are safely snuggled in their home computers.

But you realize that I was always a paranoid soul. One form of encryption, one firewall, one proxy... it's not enough. *chuckle* And that was BEFORE reading "Cryptonomicon." ;)

I hope I made my position clear.

TOR Ready! Website logo & list

[xiando]

It's been quite a while since I made my site LinuxReviews IPv6 Ready. This has made me look at the IPv6-ready Web Server list from time to time and sadly there is very few sites out there that are IPv6 capable.

It is nice to know Tor supports standard protocols like http://. But do you really believe those "Tor Ready!" websites will start popping up any time soon? I don't think so. The majority of todays websites do not validate, doesn't support IPv6 and many don't even render correctly in the majority of web browsers. Will Tor-Ready be prioritized higher by the average webmaster than these and other more serious issues?

I am also very skeptical to the bandwidth requirements and the latency. My Ipv6 connection gives me full bandwidth, but I do notice that connections going through the tunnel are, in fact, much more latent than normal native Ipv4 connections. So why would I prefer to visit some website using Tor when the real difference is a longer loading period? Yes, what the author says about low latency may be true. It may have less latency than alternatives, but do not try to tell me I won't notice significantly higher latency if I try to IRC through a TOR connection.

People are talking about Ipv6 becoming standard in 5-6 years, I will be amazed if tor still exists at that point in time and even more amazed if it's actually implemented on more than 0.0001% of the Internet's services.

Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[0x0d0a]

Paedophiles trade movies too you know.

The extreme anonymity provided by Freenet is exactly why I'm avoiding it like the plague (and also because it's a Java thing, but that's another problem): unless you live in some dictatorship like China, the only real reason you'd need that much anonymity is for kiddy pr0n...

I'm curious -- what issue do you take with child porn in such an environment as Freenet? Yes, it's anonymous, but in such an environment, it's not possible for pornography producers to profit from child porn.

The main point of making possession of child porn illegal and in making it a social taboo is that it makes unprofitable and thus presumably discourages further production of child porn. In turn, this presumably reduces sexual interaction with children, which presumably reduces physical harm coming to children (which I suspect most people would consider having intrinsic value, due to the insticts we have toward children), which is the most obvious reason for banning child porn.

Since there is no impact on the profitability of child porn if such content is distributed in an environment where the porn cannot be sold, it seems that this eliminates the dissuasion factor, the only reason for such an extreme step as making possessing a particular type of data illegal.

What's your take on it?

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt this. I suspect that much of the child porn around is made by amateurs for their personal gratification rather than for profit. The rewards for spreading aren't monetary, but the opportunity to trade your material, and the satisfaction of knowing others will use it.
Thanks to the internet, kiddie porn collectors now have access to much more material than before. And since this is an addiction (getting more porn makes you want to get even more and/or act out your fantasies) that's a bad thing.
So the issue isn't profitability, it's availability.

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[KrisHolland]

"I suspect that much of the child porn around is made by amateurs for their personal gratification rather than for profit."

Yes, the photography is gratification incidental to the actual act itself. How is banning child pornography on Freenet going to reduce sexual acts that would happen anyway?

"And since this is an addiction"

I see no proof that pornography or sex is defacto an 'addiction'. I am sure it might be argued it *can* be, and if such is the case I prefer that the pedophiles will find an outlet on Freenet instead of on a child.

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, having porn isn't de facto an addiction. But keeping a stash of illegal material (=knowingly breaking the law to satisfy your cravings) is one of the signs of an addiction.
If someone is addicted, I'm afraid 'finding an outlet' doesn't help, it just feeds/escalates the addiction, making it more likely the pedophile will go from browsing porn to assaulting children.

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[Anonymous Coward]

"But keeping a stash of illegal material (=knowingly breaking the law to satisfy your cravings) is one of the signs of an addiction."

Using that argument, tens of thousands of people are addicted to music.

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[adam.skinner]

I would say that the reason kiddie porn is illegal is that it is harmful. Ted Bundy was known to have told the Son of Sam (iirc, could be that Larry Berkowitz was talking about his own experiences) that every mass murderer he had met was addicted to porn.

While the actual act of creating kiddie porn would no doubt be "bad enough" the impact that it has on it's viewers is the real enemy here. The consumers would then turn into abusers.

There are some sick people out in this word. "Everbody is a good guy underneath it all; what you you are when the world is done screwing you over is something else."

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[Peter Cooper]

I see no proof that pornography or sex is defacto an 'addiction'. I am sure it might be argued it *can* be, and if such is the case I prefer that the pedophiles will find an outlet on Freenet instead of on a child.

You may not be able to prove it's an addiction, but it's certainly a natural instinct, which can appear to be the same thing in certain situations. There are some people who can't go a day without an orgasm. This isn't necessarily because of a classic 'addiction', but because their physiology makes it so.

Now consider that if the sexual urge is built in to most people, and certain people can't relieve those urges in the standard way, collecting pornography (illegal or otherwise) may be seen as a way of meeting that urge.. so may actually appear to be an 'addiction' based off of their natural urges.

I don't know if it's true, but a parent post mentioned that many murderers are also 'porn addicts'.. and I'd guess that the reason for this is that most murderers find it hard to connect with people, and require pornography to meet their sexual urge/addiction. Nothing more sinister than that, not everyone can get laid the regular way in this life.

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[parksie]

Disclaimer: this is my personal speculation

IMO, if someone (assume male here, but may be possible for some kinds of women) turns into a mass murderer, they must have some kind of grudge against people in general, probably from before they gained murderous leanings.

If they have problems with people, their ability to find a partner, whether long-term or simply for physical purposes, will be impacted. Thus, they turn to porn for their normal sexual impulses. However, you may end up with rapists from here.

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[0x0d0a]

Just two points:

1) This is a weak argument -- it's a single high-profile person, who already has tried to exploit his fame (Ted Bundy is a bit of a showman who likes to be known as an expert on criminals, and has volunteered to help track down at least one killer before to keep his name in the press). I would guess that, say, a prison psychologist probably knows more serial killers well than Ted Bundy.

2) Even if we suppose that Ted Bundy can effectively profile serial killers, this is an attempted argument for correlation, not causation. Remember the infamous argument: people that drive Ferraris tend to make more money than those that drive Volkswagon Beetles. Therefore, if you want to become truly wealthy, you should buy a Ferrari! I can think of a number of very plausible reasons why a serial killer might have pornography.

3) We're talking about an anecdotal piece of evidence -- not something that one wants to use to draw statistical conclusions.

4) Even assuming that Bundy is correct, unless he is using a very clinical use of "addicted" he still doesn't establish correlation even in the few people that he is talking about -- most men I know of whom I'm aware of their habits regarding pornography possess some form of pornography or another (I'm assuming Bundy is talking about men -- female serial killers are extremely rare, and in any case would not be in the same prison as Bundy).

5) The argument is not about the subject at hand -- it is regarding general pornography, not child pornography. We allow possession of general pornography to be legal, yet this argument is against general pornography.

6) While not a fallacy in the argument, generally I try to do something if I lack much evidence one way or another -- I look for something that I would expect to be present if an argument would be true. There are a number of people and groups that would love to have established a causual link between pornography and murders. The conservative Christian movement was quite strong in the United States during the post-World-War-II period when studies on sexual habits became more acceptable, like the Kinsey study. My suspicion is that there have probably been such studies before, and that I would have heard about a successful study establishing a causual link between pornography and killings.

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[0x0d0a]

And since this is an addiction (getting more porn makes you want to get even more and/or act out your fantasies) that's a bad thing.

I'm not sure that "porn makes you act out your fantasies" is a valid claim. There is a number of people with fetishes that would be illegal to act out -- take cannibalism or other variants of snuff fetishes, for instance. Yet I hear no stories of large numbers of real-life cannibalistic killings. Clearly, at least in some cases, there is no such connection.

Re:Child porn in a non-profitable environment

[Anonymous Coward]

"You may not be able to prove it's an addiction, but it's certainly a natural instinct, which can appear to be the same thing in certain situations."

Natural instincts can appear like addictions? I guess I am addicted to breathing, and if such is the case your definition of addition is meaningless.

The rest of your post seems somewhat incoherent to me.

Hm?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Same with "canuck" when they decide Mexicans are no good. ;-)"

Canuck is a term for a Canadian...

I agree.

[Anonymous Coward]

"This sort of thing is of little use to anyone but criminals."

I agree, only for criminals and America doesn't need it since it's free enough as it is. It's not like lawyers are suing people left and right for calling them shyster! It's not like the government employees were silenced and faced retaliation for trying to warn of 9/11! Who would use such a system except for these, and these, and these people who needed to publish incriminating memos that went against the public good.

P.S. if there isn't a +1 sarcastic option for me, you can give parent a -1 for being an idiot.

Outlet: Child or Porno.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, having porn isn't de facto an addiction. But keeping a stash of illegal material (=knowingly breaking the law to satisfy your cravings) is one of the signs of an addiction."

I take that you and your rambeling is just a cover for the fact you have a Ph.D. in psychology. Feel free to tell me more about addiction and how having a stash of porno, kiddie or not, is a defining characteristic.

"I'm afraid 'finding an outlet' doesn't help, it just feeds/escalates the addiction, making it more likely the pedophile will go from browsing porn to assaulting children."

You are a fool, they will find an outlet and it *will* be a child or it *will* be child pornography. The choice is child or porno, unless you think most people can keep sexual desires bottled in for the rest of their natural lives without acting on them in any fashion.

If Freenet isn't free then what is?

[Anonymous Coward]

> For one, apparently Freenet isn't totally free.

Care to explain this obscure statement?

Freenet is as free as it gets, if you don't like the freenet client (which is opensource) you can write your own.

What's not entirely free?

NAT.

[noselasd]

So.. basically, set up a NAT or proxy server rather, and let the internet users of the world use that (+IPSec)!?

Re:More Useful Acronyms

[Anonymous Coward]

Prisoner Of Mother [England]

US Military Does it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah look, the US military is destablising the world again! Putting anonymity in the hands of the chinese and terroists worldwide. You only have to look at their past record to see the damage they do.
The Internet - place for Russian gangs to remote control computers.
WMD - need I say more
Nuclear weapons - Cold war anyone.

This proves the US military should be disbanded immediately.

Beneficial nuclear weapon uses. (Theoretical)

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

#1 The Tau Cetans arrived, and contrary to current hippy theory, they're mean sons of bitches. Neither you nor I feel like being slaves for GribblegribbleDak, and so it might be convenient to have some weapons more advanced than thrown rocks.

#2 Some mutant form of fungus, bacteria, or virus emerges into the world (and you're allowed to take a potshot here... it might very well be an escaped bioweapon). A cure is unlikely, and the infection spreads too rapidly to be contained via traditional quarantine methods. Assuming that it's still within a fairly small geographic area, and those people will die anyway (or already dead), it might be nice to be able to sterilize the outbreak. Despite bad Kevin Spacey movies, nukes are the only option for that.

#3 We want to build a probe capable of meaningful interstellar flight. I doubt that it will be manned, so I'm thinking something more like Voyager. Right now, the only non-science fiction drive would be nuclear. It's an engineering problem, maybe a logistical problem, not a theoretical one.

BONUS: #4 (Biological) My cat (and by extension our carpet) has had a bad infestation of fleas, that is almost impossible to get rid of. Even now, I hope it's over, but won't know for a few more weeks. If there were such a thing as "flea pox" and it wasn't dangerous to pets or humans, I'd have loaded up at the local Bio-WeaponsMart. I want the nasty little vampires dead.

Re:Beneficial nuclear weapon uses. (Theoretical)

[SillyNickName4me]

> #1 The Tau Cetans arrived, and contrary to current hippy theory, they're mean sons of bitches. Neither you nor I feel like being slaves for GribblegribbleDak, and so it might be convenient to have some weapons more advanced than thrown rocks.

I already said that I do see why weapons can be usefull in specific cases, so why trying to make that point? Besides, you will not have a clue whatsoever about how bio weps are going to work on Tau Cetans or what not.

> #2 Some mutant form of fungus, bacteria, or virus emerges into the world (and you're allowed to take a potshot here... it might very well be an escaped bioweapon). A cure is unlikely, and the infection spreads too rapidly to be contained via traditional quarantine methods. Assuming that it's still within a fairly small geographic area, and those people will die anyway (or already dead), it might be nice to be able to sterilize the outbreak. Despite bad Kevin Spacey movies, nukes are the only option for that.

Ugh no, not actually creating bio weapons will do a lot for preventing this scenario, and besides, bnot makign them does not mean that you shouldn't research them in case you get to deal with them anyway. A genetic 'bomb' aimed at such an organism is way more effective then using nukes. You may nto realize it, but nukes are NEVER EVER local in effect. You can steilize a small geographical area with them (or actually, void it from all life) but the effect of that will nto be limited to that small area. There is this nasty bit of radioactive material being spread by the atmosphere and such..

> #3 We want to build a probe capable of meaningful interstellar flight. I doubt that it will be manned, so I'm thinking something more like Voyager. Right now, the only non-science fiction drive would be nuclear. It's an engineering problem, maybe a logistical problem, not a theoretical one.

Nuclear energy != nuclear weapons. Two different applications of the same basic technology.

Re:Beneficial nuclear weapon uses. (Theoretical)

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Not nuclear energy, literally nuclear bombs. Put a big shock absorber on the back of the space ship, drop a small nuke behind it (I dunno, 5 kilotons?) and detonate. Buckle up first, and hold onto the Jesus handle. Any other engines worth doing have serious theoretical problems at the moment. I've heard trip times of 100 years (to the various ~4 ly stars) for such a probe, and that's with technology we can build today. Of course, it also means stuff 600,000 of these nukes into orbit, so it's not without it's problems.

But before you dismiss this entirely, think about how many orders of magnitude we'd be skipping... the next best available tech makes it a 10,000 year journey. If only it were a 50 year round trip, I'd almost want to do it... imagine it being able to see broadcast back from a another star system, in your own lifetime.

Re:Beneficial nuclear weapon uses. (Theoretical)

[SillyNickName4me]

> Not nuclear energy, literally nuclear bombs. Put a big shock absorber on the back of the space ship, drop a small nuke behind it (I dunno, 5 kilotons?) and detonate. Buckle up first, and hold onto the Jesus handle. Any other engines worth doing have serious theoretical problems at the moment. I've heard trip times of 100 years (to the various ~4 ly stars) for such a probe, and that's with technology we can build today. Of course, it also means stuff 600,000 of these nukes into orbit, so it's not without it's problems.

Ok, I see our definitions differ here, I'd reard what you explain as a form of nuclear energy, eventho the technology and possibly the devices used are identical to nuclear bombs.

> But before you dismiss this entirely, think about how many orders of magnitude we'd be skipping... the next best available tech makes it a 10,000 year journey. If only it were a 50 year round trip, I'd almost want to do it... imagine it being able to see broadcast back from a another star system, in your own lifetime.

I don't dismiss it, rather, I see how it might be valid.

It is however the same as what makes the difference between a hunting weapon and a weapon used for fighting, its application, not the technology itself.

Hence I also said that I see no problem with bio weapons research (or the technology for that matter) but I do see a problem actually applying the technology for the use in weapons.

Re:Beneficial nuclear weapon uses. (Theoretical)

[SillyNickName4me]

> Not nuclear energy, literally nuclear bombs. Put a big shock absorber on the back of the space ship, drop a small nuke behind it (I dunno, 5 kilotons?) and detonate. Buckle up first, and hold onto the Jesus handle. Any other engines worth doing have serious theoretical problems at the moment. I've heard trip times of 100 years (to the various ~4 ly stars) for such a probe, and that's with technology we can build today. Of course, it also means stuff 600,000 of these nukes into orbit, so it's not without it's problems.

Ok, I see our definitions differ here, where you see a nuke as a nuclear explosive device, I see it as such a device applied as a bomb (a bomb has some more components then the explosive device and in for example the trigger mechanism there will be quite a difference between a bomb and a device used for propulsion).

I'd read what you explain as a form of nuclear energy, eventho the technology and the devices used are very similar to what is used for nuclear bombs. Using explosions to get energy from some form of fuel is nothing unusual, your average car engine uses it quite happily eventho there are good non explosive ways to get the energy from that same type of fuel also.

At any rate, it is of course a potentially usefull side effect of research into nuclear weapons.

> But before you dismiss this entirely, think about how many orders of magnitude we'd be skipping... the next best available tech makes it a 10,000 year journey. If only it were a 50 year round trip, I'd almost want to do it... imagine it being able to see broadcast back from a another star system, in your own lifetime.

I don't dismiss it, rather, I see how it might be valid, so I guess we actually agree eh? :)

Hence I also said that I see no problem with bio weapons research (or the technology for that matter) and mentioned the idea of a genetic 'bomb' to combat the theoretical situation, which is somethign that uses a technology that can also directly be used for biological weapons. The problem I see is using such technology to build weapons that are used to cause or threaten with mass destruction or elimibnation of population.

It is the application, not the technology.

Re:Beneficial nuclear weapon uses. (Theoretical)

[SillyNickName4me]

hrm. gotta love SLashdot timing out while posting and then going for a db update (???) ah well.. duplicate post, please ignore ;P

anonymous, secure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone checked out http://risersoft.com/anon-encrypt.php ?

Its an SSL Encrypted, Anonymous tunnel.

Re:JAP replacement?

[Shant3030]

Troll??? Obviously most of you don't know what kind of JAP im referring to..

JAP = Jewish American Princess

not
JAPanese.

Lets just forget everything else...

[paragon_au]

Just because there is bigger issues doesn't mean we should stop caring about the smaller issues. Or else you are just left with choas.

