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?"

Comments

You're on it baby..

[brokenin2]

It would look an awful lot like the internet we have now.

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?

Re:You're on it baby..

[ZagNuts]

Perhaps a software solution like TOR or Freenet could help you sleep better at night?

Don't know much about TOR but I just thought I'd clarify about Freenet. It is indeed a software solution to what you are asking about in which the sites are accessed in an entirely peer to peer manner. Instead of having static routing tables located at specific points each computer in the network maintains its own routing information. If a computer doesn't know how to get to a certain site it guesses by asking a neighbor if it has the desired data. Data is cached throughout the network so that sites are stored as distributed files, meaning at any one time if your computer is a part of Freenet it could have information related to a number of sites.

The good thing about Freenet is that site accesses are entirely anonymous. There is no way to be traced AFAIK. One of the bad things is that it takes a computer a long time to build up enough routing information to access any websites at all. You have to run the Freenet program for a few days before you are able to access anything and even though its painfully slow. The other problem that people have is that you have to store any content that goes through your computer. Freenet is plagued with child porn sites because the anonyminity that it provides. This means that if you are running the freenet program you are likely to have child pornography data stored on your computer even if you have never visited those sites. While the legality of this is questionable, the ethical issues are obvious.

Still it is a very interesting concept and definitely has its applications (China anyone?).

Re:You're on it baby..

[Mattcelt]

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.

Re:You're on it baby..

[r_naked]

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.

We seem to be scaling rather nicely.

http://anonetnfo.brinkster.net/

Bad Idea

[Kasracer]

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.

Not exactly practical

[georgewilliamherbert]

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.

Circa 1982

[sphealey]

> 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

Tier 1s?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.

Re:Tier 1s?

[brokenin2]

I'm not saying that there isn't a core to the internet. It's there, but that's not by design, it's a convention to keep the internet from totally sucking.

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).

All mail was read in WWII

[Derling Whirvish]

Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States.

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.

The Solution Is Crypto

[blofeld42]

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.

Re:How did this make it to the front page?

[Z0mb1eman]

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.

Pure Wireless Mesh

[Agar]

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.

Oh, how I pitty them

[MarkusQ]

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.

/dev/null, I tell you, /dev/null! The only sane thing to do with 99% of the e-mail is route it to /dev/null in the most efficient way possible. All else is madness!

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

Good God man, you've discovered USENET!

[John Jorsett]

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.

Why Not.

[darqchild]

-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.

Lord of the ... Tiers?

[bi_boy]

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.

Re:Lord of the ... Tiers?

[Onan]

Oh, it was necessary.

I just can't believe you passed up the opportunity to end with "..and in the darkness, BIND them."

OK, take these steps

[puzzled]

  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 /24 (256 addresses). They'll ask why, you tell 'em you're going to multihome.

    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 /24]
        ! UUNet
        neighbor yadda yadda AS 701
        ! Sprint
        neighbor yadda yadda AS 1239

    And *poof*! Your little /24 is now globally visible via two different ISPs. Yank the T1 to one of then, life is funny for a bit, then you're running like nothing ever happened.

    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.