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Jailbreaking the Internet For Freedom's Sake
snydeq writes "With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'"
Any alternative internet technology relies on encryption, and as long as courts have to ability to require you to decrypt data upon request, any discussion of workarounds is pointless.
To really address the real problem, the laws themselves must be the focus.
it's not about connectivity, it's about accessibility: presence in the search results, being properly indexed.
There could be million free pages under any super-free Internet. What's the point of it if nothing could be found?
Main battle is going to be around google search results and there have been several front pages on that: content providers are already fighting with google.
If a movie is getting NC-17 rating, forget about profit (in this case most rightfully so, that's Islam speaking).
If a website is accessible only via Tor, forget about business.
Imagine isntead of banning megaupload website were still accessible through Tor or some other kind of superfreeandsecretnet. Do you really think Dotcom would be leaving in 22M mansion?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I would go further and suggest that this is a desired outcome by both governments and content holders: to drive the subversives, the perceived anarchists, and in short, all of the non-mainstream consumer users of the Internet off of it into their own "underground". This keeps the nominal Internet "market" sanitized from both subversive content and disruptive behavior, as well as segregates the undesirables into their own sandbox where keeping an eye on them may not be easier, but lowers the degree of urgency for doing so.
I can see this tightening of regulation creating an all new internet that is build amongst non-profit communities and connected together in fashions so that no one owns the transmission means. Unlike today's internet which is essentially owned by oligarchy consisting of AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon (i.e. Big Telecom) communities may end up either laying their own transmission lines or use multipoint wireless. This might just be the tipping point at which the pricing and collusion of Big Telecom leads to their ultimate demise and irrelevance.
Oh god, it burns.
...but in all seriousness: okay, Mr. Venezia, you can jailbreak it. Just be careful you don't brick it. No one needs a bricked Internet. While you're at it, can you install a SIM unlock, too? I hear the service provider that the Internet comes with is terrible.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...that is what Moglen et al have been saying all along: don't trust the lawmakers and people in power to make you free. Guarantee your freedoms one by one, by building them - free speech, anonymity, etc. can be engineered!
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
People go where the content is. If The Pirate Bay were only accessible over the Tor network there would be tons more traffic there, thus more information on how to access it. If enough content were only accessible over Tor soon there would be extensions for web browsers that would make it as easy to get there as any other site.
"They said we drink horse urine and sleep with our own kin. You say it's comedy, but how can someone laugh at that?"
Kind of difficult to connect to servers that are unplugged and sitting in a guarded evidence closet somewhere.
The other problem is that people might stop creating these great sites/services because you can't "just browse" to them or venture capitalists won't fund the startup. Anonymity and an underground internet is useless if all the cool stuff is just taken down (as opposed to blocked) or even worse, never created in the first place. For example, can we secretly get to megaupload now? What about it's competitors that have disabled file sharing?
it also requires the entry and exit to be trusted.
No it doesn't. The whole point of TOR is that the only way to determine who is doing what is for the nodes to collude with one another (although there are traffic analysis attacks that ISPs can do if they can see all the traffic through all the nodes).
Are people so dumb now they can't pick from three or four installers the one appropriate to their system?!
No; it's just that you've made the same ignorant mistake that many folks here on /. seem to: assuming that the majority of internet users are technically educated.
FYI, it's not 1993 anymore; thanks to commercialization and social networking, everyone from your mailman to your granny are accessing the internet these days. Many internet users are specialized in non technical fields, such as nursing or architecture. Your statement is akin to a doctor saying, "If you're too dumb to perform gastrointestinal surgery on yourself, why should I bother doing it for you?"
Yes, there are many, many people online these days who have little to no idea how the internet works, outside the knowledge that typing "www.google.com" will take them to Google's search page. Maybe if you tried educating the noobs, instead of responding to their ignorance with your own, you wouldn't find them so loathsome.
Just my 2 pennies.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
ie, filled with errors, out of sequence, dropped and maybe even faked packets (I know, that goes beyond what UDP is supposed to do).
but assume that the network is evil and fake and someone is always trying to do bad things (listen, change, realtime trap-on, etc) and write your layered app protocols on top of THAT assumption.
its a good assumption, in fact. if you assume your transport is bad and your app fills the gap to make the end to end connection, *now*, reliable and trustable, then you can deal with both honest and less-than-honest physical and logical transports (ethernet, atm, cable, dsl, etc).
the problem is that our protocols and apps have assumed no mess-ups internally in our networks. this is no longer true anymore! the evil bastards have gotton a hint of how cool our internet toy is and they want to pervert it to suit their will.
if we don't start taking a defensive posture on our network, we will LOSE control (arguable we have already) of our networks.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The money will always be in the "mainstream", or the particular mainstream of every place and time, by definition.
Megaupload exists because it makes money. It makes money because millions of people watch movies and download shit off it, not because it makes a few hackers "free" to share stuff.
