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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?"
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.
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!
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 agree... let the service providers provide the service. If you want privacy, use encryption. Unless some higly specialised entities have developed quantum computers and kept it a secret, they won't be able to break it in any time frame suitable for mass communication snooping.
I think that response may have missed the point of the submitter's original question. I read it as "is there a way to prevent all traffic from traversing predictable routes and hubs, thereby disallowing any entity from collecting all of one's transmitted data and using it against one?"
Essentially what the submitter is interested in is a meshed network, which to my knowledge is the only network topology yet created which does not use hubs, centers, or buses to carry conglomerated traffic. Remember that things like bittorrent, bgp (less so), and other similar protocols are really creating "virtual" meshes, not real ones - all of your traffic (and that of every other person in your segment) is still travelling to your ISP, and that to their backbone. So anyone who sits at those hubs or backbones would be able to see all your torrent traffic, and who it is going to/from - it is only the separation of the ISPs and the RIAA/MPAA/FBI that keeps them from knowing your every move on the Internet! (Encryption and proxies help, but it aren't a foolproof solution, btw.)
Also, TCP is designed to be fault-tolerant, but also semi-optimizing, taking the shortest perceived route to its destination. So unless a backbone is down, most (if not all) traffic from you to a host between which the backbone sits will travel on that backbone, very predictably. TCP is not privacy-sensitive.
The short answer is that in a wired world, there is no feasible way to create a mesh. The strength of the mesh is algorithmically tied to the number of other nodes each node is connected to. So unless you're going to dig up the yard between you and, say, three of your neighbors, and they and two more of theirs, and so on, across the entire country, you will end up with a topology which looks more like what you've already got, with a smaller number of larger rings and stars, each funneling through a central location.
In a wireless environment, the possibilities are much better. Some police precincts in the U.S. have been experimenting with mesh-networked radios, where each radio is a repeater as well as a transceiver. Thus a linear configuration of radios could extend the range from perhaps a 30-mile radius to a 60-mile-per-radio diameter for as long as the chain is unbroken. This isn't the optimum configuration, however, since it is presumed that one would want redundancy, so you would be forced to configure the mesh in such a way that you could talk to at least three other nodes at any given time. This requires a very high density of nodes, so it would work much better in a more densely-populated area than one nodes are scarce.
I hope that answers the question.
Oh, chill out.
Not everyone is a networking guru (I know I'm not). I'm sure many people without much networking background have wondered the same thing as the article poster at some point or another, quite likely while reading all the "government/telcos/corporations/Godzilla are going to eat our Internet" stories here on Slashdot. The comments in this story are the perfect place to give these people a better understanding of how the internet works.
This isn't a question that's easy to Google if you don't already know what to look for (in which case you don't need to), and the poster shouldn't have to take a networking course just to get an answer. I would say it's a perfect question for Ask Slashdot - if you don't like the user's ignorance, you could take the time to educate him and the many other Slashdot readers like him with a more informative post.
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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.
"this included all mail, all packages, all telegrams, and all telephone calls."
The capacity to read everything did not exist.
This was during all out war not some informal war with no timetable.
This data was not kept indefinitely.
Lastly the computing power did not exist for a politician to do an SQL query on your life history to determine if you are "desirable".
Dangerous and misleading analogy.
The only trouble is, it's not child porn until a court of law rules it as such. Therefore, at the time you'd be deciding to filter it it isn't illegal yet, and that means you're just filtering things you don't agree with arbitrarily. And if you're doing that, what's to stop you from filtering other things you don't agree with, like websites advocating equal rights for minorities (hypothetically, that is -- I'm not calling you a racist or anything!)?
In other words, if you're a common carrier you can't make any decisions about blocking (allegedly) illegal content at all, because it would be too easily abused.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz