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Creating a Backboneless Internet?
Peter Trepan asks: "The Internet is the best thing to happen to the free exchange of ideas since... well... maybe ever. But it can also be used as a tool for media control and universal surveillance, perhaps turning that benefit into a liability. Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States. In the age of ubiquitous e-mail and filtering software, budding McCarthys are able and willing to do so. I Am Not A Network Professional, but it seems like all this potential for abuse depends upon bottlenecks at the level of ISPs and backbone providers. Is it possible to create an internet that relies instead on peer-to-peer connectivity? How would the hardware work? How would the information be passed? What would be the incentive for average people to buy into it if it meant they'd have to host someone else's packets on their hard drive? In short, what would have to be done to ensure that at least one internet remains completely free, anonymous, and democratized?"
You're describing the original design of the internet, which we're still running with essentially.
In practice though, it would be insane to let everyone with a DSL line to two different locations update routing table through the entire internet. The mechanisms to allow this exist (bgp, ospf) but major ISPs that don't want their network to fall apart prevent it because their service would quickly turn to crap. ISPs with missing filters have actually caused internet wide splits, when the entire internet tried to route through someone's T1's connected to two different ISP. BGP with a little better cost system could help that, but anyone could still cause a split anytime they liked. Think of an entire internet that acts more like IRC.
The core of the internet is still just a bunch of peers, but if you want things to stay up, they've got to be a select group that really know what they're doing. You're still free to peer directly with anyone you want, just don't expect everyone else to use your internet connection to get there too. Most people don't want to have to buy two internet connections for marginal gains anyway.
Perhaps a software solution like TOR or Freenet could help you sleep better at night?
If Bit Torrent is of any example, this would be a bad idea. One day you may be able to get to Google fast and then the next, it may take forever to load.
Peer to Peer internet would be horrible. Not only would it be unreliable, but at time slow.
Sure some agencies can access our information because it's centralized, but if we don't want them to see something, it's not hard to encrypt it. Hell I'm even working on an encryption application.
More than one internet? Looks like George W. would finally have his Internets!
If you need something like a terabit of bandwidth between the US east and west coasts, consider how many peer to peer link chains across the country will be saturated carrying it.
One of the major problems right now in the commercial ISP backbone environment is what happens if there's an outage; what's called route flapping, where routes dissapear and reappear, and all the routers affected have to recalculate how to get to various endpoints, can already saturate the router CPU logic for big, industrial grade room-full-of-racksize-router backbone facilities. Going to a more diffuse network at high bandwidth requirements exponentially makes this worse.
P2P across a city? Not ridiculous.
P2P across the world? Baaad idea.
> Is it possible to create an internet that relies
> instead on peer-to-peer connectivity?
You have just describe the net (later the Net, still later the Internet) circa 1982. You can search Usenet to read about the excitement level when USR 2400 baud modems were released: doubling of connection speed to transmit netnews!
Of course, you can also read about what happened when news (alone) was distributed on a meshed basis.
sPh
Keep the Internet out of the control of any particular government, but especially those particular busybodies.
Whatever happened to the "nuke-proof" aspect of the original military purpose for the Net? I always thought that the very existance of "backbones" contradicted this design parameter; was it a later consequence of the Net having outgrown its original madate?
That is the "backbone" and where the "bottleneck" is.
Freenet: http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=faq# what
More people use it, more helpful it could be.
I most ignore the trolls about slashdot going to hell ... but this technologically infeasiable and outright rediculous idea should never have made it past the editors. Come'on guys, what is the deal?
/dev/random
It would look an awful lot like the internet we have now.
Except for, you know, the Tier 1 ISPs, on whose networks practically all our traffic passes at some point.
Control them, and you control the net.
May the Maths Be with you!
Before and during WWII all mail crossing an international border in or out of the US was steamed open and read. This included all mail, all packages, all telegrams, and all telephone calls. In addition to all mail being steamed open and read, it was censored if the Army deemed it to be necessary to support the goals of the Army. Letters would arrive with portions cut out by scissors. They also censored all international media -- radio, newspapers, and magazines both incoming and outgoing.
It's quite easy to imagine as it's already been done.
Encrypt your email traffic, so that even if it is intercepted it can't be read.
The government can still do some traffic analysis (they sniff headers rather than read the contents of the messages) and they can learn a lot from that, but such is life.
I don't see this happening though unless a "ware of the day" like bittorrent pops up.
Forgive me if I'm being naive, but wouldn't such a free and open, decentrallized system be very different from "democratized". It would be more arachical than anything, as it would be free of government control.
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
I read "Nexus" not too long ago. It talks about the study of networks and its results in various different fields. It wasn't as deep or detailed as I had hope but it mentioned a study where it was found that the Internet is really not a decentralized network but a hub and spoke network. It can survive numerous attacks in general but if even a small number of central hubs are taken down, connectivity suffers. Obviously that means it's even easier to spy on someone simply by monitoring these central hubs. On the other hand, it also means the Internet can be physically attacked and is less resilient than originally envisioned. So the Internet's ability to survive is linked to the number of ways for data to get from A to B. The more survivable, the less centralized, the harder it is to spy on someone.
IIRC, the book points out that the centralization occured because of the cost of laying down cables and the need to minimize the number of hops. Imagine the cost of linking up every node with fiber. Or the number of hops packets have to make if we were all connected just to our neighbors. There is however, an alternative to spoke and hub. You can achieve similar results with a network where most people are connected to their neighbors but there's a random sprinkling of long connections. So imagine a network where most people are simply connected to their neighbors but maybe 10% of those neighbors have connections to distant cities like NYC to LA and maybe another would have NYC to San Francisco or even medium hops from Dallas to Houston. Wireless technology means we can pretty soon connect to our neighbors. The other part of the equation would require people having these longer jumps. We've heard of record breaking WiFi transfers so it might be possible in the future for someone to work on easily deployable, affordable connections that can go a hundred miles or so. It also makes sense for the government to sponsor research on long distance wireless connections as the Katrina disaster demostrated such a need and as we depend more and more on the Internet for commerce. Who knows, they might already be working on this. WiMax's range is a hopeful sign.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I think it would be awesome, my wireless router actually routing wireless data around in a network of millions of wireless routers. Unfortunately I can't will it into existance.... or can I :).
Pointless, upgrade our networks first, 5/1Mbps is ridiculous compared to the 100/100 in Japan.
Imagine a wireless Internet.
This would obviously require some major technological achievements, but would probalby be more practical 10-20 years into the future.
We already pretty much have blanket cell phone coverage in the civilized world. Just imagine all those cell phone towers as giant signal repeaters/routers.
Isn't this pretty much what mesh networking is supposed to do?
A backbone-less Internet... is it just me, or is that exactly the way the Internet was originally envisioned and built? The reasons we moved away from that are purely economical, and until there'll be an economical incentive to move to a backbone-less distributed system again (and, for that matter, an economical incentive to actually make it work at least as well in terms of speed and reliability as the system we currently have), things will stay the way they are now.
The fact that the centralised system of today lends itself to easy censoring etc. is unfortunate, but if you really want it to change, you have to understand why it came to be.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
BONELESS CHICKEN 4.99/LBS
I'll keep the refutation simple.
If there are no backbone providers, then who will you be getting your internet connectionS (capital S intentional, as you'd need two) from?
I mean, I could probably resurrect my 4 line Wildcat BBS, but then again, you probably think Kermit is a frog.
What you describe would be nice if everyone and their brother could afford a link into a frame cloud. But that just isn't realistic. So what some of us have done is exactly what you describe, but virtually with software.
Check out http://anonetnfo.brinkster.net/ for more info.
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
The author is somewhat misinformed regarding Senator McCarthy. The only people he ever accused of being communist agents were.... um... later proven to be communist agents. The person most slandered during the McCarthy era was... Senator McCarthy. Calling someone a "budding McCarthy" is a compliment, one which I doubt the author intended.
IANAL, but aren't there some features required by lawful access that providers have to provide to law enforcement? Telcos have things like PEN registers, and some things should require a warrant, but as part of a normal investigation, some things don't.
I agree the question doesn't exactly suggest a deep insight into networking, but since the submitter actually says so, I don't see the problem. As for wether such a question should make it to the front page, I actually think the question is interesting, at least from a computer science point of view.
As I see it, the only reason for having large backbones, in the terminology of the question, is to simplify routing. Thus, the only reason for having them, is the lack of a fast, world-wide, precise (as in up-to-date) routing algorithm, which could support a world wide network with millions of nodes. Recently, a lot of work have been done in routing protocols for large mesh networks, and the real question is: How large a network can be supported using similar techniques.
So i guess the answer to the question is: This could work with current hardware, if only we could implement a proper routing algorithm, which, most likely, we can't for a network the size of the Internet.
Put France in charge of it!
using corepirate nazi execrable scriptdead hypenosys to keep yOUR minds off of almost everything that's relevant.
how is it allowed? massive amounts of whoreabull bullshipping eye gas?
for many of US, the only way out is up.
don't forget, for each of the creators' innocents harmed (in any way) there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/US as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile will not be available after the big flash occurs.
'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi life0cidal glowbull warmongering execrable.
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as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis.
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"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."
This is a bit of brainstorming, or going for a walk through some thoughts:
m entconstitutional republic) populated by followers and controlled by scared, privileged children.
You're talking about actions which would create a new medium (well, copy an existing one) yet have it exist outside the purvue of political, religious, puritanical, military... really outside all social forces. You also want it to exist outside of monetary concerns (otherwise the social forces kick in).
Really you don't want anyone to have power over it. Well, I mean, you do want someone to have power over it - someone to decide the best technologies for the network, or technology interfaces, and someone to deal with the problems that will crop up. So perhaps the better phrase is: to be responsible for it on all levels, rather than to have no power, or to manage it, or somesuch.
And it isn't just an action, but actions over time: After getting the system setup there will be maintenance, adding new services or extending the system to support others, beside the user support itself... Really it is an on-going commitment. Or at least an on-going set of actions, if not a commitment by anyone in particular.
So is there a way to organize people in an effort yet keep it a-political, a-moral, supported/funded by the people who care, and still cross all governement and prejudicial boundaries?
A True Freedom of Speech environment, yet that has no worries about outside interference because with everyone caring about it and for it, there are no single/multiple points of failure which would eliminate the whole system?
Sounds a bit more like an organized, hierarchyless, peer anarchy populated by responsible (=able to/will respond), accepting people rather than an uninformed, bigoted democracy (or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States#Govern
8-PP
...having a P2P "internet" doesn't change the "backbone" of internet (the routing between carriers to PHYSICALLY get the signal from point A to point B). It is a much higher level.
Judging from current events, all you have to do is import the internet to China and it becomes spineless... or at least everyone involved in doing business on it does...
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Unless you're going to hand deliver your data to the recipient, you will always have to trust someone with it. In a P2P system, the size of the entity with access to your data is smaller, but the number of entities with access to your data is bigger. I contend that it is easier to control and regulate a small number of large entities than it is to regulate a huge number of small entities.
To me, it would be a better use of resources to put regulations into place (and enforce them!)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't regist
One major technical challenge I can see with p2p Internet -- essentially, a distributed (cached) p2p network would work on most static webpages, but what about on dynamic pages?
It seems that most all his concerns about network snooping and network security would be solved instantly if people just used some really basic security tools that have been around a very long time.
I think I need to submit an "ask slashdot" regarding if or why your company allows people to send unencrypted and/or unsigned emails over the open internet.
I wouldn't be too quick to point that out to the world.
The backbone isn't the problem, the access is.
The backbone providers (Level3, the UUNET part of MCI, Cogent, Teleglobe, etc) aren't the ones threatening to create a tiered internet model, the last mile carriers (SBC, Bellsouth, Verizon) are.
If anyone can point me to an article where a BACKBONE provider has talking about tiered, filtered, or anything other than packet in/packet out network connectivity, you win a cookie.
ISP backbones of today run 30 to 40 GBPS! bonded circuits to avoid congestion. They don't really give a crap about the contents of your packet, their job is to deliver it. They understand this, the poster doesn't.
"In short, what would have to be done to ensure that at least one internet remains completely free, anonymous, and democratized?"
Two things.
1) Ensure that no one on such a system abuses it (which is hard to define - there are the obvious ones like child abuse and attacking the network in various ways, but there are also more subtle cases)
2) Ensure that we never put anyone in power who has both the will and the skill to mandate all forms of communication be open to inspection. (Whoopsie)
In short, you can only fight human nature with human nature, and the result is always a compromise. You can't have total freedom for everyone and have a functioning society, but too little freedom and the criminals might as well be running things (and often do.) It's a hard problem.
If people would stop believing the network to be secure as it transmits their cleartext data, if they would become disciplined in the used of effective crypto, we could at least move to another threshold: 1. We would divide governments into two categories, those that will, and those that will not, outlaw cryptography, and 2. We would eventually discover if, indeed, government agents have the capability to break cryptographic systems that are believed to be secure.
Seems to me that the biggest risk to individual freedoms is transport over centrally/corporate owned lines.
Why not leverage nearly ubiquitous wireless access points (and possibly ad hoc wireless card settings) to create a completely wireless mesh that doesn't even connect to the Internet at all? This would parallel the development of the original 'net, where it starts as a bunch of island networks that get interconnected over time.
Think about it-no phone lines, no centrality, no existing infrastructure. Nothing to "tap", very hard to track. Even better, no infrastructure so it could be built from scratch. IPv6, anonymizing, encrypted.
Imagine a set of open source tools that take the best features of mesh networks and peer-to-peer, running exclusively over home wireless technology. One package could include a complete set of apps to get "on the mesh" including the routing intelligence, a "secure sandbox" for shared files/web pages, a browser, and caching. Run the package, and maybe at first you only connect to another geeky neighbor-but you don't know which. Check out his home-brew page in the browser, poke around the files he put up. As more people come on line, what you can access increases, sometimes dramatically as networks are interconnected.
(Maybe initially the system could tunnel through the internet to connect disparate networks and gain critical mass. At some point this will always be necessary to get across oceans or challenging geographies.)
Chicken and egg problem? You bet. Realistically, the three p's would drive it, as they do many new technologies: porn, piracy and privacy. But the opportunity is there for so much more.
Speed would suck, sure, due to routing inefficiencies. But consider that the average bandwidth would be at 802.11 speeds: minimum 10Mbps, more likely 54Mbps. If I get 3Mbps on my cable line I'm thrilled. Latency might be high, but no one would be running Quake 3 on this. And wireless tech is only getting faster, while mesh routing and caching technologies are only getting smarter.
I really think that if a truly independent, hacker-run next-gen internet will ever exist, it's going to be over home wireless. The entrenched media companies are too aware of the money making opportunities to let the "free ride" on their infrastructure continue forever (even though it's not a free ride, but don't tell them that). Unregulated spectrum is about the only Free space left.
Use it to create a network that's truly decentralized, owned by the people, and anonymous from the ground up and you can change the world.
I'm going to assume you used abel as a tongue in cheek reference to cain and abel, right? RIGHT??
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States. In the age of ubiquitous e-mail and filtering software, budding McCarthys are abel and willing to do so.
As an administrator of a few reasonably small domains, my first thought was oh, the fools!
You don't want to read every piece of e-mail that comes into even one site, let alone the whole internet. You don't even want to try to write programs to do it.
You would be better off trying to understand the inner thoughts of a lava lamp then trying to figure out why anyone thinks anyone would buy "farmasuiticals (the 1 U've been lOOking 4!)", let alone ingest them! Or invest in "s+0cks" that are about to "+ake 0ff" based on the say so of a stranger named "Brandice Hornyslut." Or the pointlessly malformed sludge, the server errors from misconfigured machines...if anyone really wanted to hide something they'd be about as well off e-mailing it as flushing it down the toilet--and trying to find it would be about as pleasant.
--MarkusQ
ROTFLMAO!!!! Hoo boy, Howie, you are just TOO MUCH. HAA!
Hee.
WiFi will be the technology that allows the REST OF US to create networks to rival the internet. The frequency is pretty much unregulated (and, because of microwave ovens, unregulatable). Once every (or every other) house has a WiFi router in it, a suburb has the infrastructure in place to be its own part of a backboneless internet. Connections from it to elsewhere can depend on a few hackers in the community with the means to talk to hackers in the neighboring ones using esoteric technology (including links to redundant fail-overable old-school internet connections). Finally, there needs to be some good code to organize the mess. But the advantages that result would be enormous: huge unregulated pipes from everywhere to everywhere. with all sorts of untraceable free content. It's an intellectual property (or a God-I'm-glad-Osama-kept-me-in-office politician's) worst nightmare. But I think it's coming.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Wikipedia.
North American Numbering Plan Administration.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
You've described the original implementation of USENET. Participating machines would dial each other up and exchange current traffic. A message injected at one machine would eventually end up in the rec.practicaljokes.hotfoot newsgroup on every participating machine within a day or two, just by this simple machine-to-to-machine exchange.
The bottleneck is infrastructure: there's no way around the fact that your cable modem/phone line/T1/DSL/whatever winds up at some aggregating point. Wireless is, in a real sense, even worse -- sure, it could avoid said aggregation, but it's wide open. The only true way (and, by the way, the idea behind the genesis of S/WAN) is for encryption to become de-facto. If and when that happens, THEN, and ONLY THEN, will there be the ability to avoid scanning of your stuff by .
Of course, I sure the hell wouldn't put it past the gov't to outlaw encryption. It's not like they haven't done it before.
Is this to go with our backboneless politicians?
I started writing a little tell-off to the guy who asked this. It turned into a small university lecture. basically the following explains the "idea"s of the internet. I've never worked in the industry, so I'm talking from a purely theoretical point of view. It's generally accurate though.
So, having studied the internet in detail at the senior university level, I can tell you that you have just described the internet. Now, notice that internet is made up of two words, inter and net, which stands for network. Inter = between entities, network = the entity. The point is that the network works by design to be a collection of proprietary networks that agree to share information in a standardized way. We're talking about ip and routing table standards. The problem is that connecting to the "internet" is really expensive. For this reason, only large companies do so (more on this in a sec). Some of these companies are "providers". These "providers" were a new kind of company in that all they do is buy access to the internet, and then allow people to join their network(s). When you're buying a connection through a provider, you're buying a shared piece of their connection to other networks. By having two networks communicate, you have the internet.
Now the original system started to get overloaded from lots of people. So then "someone" (providers/government/whe exactly is not really pertinent) got together to improve performance. They built what is "the backbone". Basically its a system of high capacity, high speed connections that connect global regions (like western canada to japan). This caused the providers to end up on networks of their own, because the only way to make connections REALLY fast (we're talking software/firmware here, not hardware) is to have small routing tables, so they limit the number of people allowed on it. They do this with economics, so they just raise the price until only the limited number of people they want are left. This is why it's expensive - if it were cheap, we'd all just connect to the backbone, which would in turn break the backbone (or at least slow it down).
Long story short, the internet is peer-to-peer, you're just not a peer. Do some research into Cisco and other providers of this highend hardware and you'll see how they make billions selling their stuff -> it's really expensive. As cool as MySQL is, it's really not that easy to make in circuit diagrams, which is basically what they do. Providers amortize the price of this across their subscribers. A Provider, by being connected to other networks and maintaining servers, is part of the internet. You, are part of your providers network. The internet isn't called intercomp for a reason - you would need potentially multiple database entries in your routing table for every computer in the world, or else your packets would just "fly out" into the world bouncing from computer to computer until they find a computer with the right information. It would take a long time for your packet sent from Florida to randomly choose to jump to a computer in Russia where it might find a reference in a routing table with an entry for a website with high-end vodka. It would be so rediculously slow and eat a stupid amount of everyone's computer's cpu and memory to route all these randomly flying packets.
The beauty of the internet is that these layers of abstraction - networks of networks, can be added on the fly, and they are. The example I gave was pretty simple - there's more than 1 degree of separation between you and the backbone - but unless you work on the architecture of some companies like Rogers, AOL, or whatnot, you probably don't know how many layers there are, and they might not either. The beauty is that you don't need to - the abstraction is good enough you can just plug more servers in and get a performance increases.
What about Peer-to-Peer? well, I don't think you know what peer-to-peer is. Peer-to-Peer is not "my computer sends stuff directly to your computer". It's "
The wonderful internet of all kinds of intricate P2P human communications depends on a very simple basis of physical communication: the cable. And that in turn depends on geography. You can build millions of P2P networks for short distance, but that's no internet. Global reach requires cross-ocean cables and there are just so many of them (and satellites, for the sake of accuracy). That's your bottlenecks. If they get 0wn3d by some senator, all your data on them are belong to him.
You can't avoid passing your communications over senator McCarthy's cables. What you can do though, is use his cables and give him the long nose anyway. The long nose goes by the name of "encryption".
Thus, the answer to your question is no, it is not financially feasible to create an internet that relies on P2P-connectivity, but it's not necessary either. The problem is not at the level of connectivity, but at the top-level of the data. Stop using hotmail to begin with, start routine-encrypting your communications as the next step. There's your P2P internet. At least until the day that backbone providers refuse to carry encrypted data...
Even in Western countries it's illegal to properly depict Prophet Mohammed because of child pornography laws.
'nuff said.
It was called UUCP. :-)
Correct me if I am missing something here, but is not that how the internet already works? There is no guarantee that any two packets will take the same path to get to their destination. Furthermore, the idea of "storing packets on a hard drive" is nothing short of absurd. There are no hard drives large enough or fast enough to record every packet a router receives, much less reassemble them in the proper order.
The infamous Carnivore was one thing, relying on a predictable user-level protocol (SMTP). But the crazy notion that all packets from party A to party B will travel the same path and can somehow be logged is ludicrous. It would take cooperation from dozens of ISPs and precious router CPU time, where carnivore only required cooperation from the ISP who hosts a particular mail server of interest. The idea of tapping 2,000 US phone calls at any given moment to investigate terrorism is clearly a waste of taxpayer money and only lulls the truly stupid into a sense of security; however, the author's idea is just plain stupid no matter how you look at it.
Is /. really running out of news to cover that we have to resort to this kind of "I am not a specialist nor do I really care to do some basic background reading, but here goes" talking points? I see this kind of pseudo-deep-intellectual topics a lot on sci.crypt, where someone would claim to have found a brand-new algorithm, only to have one or several of the following happen:
1) The algorithm gets shot down in about fifteen minutes by several people who really know their stuff,
2) Someone posts, "Oh, this is exactly the same thing as that zippity-zing-zang algorithm that Chuck Dumbo 'invented' some years back. It's completely bogus."
3) Someone posts a follow-up question, and based on the reply given by the OP you suddenly realize that he has no clue whatsoever about crypto design.
It really is not that hard to research some basic, layer-1 information about networking and deduce some fundamental operating principles (as someone already pointed out, one of which is physical cabling). Cisco has plenty of introductory material that even my wife the musician can understand. Do your homework first, and then come back.
It's a pity that the VENONA project was only declassified almost 40 years after McCarthy's death. It proves that he was right all along.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Look at GNUtella. Years ago, a problem was noticed: some peers are far more capable than others. Search traffic became heavy enough that it was saturating dialup users. This wouldn't have been so bad if the protocol didn't also ask for pseudo anonymity; this led to the networks occasionally dividing in two as a set of dialup users flooded off the net. The solution is to organize the network so that high capacity peers are on the inside, and dialup or otherwise impaired users become "leaves" of sorts. Gnutella2 uses this approach, and this has been added back to Gnutella in some fashions.
The end result of this unequal distribution of resources is that centralization is the most efficient use of them. For the vast majority of Internet users, efficiency and performance are paramount. I hear far more complaint that Bittorrent is slow than that it's centralized or not anonymous. Even if you're willing to discount performance, the price of implementing a peering based system is greater, since it costs to maintain each link. People have tried using wifi to create mesh networks that operate sans "backbone" but this doesn't scale well either. Nor is it anonymous or difficult to tap.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
mccarthy, while his methods were excessive, was after communists in the state dept and army. and you know what, there were plenty. we have the venona project as proof that we were infiltrated at the highest levels. and before you defend political freedom, these were people working for the enemy. you konw, the one with 10,000 nukes pointed at us, the same Stalin that had millions of Ukrainians starved to death, that killed many millions more in his purges, sent millions to the gulags, oh wait, duranty was right. those trials were legit.
what makes it even more funny is that bobby kennedy served as mccarthy's right hand man. jack kennedy was a good friend of joe mccarthy, and the real "terror" came from HUAC. but see, that was a bipartisan affair, and well, history is easier just demonizing the republican mccarthy.
as for the NSA thing, monitoring incoming calls is hardly widespread domestic spying. since i'm not a lawyer, i honestly don't know all the FISA details. but amateurish speculation is nothing more than sophistry. oh, as for the history, well, I'm a history teacher.
one last question, would there be as much anti-mccarthyism if he went after fascists? 'cause when you get right down to it, both the communists and nazis were equally evil, equally bent on world control, domination, and destruction. but since uncle joe or chairman mao didn't target those according to their race, i guess it's not really genocide then, eh? the millions dead? just "collateral damage" to be sure.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States.
He probably would have found several communist.
The companies that are talking about tiered internet service are mainly ran by pointy-haired people who barely understand this whole internet thing and want to wish it away. Most people, in particular in the most profitable markets, have choices of internet service providers. The ISP who makes a policy change that makes Yahoo!, Google, or Ebay slow will lose customers. Same problem if a particular backbone provider does that to an ISP. The first business to try this is going to learn how easy it is to lose a lot of customers very quickly. There won't be a second time.
I'm even less worried about any persistent efforts by the United States government to snoop on me. Oh, they'll try. But it is doubtful they will ever be very effective at it. I'll admit it is technically possible to monitor all traffic on tcp port 25 that is going through any of the (relatively few) access points that route traffic internationally. With furious effort, you could even store a lot of it -- and think about how much of it would be p0rn spam. Of course, in the modern era, a lot of SMTP traffic is encrypted with SSL, some of it is over VPNs, and some of it might be accessed via other protocols. Some of that email might be accessed through webmail and it won't be immediately obvious how to fish the emails out. Yeah, Yahoo! and MSN might roll over and hand the emails over to a big bad government. But you'd have to be looking in a lot of places all of the time to build an effective police state on top of the Internet we have today. Given infinite resources and incredible competence it might be possible, just barely.
Oh, but did I mention instant messaging (with how many incompatible protocols)? Did I mention online fora?
Resources and competence seem to be rare goods in the U.S. Government these days. Why should halfhearted snooping be somehow special?
Remember, this is the same government that didn't connect the dots on 9-11.
Remember, this is the same government that connected dots that weren't there in Iraq.
Remember, this is the same government that botches monster iT projects (the FAA and the FBI) all the time.
Remember, this is the same government that still hasn't translated all of the documents captured in Afghanistan.
Remember, this is the same government that did a heck of a job on New Orleans.
Remember, this is the same government that hasn't captured Osama, and took years to capture someone hiding in North Carolina.
Is it possible to create an internet that relies instead on peer-to-peer connectivity?
Depends -- can you afford to fight the RIAA lawsuits?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I'm sure it'd be based on wireless and encryption, and it'd be pretty slow.
Your connection would just be to other wireless nodes and you'd forward traffic that you receive that isn't destined to you. To solve the problem of people snooping traffic there would need to be some strong end-to-end encryption for communications.
Since there isn't any static routing going on, it's going to be slow because it's hard to construct an efficient route.
That whole "the internet routes around censorship" thing borders on mythology. The truth is more limited. While the protocols allow for multiple paths between two end points, as a practical matter there are very few paths between points - and when those points are countries, the vast majority of traffic passes through just one or two choke points.
Clear, Dark Skies
-The complexity of the routing tables. Although people complain that we are running out of IP address space, this isn't exactly true. The problem is in badly fragmented IP address space. That is to say that the route tables of our core routers that join the backbone providers have grown to be huge. There are a whole pile of class C networks (254 hosts each) that the IANA is trying to claw back so they can be consolidated into larger /16 and /8 CIDR networks.
-BGP AS space. Due to what i can only assume was poor foresight, the AS# used to identify BGP "Autonomous Systems" (Corporations, and entities that use BGP to exchange routing information with the backbone providers) is a 16 bit value. So there are only ~65K numbers that can actually be given out.
-Complexity of configuring these routing protocols. It's rocket science, plain and simple. A misconfigured BGP router will not work, and may even disrupt traffic over the rest of the internet. If anyone was allowed to broadcast any BGP route without the consent of all their peers and a pile of red tape, i could advertise a route to 24.0.0.0 and half the internet would disappear for a good number of cable-broadband users.
-Required bandwidth, and latency problems. The current top-level backbone providers have many millions of dollars worth of equipment and high-speed point to point connections to keep the number of hops for each packet to a minimum. They have the capacity to push more traffic than you'll use in a week down their wan links every second. This is a vast improvement over a pile of 56, 1024 and 3068 kilobit connections that would be meshed together in a distributed model.
What? Me? Worry?
First, the stated privacy concerns are no justification for changing the underlying infrastructure. If you're genuinely concerned about privacy, then start encrypting everything you put on the wire. Use anonymizing services.
Secondly, network geeks in general do not grok the economics of the internet on a national or global scale. Without statistical multiplexing and large economies of scale created by the "backbone providers" vilified in the original post, your internet access fees would not be as affordable as they are today. Without large service providers, your connectivity would not be as robust and reliable as it is today.
Finally, large-network interconnection is as much an art of negotiation as it is a science of traffic exchange. Each commercial network relies on access fees to remain solvent, but universal access to the internet requires at least a few large players to exchange traffic. It works best network-wise if this exchange is settlement-free and frictionless: routing protocols get to do the jobs they were designed to do, and bits fly directly to their destination networks. However, networks often want to be paid for such peering, on the basis of unequal exchange, network size, stability, POP count, etc. Adding this "friction" to the creation of network peers balkanizes the net somewhat, and arguably increases stability, but it prevents a rich, dense routing mesh that would be ideal for network efficiency.
Just imagine how wonderfully the internet would work if every AS peered with every other AS in a 50 mile radius. Sure, smaller players would still need to buy transit bandwidth, but two businesses in the same town wouldn't need to send traffic to a coast just to communicate. The optimal way to reduce the need for "huge backbone pipes" (a brutal oversimplification, btw) is more dense interconnection and more direct routing that would result. The drag on such progress is economic and political, not technical.
I always thought the program was called "Verona" not "Venona"
Clear, Dark Skies
How the f^&* do you expect *routing* to work, with..... what multimillions?? of routing updates/second??? BGP4 works OK, but it only has about 180k routes in "the Internet routing table" (no such thing as this really... depends on what routes get propagated to you). the routing would never work, as the routing table churn would be nearly constant... with hundreds of millions of routes... there is not a router out there that has enough CPU or memory to even come close to working... thus... address summarization, hierarchy, route filtering, etc are in place to reduce and control the size of route tables (nothing longer than /24 gets into the global route table currently..) Hierarchy is the only way to control and have a functioning Internet... IPv6 is no different.... Not to mention the fact that *somebody* has to play "PipesRUs" ala Level 3, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc... do u really want an internet where the links between regions are T1 scale, rather than OC12|48|192|768|GigE???? shit the internet was *SLOW* back when it was (woot!woot!) DS-3's ... and there were like 30k hosts on it... way back in B.W. (Before Web) time ... now, with filesharing, VoIP, Video... every asshole and their mother with a cockamamey idea like this on there... such a plan would not even come fucking close to working.... I *am* a networking professional, and I can tell you that what is out there now has evolved over time, because it is the best solution based on market forces...pie in the sky shit like this is fucking dangerous!! Assholes like this come to work and propose the same kinds of dumbass ideas in project meetings where I have to show them the way back to the real world of necessary performance and limited funds vs. "wouldn't it be great if bandwidth were free!!!"
FOOL!!!
Control them, and you control the net.
One Tier to Rule Them All. One Tier to Find Them. One Tier to Bring Them All and In The Darkness Bind Them.
Yeah I know, redundant, I couldn't resist though.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
An old news from kuro5hin here:
Netsukuku the Anarchical Parallel Internet
Freaknet, Netsukuku is a new p2p routing system, which will be utilised to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls. In a p2p network every node acts as a router, therefore in order to solve the problem of computing and storing the routes for 2^128 nodes, Netsukuku makes use of a new meta-algorithm, which exploits the chaos to avoid cpu consumption and fractals to keep the map of the whole net constantly under the size of 2Kb. Netsukuku includes also the Abnormal Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy, a non hierarchical and decentralised system of hostnames management which replaces the DNS. It runs on GNU/Linux.>>
The site of the project is: http://netsukuku.freaknet.org
Broadcast spectrum is an artificially and governmentally mandated "scarce" resource. It's not really scarce, they just won't let you use it, you must jump through a ton of hoops and payoff/bribe bigbro to the tune of megabucks. And even then a lot of the neat-o tech they just slap won't let you use at all, only the dot mils use it. With spread spectrum and the people getting to use it and not just mostly a small handful of big corporations and the government, it could be possible.
I'm surprised at the number of people who think wireless is a viable solution for a world wide high speed, high bandwidth internet. As I understand it the main problem is bandwidth. Esentially you only have a fixed number of frequencies that can be used. That means there is a maximum bit rate available. The only way to increase this is to either allocate a wider range of frequencies, make each transmitter weaker so that its footprint is smaller or start using focused beams. The smaller the footprint the more reuse of the same spectrum of frequencies that is possible. You run into the same problem with cell phones, there is a maximum number of conversations that can be active within any one cell site. Once you hit that limit any other cell phone is out of luck until a slot opens up.
Wire and fibre have the advantage of being able to have multiple high bandwidth channels all bundled together in a relatively small space. If you want more bandwidth, light up more fibre.
As far as te OP's question, its not a matter of peer to peer as opposed to anything else, thats just a way of looking at the hierarchy of how the two or more machines talk to each other. It doesn't deal with the actual communications channels. You can have peer to peer communications going over a single, monitored wire just as easily as master/slave messages.
What the OP was really talking about was every node having at least 2 channels that are separate and independant. Personally I think that most people won't care and will only have a single channel.
This problem doesn't need a technical solution. The free market offers a perfect solution -- namely, buy Internet access from someone that you trust with your bits. Read your ISP's terms of service, and if they don't appropriately guarantee your rights, switch ISPs.
The same applies to the recent news of tiered bandwidth pricing. If your ISP has a tiered pricing arrangement, switch ISPs. It's quite simple.
Wow, its as if the drooling wireless fanboys suddenly discovered life beyond an IP address assigned via DHCP. Please pay attention, children ...
/24 or larger in size. Each AS connects to at least one other AS, makes at least one netblock available via BGP, and thusly the internet is stitched together. Find this shocking an incomprehensible? Try this
The internet is composed of 'autonomous systems' - each autonomous system or 'AS' has one or more netblocks of a
telnet route-views.oregon-ix.net
follow your nose through the login procedure, then type 'show ip bgp [your IP address]' and see what it says. Oh, if your IP address is 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, or 172.16-31.x.x and you put that in please step away from the computer now and ask someone with a clue for help.
I mean really - *this* is a frontpage story? I swear I'm going to auction my low Slashdot ID number on Ebay one of these days and alias this site to memepool in my hosts file.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Ahem... It's monitoring international communications that just happen to terminate in the US. They are monitoring the people outside the US, it just happens to be they are talking to someone in the US.
4th amendment covers search and seisures.... FISA covers physical (black bag) searches of foreign nationals/citizens... NOT wiretaps
the Authoriziation (below) says use of force against those responsible for the recent attacks... i.e. the Terrorist/Supporters... not JUST Afghanistan.
WTF??!?!?! Ahem... CONGRESS says what is law. COURTS INTERPRET the law. This is where the ACLU really gets me pissed off. THE COURTS DONT SAY WHAT IS LAW! The only thing courts (and only FEDERAL Courts) CAN SAY ABOUT A LAW is this... "Yes, it's Constitutional." OR "No, it's NOT Constitutional". If you want to talk about checks and balances... look at that one TOO!
Some of these I do agree with. The main problem for the president is that the Administration didn't go to the courts within 72 hours. Other than that... it's just political posturing... Personally, I liked this one "myth"
Ok, they got 1 right.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
The original internet was designed this way. Everybody knew the routing table to go anywhere. The fact is, there's too much data to *manage* the connectivity that it hinders the actual performance. Hence, they made a hierarchy routing system using subnets. This allowed for routing to be taken control of on a local level for local traffic.
However, this hierarchy does have a top, obviously... and that's your backbone. So the quick answer to all your questions is "they tried it already... it doesn't work that well."
(I know my explanation is dumbed down and it is much more complicated, but I spared details for those who never took a proper networking class)
There exists a p2p routing protocol designed to be scalable: Netsukuku.
It is just a routing protocol so you can use it on network topology. Obviously the wifi is the simplest solution to connect many nodes, but the bandwidth will be saturated in no time, so the best way to handle this would be a mix of copper and wireless.
In constrast with some of the jerkoffs who post on /., I actually think that a backboneless internet is the future. Backboneless internet is, in my mind, a much more logical proposition. Let's consider that anomolies such as blackouts still occur. The backbone could become severed or could degrade in quality over the years. With such a huge bottleneck, the backbone is crucial to national security, and in fact the internet backbone is a well-kept secret. A guy a few years ago actually mapped it for his doctorate, and the feds showed up to classify his work. Of course, the feds would also hate a widely distributed internet; it would make their dirty work harder (though in some ways it would be much easier, and these ways would be conducive to civil liberties). A distributed global network would handle routing very similarly to how routing is handled currently. Machines could have a cache of neighbors and voila. Mathematically the number of hops would actually be quite small in a DGN. Contrary to other /. posters, who resort to calling people "FOOLS", a distributed internet is a dream of mine. It, I believe, would be a major step toward machine intelligence, though I believe machine intelligence is within striking distance. Either way, massively parallel systems and problems could be run and solved easily with a distributed global network, rerouting data through the "path of least resistance." The most important development would be a "protocol-less protocol", i.e. an intelligent machine capable of discerning the information it recieves. Ah, dreaming about the future....
Maybe I'm getting grouchy in my old age - see parent for details. This is how real men connect to the internet:
There are three ISPs in the world - Sprint, UUNet, and [other]. Get on the phone and order a T1 from one of the two real ones. They'll get your payment information and then someone will ask how many IP addresses you need. Tell 'em you want a
Go to ARIN.net's site. Figure out how to get yourself an autonomous system number. Call up the other ISP you didn't originally order from and get a circuit from them. No IP addresses required, we'll just use the block from ISP 1.
Assuming you're using a Cisco box do the following:
router bgp [your AS number]
network [your shiny new
! UUNet
neighbor yadda yadda AS 701
! Sprint
neighbor yadda yadda AS 1239
And *poof*! Your little
Take this little story and abstract it a bit - there is no 'backbone' to be found on the internet, just a web of large carriers with all sorts of peering agreements with each other. This won't happen at the home DSL router monkey level, but the diverse internet the asker speculated about already exists and happens to be pretty resistant to fools trying to monitor it.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
A peer-to-peer network would work, just not very well. The Internet as we know it would cease to exist. Routers would become useless - hell, IP would be pointless. Very loosely speaking, you can think of an IP address (IPv4) as a representation of a four-tiered hiearchy, as was (for the most part) its original intent. For example (once again very loosely speaking) the IP address of 192.168.1.21 can be viewed as the 21st machine one tier beneath the 1st network that is one tier beneath the 168th network that is one tier beneath the 192nd network. A four tiered system inherient in the addressing scheme of the Internet. The Internet has the potential to become extremely efficient and fast - and in many cases that's what it is, relatively speaking - because of this hiearchy. The data from a given web server is sent upstream through thin pipes into switches that are sent further upstream through thicker pipes to routers(their ISP) that are sent on to other routers through even thicker pipes (the Internet backbone) and then back down again (your ISP, your switch, your PC). Peer to peer networks don't allow this. On a side note, the notorious "two-tiered" Internet is an enormous, gargantuan step backwards.
Anyway, I think it's a moot point. Who cares about the topology of the internet when you can just encrypt everything? Backbones are great. Best thing is to use the fastest and most robust network topology, and let security be handled at the application level.
True; but if various corporate proposals go through, your encrypted traffic might travel cross country at sub 56kbps rates with multi-second latency. Which does bad things to a torrent.
Mind you, this still won't stop file sharing. As an example of the alternatives: someone in my apartment complex has a non-internet wireless access point, "Blacknet". It's an "open" network, DHCPing on a 10/8 space. Any DNS query resolves to the IP address of a single server, "OneTrue.blacknet."; and yes, that's the whole FQDN; any traffic to any other IP and any DNS name routes to and is intercepted by OneTrue. OneTrue's apache server redirects any URL not using OneTrue by name to OneTrue's home page. OneTrue also speaks IMAP and POP (any account name and password accepted, any mailbox you check has only one email message directing you to http://onetrue.blacknet/ telnet and ssh (assuming you're stupid enough to accept the key....), and even gopher. On the web server proper, there's about 200GB of MP3's, about 3TB of movies (uncompressed DVD ISO). They have a submissions page if you want to upload MP3s. An "about" page claims the server has over 10TB of space. Games? There's... er, NetHack. For all of the OSes listed at Nethack.org; hm. "We'll put up more games once we get back with the Amulet of Yendor."
They're fucking nuts. Not that I have room to complain, mind you....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Antimedia dug up case precident that shows it.
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1139889852.shtml
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The real threat to the Internet as we know it is government regulations designed to "level the playing field" between VoIP and IPTV vendors and old line PoTS and Cable monopolies. The old time monopolies got their status from the Government by agreeing to a whole raft of "universal service" and other government mandates. These mandates sound great but really just drive up costs and slow innovation. The monopoly companies want to hoist these old rules on Internet providers knowing it will kill their businesses. A good example is trying mandate E911 and WireTap features for VoIP phone companies. Cable companies are getting in to the act to and saying that phone companies shouldn't be able to compete with them by offering IPTV because Telcos don't have the "universal access" rule of having to provide TV to everyone in a franchise area. The monopolies also claim if you get too many providers trying to offer service in an area the streets will be torn up all the time which is also a bogus excuse. Everyone should have access to public rights of way and the cities should just set rules about when and how long streets can be disrupted to cause the least annoyance for people. It's the phone and cable TV monoplies who today wine and dine the cities to let them tear up the streets anywhere and any time they want.
The RIGHT (tm) solution is to drop government regulations and government sponsored monopolies and leave it to the free market to innovate solutions. What right in a free society does the Government have in be involved with any communications business (except as a paying customer)? If cable companies can't compete with IPTV by offering CableTV at a decent rate then let them go bankrupt and a let a company who can do the job buy up their network and make it work. Same goes for phone companies, if no one wants to buy over priced phone and T1 lines from them then get out of the business and let someone else manage all those pretty copper strands. I'm sure there are plenty of smart companies who can use them for phone, Internet, TV, and who know what else.
On a related note, there is one major choke point in the Internet and that's the stupid DNS system. Just FYI, the internet (IP, UDP, TCP, BGP, etc.) will work fine with out it. All it does is take a server name everyone can remember and gives you back the right numeric IP address (66.35.250.150) for that server (ok it does a few more things but that's the basics). Anyone is free to invent a new efficient decentralized network address to network number system to replace DNS. An example of a very cool system that does just that is called JXTA (http://jxta.org) from the good people at Sun Microsystems. It's billed as a P2P protocol and collaboration system but it is also a beautiful re-imagining of the Internet sans DNS.
Traffic analysis can reveal a great deal about transactions, regardless of whether you can read the contents of those transactions (think of every communication as a transaction: you send something, and he gets something. He sends something, and you get something). To ensure not only privacy but secrecy, you will also need to simulate traffic (ie, create "dummy" traffic that's convincing), which drives up the cost of secrecy quite a bit.
Why not have a p2p-style network with packet re-routing, so that person A attempting to access site E first sends it to random person C, who decrypts the outer layer and a random amount of time later sends it to person D, who decrypts their outer layer and sends it to site E, who takes the request, and returns along a second obfuscated return path. Nobody except the requesting computer would know the entire path, and while the ping time due to the random delay would be terrible, it would be utterly untracable.
High latency, but still high throughput. And untracable.
As to the other submitter's question... It is time to overhaul the e-mail system. It is just plain time. And end-to-end encryption should be part of that.
The ______ Agenda
...is that the poster didn't just talk about privacy, but also about media control. While encryption might handle the privacy angle it does jack squat for getting an unpopular message out to everyone over channels controlled by people who think the message is detrimental to them. Especially if your web host or ISP is told that your message is "illegal" in the next few years. I live in America where it's getting harder and harder to get the truth out to people via mainstream channels. And now we've got politicians trying to shut down bloggers because the bloggers disagree with their views. Political dissent with the right wing in the U.S. is slated to be a crime before the next election. THAT'S the more important issue here. The only way to fight that battle is, sadly, with lots of money which the sane people in the U.S. don't currently have a lot of. To the remaining REAL Americans, media control is a HUGE issue. The wrong people are controlling the media today and the Internet is largeely becoming just another form of media for them to rule over.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Actually, I tried to steam open a letter once and it didn't work very well at all.
Japan was attempting to destroy the US as well. No doubt there were Japanese infultrators amongst the citizens of the US... some must have have been in positions of power in their communities.
But that doesn't justify taking the lives and families of Japanese Citizens of the US and throwing them in concentration camps. That does not justify locking my grandparents up like criminals for years, kept away from their kids.
McCarthy didn't just go after traitors. He went after communists, people with alternative sexualities, liberals, those that believed in social support, those that felt capitalism needed work, and anyone that anyone was willing to name to get themselves out of trouble. Just like being ethnically japanese made people potential traitors in WW2, being of the opinion that pure capitalism is broken was enough to get you thrown in jail. Even agreeing with Adam Smith that the pure capitalist system eventually breaks down was enough to get people blacklisted, thrown out of work and schools, careers and futures taken away from them. And remember, Social Security was considered a liberal, communist thought. There is a lot of ugly, pointless history there.
And its happening again. Now we're throwing people in Guantanamo if we suspect them of being a terrorist. And a terrorist is anyone who disagrees with the war on terrorism. Being a darkie, of course, doesn't hurt, just like racism played into our concentration camps in WW2 and our ideological purge by McCarthy.
You're a history teacher. You should know better. If you can't see the connection, history is most assuredly doomed to repeat itself. And who knows who it will be next time: lots of countries have purged their intellectuals.
The ______ Agenda
about sean dreilinger
First, to be effective, all network connections would need to be fairly fat. A tiered Internet is designed along the same sort of design philosophy as a "fat tree" - low bandwidth at the work-node level, massive bandwidth in the middle. A tierless Internet, particularly one that supported enough multiple paths to be useful for robustness and decentralization of control, would need ALL connections to be much fatter than they currently are. You'd need gigabit to ten gigabit pipes between the majority of machines to be useful.
Second, you can't use the design strategy of bordered autonomous clouds, linked by a backbone, because you'd have no backbone. With no borders, you can't use internal and external routing protocols, as there would be no "internal" or "external". Besides which, they mostly suck when it comes to massively meshed networks where individual connections are unreliable and potentially mobile. BGP, OSPF - you'd need to RIP (yeah, bad pun) them out and replace them with an ad-hoc mesh routing protocol that supported mobile IP and NEMO. The complexity would be much higher, particularly as software packet switching and software routing are CPU and bus killers, which means an optimal path would need to figure in the density of traffic in a fairly sizable part of the mesh. Modern architectures just aren't built to handle such a design, but that would not stop you from building an architecture that COULD support it.
So, (1) yes it is possible, but (2) not effectively with the existing infrastructure or existing PC designs, though (3) both of those problems are solvable.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
How do you intercept and censor telegrams and telephone calls with steam? Inquiring minds want to know.
What the author of this article doesn't seem to be aware of is that the "backbone" issue is only present when using a tree topology or network layout.
The tree topology uses trunks or main branches with smaller branches extending out from there, but there is generally only one or two connections or lines of interaction between the main branches/trunks. Thus if there is a blockage at any point in the trunk, the branch machines/sites along the trunk become unreachable.