By your reasoning, we should pull all cops off traffic duty, robbery, fruad, assault and everything else. And just put them onto Rape and Murder cases.
Great we stop more of the murders, but now no one has anything left to go home to because everything of value has been taken, and you can't drive anywhere because others are driving at 120mph in a 30 zone. And if you were to ask them nicely to slow down because children are getting out of school. Expect to be beaten to a plup.
But the police won't give a fuck, because... well.. you're not dead. /End Rant

Re:Lets just forget everything else...

[0x0d0a]

All of those either have strong potential to cause direct physical harm (traffic duty, robbery, assault) and/or badly undermine systems that allow our society to continue functioning effectively (robbery, fraud).

Calling someone a "jap", a "mick" or a "cracker" just doesn't even register on the scale.

Hope it's got more servers than JAP

[Anonymous Coward]

it'll never survive a slashdotting otherwise

Re:Beneficial BIO-weapons. (NOT Theoretical)

[nusratt]

"If there were such a thing as "flea pox" and it wasn't dangerous to pets or humans, I'd have loaded up at the local Bio-WeaponsMart. I want the nasty little vampires dead."

Actual example: "BT" (bacillus thuringensis) is sold at most gardening centers, for killing garden pests.

Re:nuclear bombs for space propulsion

[nusratt]

See "The Curve Of Binding Energy", by John McPhee, about Theodore Taylor, who worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project and long thereafter, and who did some work on this idea.

Why should I run Tor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe somebody already mentioned it, but the developers' replies to this question are at http://www.freehaven.net/tor/doc/tor-doc.html Yes, communication privacy can be abused. But we do not see anyone screaming that sending a letter in the real world should require authentication and total disclosure of the contents of the letter, so why should the digital world be different? (By the way, it might be that Tor is slashdotted now.)

GPL vs BSD license

[exhilaration]

Freenet is licensed under the GPL:

(c) Copyright 1999-2002 The Freenet Project Inc Released under the GNU Public License Version 2.

Tor appears to have a BSD-style license:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted

Some people say that the GPL isn't really "free", those people usually argue that the BSD license is. I don't agree with them, but you hear this from many BSD developers.

Re:After Pearl Harbor we shoulda exterminated them

[Melantha_Bacchae]

What would a nuke do? Today, for the obviously clueless, is the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That day, 59 years ago, 80,000 people died, mostly civilians. 60,000 more would die of radiation sickness by the end of the year. Thousands more still suffer from the radiation exposure. That is the inhuman price of your "glass"!

In Nagasaki, the effects were similar except for one difference: Nagasaki was home to Asia's largest Catholic population. A population that was persecuted by their own government: the punishment for practicing any form of Christianity was death. The Catholics of Nagasaki were not only innocent civilians (which it was against the Geneva Convention to attack - can you say war crime?), but they were innocent victims of their own fascist government: our enemy. We still murdered them by the tens of thousands.

In WWII, we "liberated" the Marshall Islands from Japan and made it our protectorate. Years later, in 1954 (fifty years ago this year), the Japanese occupation was ending, and Japan was emerging as our ally once more (Japan, except for the WWII era, has been our ally since our Commander Perry visited it). On Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, we were conducting nuclear testing. On March 1st, we tested Bravo, the first, biggest, and deadliest H-bomb, the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshimas. The Lucky Dragon Number 5, was trawling for tuna 87 miles away: its radioman would die of radiation sickness in six months, its tuna catch poisoned. Rongelap Atoll, 120 miles away, was irradiated by a nuclear hurricane and a snow fall of ash. Death came in the form of cancers, leukemia, and hideously deformed babies. Japanese newspapers declared "The Second Atomic Bombing of Mankind". The Japanese public turned strongly against nuclear testing. On November 3rd, Godzilla, Son of Bravo, appeared for the first time in Tokyo Bay.

Well, now you know the cost of your glass. (I'd suggest getting a book on glass making and try making it using fire.) You should also know the cost of dehumanizing a group of people with a word like "JAP": all kinds of atrocities become possible, from concentration camps to nukes.

The person who named "JAP" probably did it out of ignorance, but the word is still highly offensive to people who today are our good friends (by some miracle). I'm glad to hear it is being replaced.

"Our people.. stricken with disease.
You.. you played with the fires of the gods.
And you dare to come here and ask us for help!
You betrayed us! You expect us to trust you after what you have done?"
Infant Island Chief, "Godzilla vs. Mothra" (US Version), 1964
For the 10th anniversary of Bravo.