Slashdot Mirror
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?"
> 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
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 :).
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.
freenet exemplifies what a peer-to-peer internet would be like: a disaster. It's slow, it's cumbersome, and more to the point, it fails to solve a problem a doesn't really exist in the first place. Nobody cares about anonymity at the EXPENSE of speed and convenience, except child pornographers, law breakers, and the paranoid. That's why networks like freenet and ZeroKnowledge ultimately fail.
That's not to say freenet not an interesting experiment. That's not to say anonymity isn't desireable. but please, anyone that's tried it knows it's not a panacea. If you're really paranoid, use a proxy like anonycat, or any of the zillion others. They are more than adequate.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
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.
The main problem with a P2P internet would be bandwidth, at least at this point. There just aren't the resources available - hardware or software - for people to be running /. out of their mom's basement. Even a good amount of small businesses wouldn't be covered by a fairly decent dedicated server, but they can't afford to set up a cluster to run things like a hosting company can, let alone hire someone to set the thing up (or be expected to know how to set it up and maintain it themselves), even if everyone had a petabit connection to the internet for a buck a month.
So it's really not a feasable idea. If it were realistic, it'd be great, but without some major hardware changes (large amounts of solid-state flash-volitility RAM-lifecycle storage at affordable prices) and obviously a complete structual revamp, it couldn't work.
So until we all have streaming-ten-next-gen-uncompressed-high-def-movie s-all-at-once internet connections with equally fast storage that has nanosecond seek times, it's just not realistic. So until that time comes, keep encrypting, and then encrypt over that (because if it's a bitch to crack the first layer of 512, you're screwed trying to break through that second layer of 2048).
Or just lobby for us regaining our privacy. Too bad there are so many people willing to lose every bit of their privacy if it helps to reduce the already-miniscule chance of them being injured in some sort of "preventable" terrorist attack.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
His question was, "Is there a way". The answer is yes, but you don't want it, so people stopped doing it. Anyone can peer with anyone else, but the copper/fiber cost to take the core out of the picture prevents anyone from wanting to do it. If you're worried about big brother, encrypt.
If he really wants what he's asking for, he can start finding peers on the other side of the net, and he can keep *his* traffic off the backbones once he has enough peers (and he's built some enormous route tables as well).
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
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.
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.
As a related matter, I've found myself wondering why encrypted email has not become far more popular - or encrypted IM for that matter. I downloaded and installed PGPMail myself a few years back, but could never get any of my friends to install it as well. This strikes me as strange considering that I know that were I given a choice between an email client with encryption and without, I would choose the former. I assume most people would. So why hasn't this been offered as an automatic part of Outlook or Thunderbird? Why haven't market pressures led to this? Is it technical difficulties? Or is it something else?
14 digits of Pi are all we need.
Tor is unlikely to go mainstream so long as P2P is kept off of it. My guess is that mp3s would create the largest demand for a highly secure network due to the risk of copyright infringement lawsuits. Mp3s are also small enough to accept a 3-1 or so overhead, but big enough to put a heavy load on the system.
Porn (particularly highly illegal types) would also be a strong demand driver. Anything else that a substantial amount of people want and is sufficiently prosecuted or sufficiently taboo will drive demand.
These tools aren't answers in and of themselves though, as they themselves can be banned and filtered out, even if the contents cannot be looked at. Also, monkey-in-the-middle attacks can work if enough nodes are controlled, which major ISPs/government agencies can do.
Tor + a decentralized network would be far more resiliant to attempts to flat out ban Tor.
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.
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.
Not only that, but there's the problem of growing routing tables. Every host on the Internet needs to know what direction to send packets destined for every other host. IPv6 is designed to alleviate some of the problems of big routing tables, but that's just because it makes it easier to map a hierarchical network topology into a hierarchical address space (thus reducing the need for explicit routing table entries).
As far as I know, a global flat address space is practically impossible.
http://outcampaign.org/
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.