It was this very design flaw which caused the IRC phenomenon of "netsplits." One IRC server would become inoperable, (for whatever reason - restarts, server maintenance, mechanical failure etc) and because perhaps half the network was arranged in a straight line beyond the inoperable server, it could very often mean that both halves of the IRC network were no longer reachable to each other. It is also worth pointing out that such a phenomenon was actually the very thing which the Internet was originally designed to avoid.
The Internet was so named (at least partially) because it was originally intended to use a net or mesh topology. What this means is that any given node on the network has connections extending out to other nodes *on all sides*, rather than merely one or two. This can be visualised mentally as a grid formation, and the large number of connections between nodes was the very thing which was intended to enable the network's survival during a nuclear attack. The idea was that the node connections themselves would be sufficiently numerous that information would still be able to pass through the connections between the remaining nodes, even if a very large percentage of the nodes on the network had been destroyed.
This design however has now largely been circumvented, thanks mainly to many countries only having one or two international connections, which are of course entirely owned and run by the usual rapacious ("money is more important than life itself") corporations. Because of this, widespread use of the flawed tree topology is currently largely unavoidable.
The way to create a more fully peer to peer network would be to create a network which both locally and internationally has more connections between individual nodes (computers). If this were done, it would mean that the network would become less vulnerable to said corporations' manipulation.
The Internet is only vulnerable to breakage, manipulation, and deliberate abuse if the principles underlying its' design are not fully/properly adhered to. Said principles are extremely solid...they aren't the problem. The problem is actually that the net isn't as fully fledged yet as it could be. If a true global mesh topology existed, the idea of someone turning it off wouldn't be something we'd need to worry about...it would be genuinely impossible.
Jesus fucking christ, the fucking liberals always have to bring up mccarthy... hmm lets see,last time i checked, mccarthy != big brother.
Lets go over what mcarthy did, shall we?
His goal was to rid the government of soviet communist spies. Hmm, seems like a good idea, right? Not to the liberals! jesus christ, evreybody flames him for blaming people of being soviet spies, but the little known fact is that hmm.. he was RIGHT. the one little thing that people neglect to mention is that the people who he claimed were spies, actually were spies.
And lets get one thing clear for the morons. he wasnt heading up a big-brother campaign, he NEVER was a part of HUAC, and he tried his hardest to keep his findings private, until he was FORCED to in congress, by liberal senators.
am i the only one out there who doesnt go along with liberalist propaganda?
So Peter, next time you try to compare the likes of a great american patriot and stereotype him to the likes of an orwellian antagonist, how bout we do a litter reasearch, yes? 'Cause if you do, maybe next time you wont sound such like a moron.
-ND
PS: Go ahead. mark me as troll. my karma can take it.
-ND
The good news: the feds are sniffing all of your packets.
(This is the oldest joke on the net, by the way.)
"a new cryptographic mesh routing protocol"
These guys have been at this for a few years now, and have some traction:
http://www.cococorp.com/pages/technology.html
If we had no backbones, how would we get across the ocean?
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
Get a bunch of those Cheasy cheap Fry's Airlink101 WIFI (AP411W) router for $19.95 and setup a mesh of those - They can forward or act as relay
I dream the day of one of those WIFI router on every power/telephone pole.
Would be great if they support IPv6, so I dont go out and steal one of those IP sub net.
Well this type of network might look like a UUCP network, or even a BBS. I have always been interested in how UUPC worked, but I am too young to have had any first hand knowledge. It sounds like a cool type of network, but from what I understand there was all kinds of limitations. Probably the biggest was bandwidth and connectivity followed by security. It might be interesting to try and create a secure UUCP type network that runs over the current Internet.
I"n short, what would have to be done to ensure that at least one internet remains completely free, anonymous, and democratized"
:P
easy! get a REAL(*) goverment and make it (internet) a public utility.
(*) you know one that is free of oil markets and WMDs
If you were a *Soviet* spy, would you blow your cover by being obviously involved with the Communist party in the US? You might make contact, but I can almost guarantee you that you wouldn't want to be seen as a regular.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
lol learning history from george cloony is like saying you learned law from judge judy.
-ND
IANAL....
Anyway we have a fair bit of case law on this subject that I am aware of. We know that wiretaps are generally held to the same standard as any other search and siezure Constitutionally. That is that it must be "reasonable." And this generally means that it requires a warrant.
Of course, there are circumstances where this may not be the case, but we have the FISA act which requires that search warrants be applied for within 72 hours of initiating surveillance. In other words, if it is a real emergency, you can fill out a few extra forms and get your search warrant retroactively.
The Government's case for the legality fails on a number of grounds. THe first is that the Commander in Chief does not have unilateral authority to decide what searches and siezures are reasonable especially in a state of conflict which by all indications will be perpetual. The idea that war powers are not a blank check was echoed in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Rasul v. Rumsfeld, and other recent cases. So this one falls flat.
The second justification that the AG uses is that this is reasonable even in the absence of a warrant. In this case, the analogy is made to searches in airports that are generally considered reasonable even in the absense of a warrant. I don't believe that this analogy holds, for to suggest that one can place on public communications media a mechanical system for monitoring certain voice patterns and words would seem to me to be both a potential conflict with the 4th Amendment but also and as importantly with the First. Why should my call be recorded just because I say something about Jihadists? What about the chilling effect?
Similarly the search is unreasonable because it is an automated search of a large area which deeply intrudes on calls where there is a legitimate expectation of privacy. If my wife goes back to Indonesia and I am on the phone with her discussing our marriage, why should the government have a right to analyze that traffic?
Third, the AG asserts that the AUMF of 2001 provides the president to use military force against any he deems necessary as part of the war on terror. If this is to be deemed a blank check to engage in widespread military surveillance (or other activity such as military assassinations/summary executions) on US citizens without standard Constitutional safeguards, then our country is on the road to dictatorship regardless of what one personally thinks about Bush. Even if one supports Bush, one cannot guarantee that our nation will always have wise and just rulers. I wonder what the GWB supporters would say if someone they didn't like ended up with the same powers.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If there were some open nationwide RF specifically for a People's Internet then I could see a nationwide wireless internet running in less than 5 years. It would need no government intervention at all and would be free.
What are you a terrorist!! ;)
-- My favorite thing about OSS *is* its Militancy!
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Indeed such an Internet exists, read more about it at Freenet.
Creativity uninhibited www.kreeti.com
When your communicator, has the processing power and speed of a cell tower (couple of years?), and everyone is using all the radio spectrum, we won't need very many centerpoints.
Daryl
The original "Internet" didn't run on the Internet Protocol. It was yet-another-proprietary network protocol. The brilliance of the core idea for the Internet Protocol is that you can build two separate internets, with coordination only on the addresses, connect them with one link between a pair of routers, one in each internet, and create one integrated Internet out of the two smaller ones. It is difficult today to understand the originality of this concept.
TCP/IP is inherently hierarchical. It has to have backbones and exchange points.
The original fat-cable Ethernet works the way you want. The only thing that is shared is the cable. All communication is peer-to-peer. Network hardware merely repeats packets (like a digital amplifier). The cable works like wireless, so you could say that most/many wireless networks work the same as Ethernet with the important exception that while all Ethernet stations can hear all other Ethernet stations (if the rules are followed), wireless stations can be out-of-range of each other, requiring complicated peer-forwarding algorithms.
The Unix-to-Unix network was also a peer-to-peer non-realtime network in its earliest incarnations. Unix sysadmins would arrange dial-up connections among themselves in a very ad-hoc manner and email would be routed from system to system using the "bang" addressing scheme. me!him!you was the style and you had to know the path to send the message. UUNET was only for email/news and file transfer. But UUNET became hierarchical in order to grow, it piggybacked on top of TCP/IP as Internet grew, and today all that is left is USENET.
So why don't we use fat-cable Ethernet and UUNET today? The simple answer is that they are not scaleable. IP provides hierarchy in routing and this allows the building of backbones and the use of default routes to make the Internet able to grow very large and remain manageable.
No one has invented a scaleable peer-to-peer network. It is probably impossible, but something like what you want would be a global-reach wireless network. You would have to build many separate static peer-to-peer networks and interconnecting them would be hierarchical, or you could build ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks on demand using some kind of beacon channel for rendezvous and peer-to-peer network initiation. You would need a very-spread-spectrum or burst-mode radio channel and of course it would have to run unlicensed and deal with interference in very creative ways. It would also have to be very-low-frequency with large antennae and expensive electronics.
Your question is a good one. Why don't we have such technology? Hierarchical organizations like hierarchical networks. Hunter-gatherers have fewer resources to build such awesome technologies. What you want is not impossible, but it would seem very difficult at this time. A revolution in radio technology combined with a protocol designer of great genius might be able to create what you seek, but it would look and act quite differently than today's Internet. There is no assurance that it wouldn't simply fall-apart one day or morph into a hierarchical structure to allow consolidation of operation and improved service reliability.
Hmm... isn't it possible to specify routes for packets? I thought I saw that ping or something was able to do that. If not, how about a routing protocol that lets you request specific routes for your data? Kind of like asking a router to send everything from your source address out via a certain gateway?
But with the current number of wireless laptops around...
I can easily see a city running as it should networked by the laptops within it. Exactly what the Internet was designed for - or a general case of what i was designed for, error correcting, sporadic contact, resilient).
There are already 'price' parameters that can be set for routing. All it needs is a little software and configuration, not that much really.
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
A peer to peer Internet would do nothing to stop "the man" from sniffing your traffic. That copper pair/fibre running from your house/office is all "the man" needs to get at your data.
The *only* way to prevent your data from being collected is to personally control every aspect of the network: layer 1 to layer 8.
Encryption mearly delays access to your data.
friend-to-friend P2P is less risky and is TFA answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend
Now the only ones that know that you provided some files are your friends. Will they sue you for providing or censoring a file ? Less risky, definitely.
Here's a thought: what if every household, business, etc, had a wireless-access point, and they got access to the internet not from fiber or copper wire, but from eachother? Say, one node can see two layers of nodes around it, and each of those can see the same, and they all route traffic through eachother. They are also constantly updating their awareness of eachother, of latency between nearby nodes, and of nodes that appear / disappear.
This would also get away from the monopolistic net ownership that's likely to happen with cable modems, DSL, and fiber optics. Less likely for monopolies, more likely to have competition, so more likely to have great service at low cost.
How's this sound? In, say, 15 years time?
Basically, it's a function of processing power to bus and network bandwidth.
If you compair a Pentium 1 to a Pentium 4 you'll find the pentium 4 is about 1000 times as powerful in all applications and the developement cycle is about over a decade. If you compair 1.5meg DSL to 56K which also has taken about 10 years of developement to become popular, you'll find that the DSL lines are about 30 times as fast. If you look at the developement of PC Bus architecture, you'll see a similar developement. ISA ran at 32*8.3mhz, or 33.2 MBps, PCI ran at 32*33 or 132MBps, and now we've got PCI-X, which at 16X runs at about 8GBPS if memory serves but for brevity, most comps use PCIX4 which does about 2GBPS.
So, look at it this way.
1995:
Processing power of 1x; 100mhz P1
Network Bandwidth of 1x: 56K modems
Bus Bandwitdh of 1x: 33.2MBps EISA
2000:
Processing power of 100X: 900MHZ P3
Network Bandwidth of 10x: 384/128 Cable, ISDN, shotgunned 56K.
Bus bandwidth of 5X: 133MBPS PCI
2005:
Processing power of 1000X: 3.8GHZ P4
Network Bandwidth of 30X: 1.5/768 DSL 3.0/1.5 SDSL
Bus Bandwitdth of 60X: 2MBPS PCIX4
So it's safe to say by 2010
Processing power of 10,000X: 8GHZ P???
Network bandwidth of 100X+: 10Meg T3 or really high performance DSL.
Bus Bandwidth of 120X+: Fully fleshed out PCIX with a new bus appearing at around 100GBPS bus bandwidth.
Notice how processing power always outstripps bus speed by a whole lot? What this means is that PC processing power is going to be so incredibly cheap that we will have the ability to, within a decade or so, run on routing tables on a PC what took a massive Cisco 10,000 series to run. The main advantage of using a router over a PC has never been processing power since X86 handles IP with ease and not to mention you can design the processor with another command set specificly for networking. The main advantage is the optimised bus; you don't run a computer with 20 PCI slots and 20 NICS; it's slow. Although, PCI-X is very, very router-ish and I wouldn't be suprised if someone figured out a way to stick 16 PCI-X1 slots onto a motherboard as a cheap router.
Is it possible today? The real question is, can we keep legislators from helping buddies in loyal Tier1 ISP's through passing legislation that benefits those companies? There's no doubt that if AT&T came back as a telecoms monopoly that all the other ISP's would conspire against them; that's how nerds work afterall. They'd find a way of either boycotting ma bell or not using Ma bells lines because they know Ma Bell will eventually conquer them if they don't stand upto them. So the assualt must be made from within, with the nerds blessing and that I find, given the political intelligence of most network administrators would be very difficult since most don't play domination games. At worst, most just like playing good ol' harmless games like taunt-the-idiot-with-the-open-webcam-server.
Has anyone thought to use wireless network routers to make their own(not using any isps) internet, thats what (how i understand it) the internet is, but insted of running wires to each and every house it makes a network connection through isps, so theroetically if we use wireless networks we dont have to pay for internet connection (if we all did..) this is what i invision for the future internet setup.
anyone with more info on wireless (isp free) internet idears pleas contact me at
worldoffire2000@yahoo.com
Flame me... i don't care. This person doesn't know anything about how the internet works.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Since the state would simply ban any potential technology of circumvention---ie, the police would arrest you for illicit wireless networking. Though, on the bright side, there are probably some authoritarian states that are now institutionally incapable of carrying out such a policy.
A citywide mini- Internet could be developed that exists without the need for Internet providers. Almost every one of our neighbors has wireless Internet access. Much like the serverless, bootstrap-initialized MUTE and Kademlia protocols, we could create an enormous P2P network based on that. Of course, there should be established and enforced certain bandwidth limits (also like MUTE and Kademlia). It will not be anywhere near as fast as the Internet we have now, the pings will leave much to be desired, but we would be able to communicate with each other, send encrypted messages, visit each other's websites. The complex P2P/caching system would dynamically split the bandwidth amongst people when someone's website becomes all too popular. There's no single host, there's just a single seed. This is the kind of Internet where censorship just wouldn't be ever be able to be enforced. Everyone's a proxy for everyone else, plus encryption, automatic banlists for leeching/protocol violating clients, blah blah blah. With the right protocol, the negative/corruptive/hash faking element would be filtered out by the numbers of those who are not.
and the problem is key exchange. Outlook holds thier proprietary keys on the outlook server and makes the whole key exchanging thing transarent.
If open gpg were rolled out as part of thunderbird, ans a good network of key servers was set up, then there would be a good chance for this to take hold. As it is the free encryption packages are hard to understand and critical mass is not pushing the market forward. Uts a shame because gpg is perfectly mature, but even a slashdot reader feels compelled to buy pgp.
Encrypted IM needs a standard, trillian does it best, but this is incompatable with aol aim encryption, and whatever gaim might use.
Last but not least the cryptohackers need to understand tht we are not all as smart as they are, and if they spent a little more time explaining the issues instead of pontificating, things would be better.
Ok, the whole peer-to-peer networking sounds great logically and that was how it used to be before all the Noobs started dialing in. There will always be a network backbone until each of us can connect with an OC-192 between our homes and peers.
Not very likely to ever occur.
But let's assume for a second that all machines on the Internet communicate directly, both good guys and bad guys. Before around 1995, that was how it worked - nobody really had firefalls and spam was a lunch meat.
Then Al Gore >>created Yippy!
Now all the high speed connected folks - and everyone is really high speed can be taken over into huge botnets. Phishing and spamming are a way of life for many. email is directly transfered between every machine. There's no more POP3! I thru that in since there shouldn't be anymore POP3 after IMAP was created!
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM!
*ROTFLMAO*
Check the man page on uucp, and google usenet.
That *was* the 'Net: peers calling peers (although back then, servers connected at a blazing 56k).
Then, to expand on other's cmts, the reason it's so hard to censor the 'Net, even with the Great Chinese Firewall (or Carnivore), is the 'Net's original specs. Remember, it was created by DARPA for the military, and those specs included "if The Button has been pushed, and 75% of everything between you and me is radioactive dust, so long as there is *one* single route between us, no matter how many hops, the packets will find their way there."
Now for the neofascist Bushista, if more of us sent more encrypted email, they'll *never* have enough resources to brute-force decrypts, *then* scan, billions of emails/day.
mark
all the other answers you got are reasonable, but all of them seem to miss a point. Most of my contacts use web interfaces to email more often than a client.
And implementing cryptography on a web page is just a joke. It would provide no real security. Well, there are ways (i.e. hushmail), but they are hard to implement and requires stuff like java (forget to check your mail from your aunt-s pc or your pda) and most people, me included, are not going to trade accessibility and ease of use for security.
As others have said, the Internet we have today is essentially what you are describing, but with a lot of traffic being consolidated through a small number of peers in the center of the network.
We have a wireless network in our neighborhood that is not even on the Internet. It is just a wireless network that anyone can connect to. The community runs a web server with forums that also allows private mail between users. We have looked into the possibility of putting other nodes in nearby locations and setting up a mesh network. This would be more like what I think you are describing, but the larger it gets, the higher your latency. If I am on the other side of town and want to send packets back and forth from the house, I could potentially go through dozens of nodes to get there. One way around this is to create central nodes with towers on the hilltops, but now you are getting back into a backbone like model.
The other thing we have considered is putting our little network on the internet and making it our own little neighborhood free wifi hotspot, but there are legal issues involved with that. Apparently our local municipality takes their franchise with the cable company quite seriously and most of the ISPs we could connect to would not let us share the bandwidth like this. Of course, you could just do it and not ask anyone's permission and would PROBABLY not get caught. I know and trust my neighbors, but with an open wifi access point, some freak could sit in his car at the top of our community and download kiddie porn and the IP address would point back to us, not him.
So while it is technically possible to do it, reality and practicality would bite you in the end. (Bad pun intended)
The TTL would have to be far to great and the latency far to high on a network like this. At least for geographically distant locations.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
A number of other innovations spring to mind regarding the free exchange of ideas. Writing is a good one. The telegram was, socially, a far more important invention than the internet. It went further to revolutionise the worlds of commerce, private lives, etc...
The renaissance was pretty important. It is only historically ignorant people who would claim such a thing.
Just buy a bunch of MeshAPs right? AODV routing.
You can use W.A.S.T.E, Tor, Freenet, etc there are many software GNUnet, MUTE, etc.
You can also build your own "Internet" with WiFi maybe, there coming faster technology like WiMax that is faster.
And high-speed connections are becoming more popular, in some contries it is possible for people to buy 1 gbit/s Internet connection for their homes. If alot of have that kind of connection, then it would be possible maybe for this peer-to-peer Internet.
A routing protocol called L2R solved all these issues (and many more) over 6 years ago.
Of course, none of the big carriers seem to want it yet (They can't figure it out)
so sad. so L2R continues collecting dust, though it's been ready for eons...
some products are running it, but good luck finding them.
The Internet is made to work entirely decrentalized with multiple paths through BGP and so on and so forth. All this has been said.
The argument that seems to be coming up is why we let a few Tier-1's (MCI, Verizon, etc) take most of the bandwidth. It's the same reason why most towns have one power company and water supplier. Sure there isn't a monopoly due to the few players out there, but the number of people who can push insane amounts of data are those tier-1's. And why peer with 100's of people when you can peer with one or two and have access to the whole network?
It's simply that unless you want to be paying a lot more for your net access (and more importantly, corporate dedicated access), you need to bring a lot of bandwidth together.
Think of all of the idle bandwidth if every major ISP in North America were to have to connect to all of the others (keeping in mind peak speed, 95th percentile or whatever you want to classify as 'enough' bandwidth). That's a lot of wires, and a lot of capacity bottlenecks and constant upgrading. Compare that to everyone connecting to a few Tier-1 providers and suddenly the long hauls are done on large and fast circiuts, not to mention taking a ton of monitoring and planning burden off of the ISPs.
Thinking that for one second that MCI/WorldCom's (and others') role of the Internet can be replaced by tons of peering. It's necessary in order to have the speed and quality of service you've grown to expect from it.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
One idea I had for a radio based network is this: sell people nodes. The nodes that you sell have a weighted random distribution of power levels and capacities: most people will get low power nodes, but a lucky few get high power, high capacity nodes. Since it's random, you get a geographically randomized set of tranceivers, with enough high power nodes to connect it all together.
Obligatory Ninja High School manga reference:
"We professors of steamology must know these things my young friend"
Professor Steamhead
personally, I never graduated from Quagmire High, having failed World Domination 101.......
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
If McCarthy could have steamed open every letter in the US...
Oh, Wow, man. Like, you mean, the Communists wouldn't own the MPAA, RIAA and ClearChannel, today?
That's kindof hard to imagine.
Come to think of it, do you think Microsoft might also be a little different, a little less controlling?
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Well, we already have *spineless* service providers such as Google or Yahoo, who will meekly turn over all the information they have about you to the authorities if they are asked to... so, going backboneless wouldn't be much of a stretch, would it ?
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
P2P isn't the solution. The solution is to take a significant majority of the backbone out of the hands of corporations that control them. Corporations will bend to government influence, just as governments bend to corporate influence.
By creating a non-profit organization whose sole purpose is to enhance and extend the internet backbone, you've solved the problem of petty ownership and government blustering. Funding would be an adventure, but it's been done by lesser qualified organizations. And no more Level3-Cogent spats!
Our friend the OP Stormwatch is a neo-nazi sympathizer. Stormwatch, aka Stormfront.
A peer to peer mesh network based upon wireless unrestricted ultra wide band (UWB) technologies (such as unresticted http://time-domain.com/ has huge potential. High bandwidth rates over vast distances (20km+) between nodes with excellent obstacle penetration (due to the UWB). Since these devices are essentially digital pulse technology over a wide frequency band without the use of a power applifier in the transmitter they use very little power, about 1/1000 the power of a cell phone; yes, 1/1000.
The key is that it needs to be unrestricted; unfortunately the technology has been clamped down by the military in the USA (through the FCC) due to it's awesome capabilities for combat and other military applications. As a result most UWB devices for civilian use have extremely limited range. Also the detailed technical papers that were up on the Time Domain (Pulson) web site that explained the technology were removed (anybody have copies?); now the web site is little more than a lame product site.
Some of the military applications include: radar, secure and long range communications (many times greater than the best WiFi), accurate tracking (to the centimeter at 20km), imaging through walls. Another aspect that the military likes are the stealth capabilities of UWB which is very difficult to detect (with current technologies) since it appears as low power background noise (a.k.a. static); you have to know the transmission encrpytion codes to know how to decode which frequencies are the real ones at any moment. This also makes it highly secure. With these characteristics is no wonder that those in power don't want those not in power getting a hold of the full capabilities of this exotic technology.
The beauty of this technology is that it's perfect for creating self forming mesh peer to peer networks. It was the range, obstacle penetration, low power usage, and bandwidth needed. It's also all digital from the start. The low power enables the use of units placed in remote strategic locations with solar pannels to provide bridges and hubs into remote communities or in countries in the process of building an internet and voice based communicaitons infrastructure across wide swaths of land.
Imagine having a cell phone network where you didn't have to pay provider! Of course there could still be providers but an open commons would be best. Each cell phone in the network extends the range and capacity o the network (unless all the units converge at the same location).
Now maybe there are merits to having paid networks, after all we are in a capaitalist society. This can be built in and the costs computed and shared by the supplier routing paths with the supplier nodes bidding in real time for your communications. This can ride atop the existing protocols that compute the "cost" of network traffic. Of course anyone is free to provide true "network peering" arrangements. So there would be the need for open source communications licenses.
The major problem is that this needs to be approved by governments in various countries around the world.
The all the development going into WiFi maybe we'll get something similar and then make the jump to UWB once the hardware and software is ready for advanced mesh networks such as described above. The Dlink MiMo router is a step in the right direction at least in terms of range with its extra power; however it can only reach long distances with a directional antenna - UWB is generally omni directional. Imagine the range with a directional antenna.
Lobby your technology companies, your elected representatives, and your departments of your government that control communications and technologies in your country to allow for the best possible civilian capabiliites. DO NOT do this if you think you'll end up in jail or be put under survailance by your big brother style government - it's not worth the risk to your life as the next generation of WiFi units are likely to have the mesh portion put into them anyhow.
There is a way and it is called OLSR. Wireless networks.
See also Freifunk.net, a wireless network pioneer group from Berlin.
Since it doesn't exist yet, and never will. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
There are already meshed networks that exist in different European cities that use wireless connections (802.11) to communicate between computers. The biggest of these networks is found in Berlin, see http://olsrexperiment.de/index.php?option=com_wrap per&Itemid=94&lang=en for a map of the whole network.
The big problem with this - and don't get me wrong, I really love the idea from a technical standpoint (presuming heavy encryption is standard, automatic and ubiquitous) - is that governments assert a right to regulate radio broadcasts as they see fit, as the radio spectrum is a public resource. The only reason unregulated spectrum is unregulated right now is because they let it be - if the FCC so chose, they could impose regulations on that part of the spectrum, and then the nice happy FCC hardware-confiscation vans show up to shut down your "pirate radio station".
Nobody cares if you run a Gigabit cable over the fence to your neighbor's house except you and your neighbor. A wired network could be built with privately owned equipment between owners of private property and nobody would give a damn - and even if government DID give a damn, the people will really throw shit fits if the government starts telling them what they can do with their own private property on their own private property. (Then again, out where I live in southern California, most people don't own the property they live on anyway, even ostensibly i.e. mortgages - everybody rents or leases. Feudalism all over again, working just to pay the land-lords... or the banks, if you're lucky. But that's another topic).
But as has been covered elsewhere in this thread, there are large social and especially technical hurdles to getting a wired mesh network running and widely adopted (and therefore useful). A wireless solution like yours is far better technologically and largely circumvents the social problems, but leaves itself wide open to government regulation of a sort that not many people will be prone to complain about.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
...the printing press.
I think, reading between the lines, it's because we don't have a broad consensus that encrypting all personal communications is good for people collectively.
.DOC files because people I work with do; but the deeper question is: what factors influence the rate of changes in groups, and the willingness to make difficult changes perhaps against the groups norm of the time)
I know that's an unpopular view to take on here. But I've been thinking for a while: encryption and anonymity are great for avoiding the evils of government and corporate spying, profiling, repression, and good for whistleblowing, etc. Privacy is often good, and it's known that certain types of privacy are essential for human sanity too.
But the same mechanisms are also great for facilitating money laundering, enlarging the market for snuff porn, making it easy for politicians to accept (digital, untraceable) cash for votes with nobody knowing, and other dodgy information exchanges that increase genuinely nasty criminal activity.
In other words, encryption and anonymity might lessen the powers of evils that we can identify at the moment - but they might prove to be the infrastructure of new ones that are harder to monitor, harder to measure, harder to identify, but just as frightening, and just as capable of enabling the concentration of corporate wealth and political power that we were hoping to dissolve with these technologies.
I think that we don't have a broad consensus on what to do about that dilemma. It's not a simple question of good vs. bad. Wide availability of encryption makes it possible to send encrypted messages without raising eyebrows. And that facilitates anonymity as well as identity-hiding. Those have their good uses. But they also prevent accountabilty - the results of which you can see on every web site that allows anonymous posting without moderation, and in every political system and centralised control system of the world.
And therefore - I think - that's why large numbers of people, including software product developers and policy makers - even at the mundane level of choosing an email program - are not embracing every available mechanism for strong encryption and anonymity.
It's creeping in here and there, in places where it is obviously essential - such as submitting credit cards in financial transactions. Yet, notice that comes with an audit trail: anonymous digital cash hasn't taken over, despite available mechanisms for it. It will continue to creep in here and there, and at the same time, mechanisms for accountability will develop too - they have to mature hand-in-hand, before they become popular. The web of trust is one of those mechanisms. Connections with people you know. Aggregate trust mechanisms such as group moderation systems are also among them.
From this, I predict that peer to peer file distribution, moderation, and annotation mechanisms will develop more advanced trust aggregation systems. And that eventually, that will develop far enough that the internet itself develops a new, useful peer to peer transport mechanism, similar to what the article's author asks for.
However, that new internet will exchange traffic, and files, and calculate the costs of transporting it, and the quality-of-service costs (e.g. to maintain low-latency video links or real-time news feeds), using trust aggregation and trading systems much more sophisticated than the routing protocols we currently use. And it will settle at a level of tracking and accountability that finds a middle ground between too little and too much, as determined by the great many people effecting the evolution of this system.
That's what I think today, anyway.
-- Jamie (who doesn't use encrypted IM or mail because nobody else I know does; who uses
Please mod parent up. This is a very important point!
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Yes it is a sad thing that more people don't encrypt their email
If more people used pgp it could be used also as a spam filter by only allowing signed emails to pass and verfiying the public key with allowed mail. No vaild key.. No mail..