No mainstream = no money = not *existing* in any noticeable capacity.
Yes agree, tor + freenet + GPG etc. are the basis for something useful. However 'they' own the pipes and country to country gateways, for example. So the new, new thing will really be from the bottom up and may be quite retro to start with. I've been looking backwards at fidonet, packet radio and gopher, for example. Also been thinking about biomimetic systems where the keys, for example are transmitted on one medium and the 'doors' on another, via something that spectrum hops.
This sounds very tinfoil hat stuff but I've been around servers since Prestel, Minitel in France, BBS systems with modems and the current outlook just seems pretty bad. That is intuition rather than science, but really doesn't feel good at all. Even if we 'keep' the internet, it becomes something worse than television.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
I was just about to make the very same point myself. It's called Perfect Forward Secrecy. Use protocols in which the users do not have the ability to decrypt content after the session ends. Courts can't require you to do the impossible.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
For everyone to use encryption, it needs to be made so easy that they don't even need to know what encryption is. Like with SSL - all people need to know is that if their banking site doesn't show a padlock icon, something is suspicious. That probably means accepting 'good enough' encryption for a lot of things - encryption that could be broken by a fairly advanced MITM attack, but which is sufficiently annoying to the evesdropper so as to render mass-monitoring impractical.
As a darknet I2P is clearly superior to Tor, both in speed and security - Tor still relies on trusted directory servers while I2P is fully distributed and requires no trusted servers of any kind. Tor is better as an anonymizing proxy.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In a free society, piracy can happen.
In a society where no piracy can happen, it cannot possibly be free.
I leave it up to you to figure out how to reconcile a free society with one where piracy cannot happen.
The problem with this approach is that it focuses on the end user's connectivity and not the effect such laws would have on the web sites themselves. Who cares if you have unfettered access to all sites when the sites don't exist due to legal threats.
Let's take Slashdot as an example. Say something like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc eventually succeeds and it becomes very easy to shut down any website with just a suggestion of copyright infringement on the site. That is, if somebody posted a link to The Pirate Bay in the comments, then somebody else could get Slashdot as a whole effectively shut down as a result. And yes, that's what could happen with laws such as SOPA.
What do you think happens to sites like Slashdot in an environment like this? The only reasonable response would be to drastically limit, if not eliminate, all user comments.
Meanwhile, the Slashdot user deftly installs the circumvention software and is easily able to get to Slashdot... but who cares? Without the comments, the entire site has only marginal value.
That's why circumvention software is only a tiny part of a workaround and one that will eventually fail. It's the sites that need to be protected, not the access.
And yet we have people running covert operations to let corn rot and then distill the runoffs. They have to hideout in the woods to perform one of the simplest operations you can do with fire and liquid. The laws are justified and sold, claiming that they protect people from bad alcohol, when we all know it is about tax revenue.
In 1914, the federal government went on record outlawing a weed that covered the banks of the Potomac. A huge cadre of policemen have since been converted to an army to prevent people from talking stupid and getting the munchies. The claim is that marijuana is a "gateway" drug, when we all know that the taxed alcohol the authorities allow is the real gateway drug.
Anyone that calls these regimes into question is labeled with an outlaw, rebel, or some other less than "proper society" title. Any politician that claims that it is a matter of personal liberty is called "bat shit crazy" when they aren't being completely ignored.
Why, oh why, would anyone think that the powers that be would allow an alternative internet? "If you're on the alternative internet, it must be because of child pornography!!! Or you might be a terrorist! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" The excuse to bust down doors to lock people up for talking in chatrooms is prepared already, and the people have been conditioned to swallow it already.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
While circumventing censorship is better than nothing this is not technical problem but a legal one. We need to stand up against censorship on the streets, not on some dark unknown meshnet.
If it weren't for pirated content, few people would need big hard drives. I mean, really, a terabyte on the desktop?
It's really hard to fill a big hard drive without pirating stuff. I was just looking at my hard drive space consumption. I have on it:
This all adds up to about 200GB.
If it weren't for piracy, the hard drive industry would be a lot smaller.
The *AA's have declared war on the free internet, and governments everywhere are getting on board with that after seeing the Arab Spring use its tools to overthrow their governments and generally stop doing what they're told. We saw with the SOPA protest how effective we can be when we work together, because there are vastly more of us than there are of them.
What we need to do now is to take it to the next level and take the fight to them. Revising copyright is probably a good place to start because there is a greater degree of public awareness about it now. If we push for the complete abolition of the notion of copyright, and push very hard, then the *AA's will be put on the defensive.
More generally we need to expunge government of the clueless, supine creatures who lay down for all this nonsense as well as the pure evil who are screwing us with full awareness of the damage they're doing. With the advent of additive manufacturing this same set of issues is about to spread to every industry, and it's going to intensify with those larger stakes. We can see a new era of human freedom or unprecedented repression, but we won't tilt the balance in our favor unless we all fight hard.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
To give an analogy, it's like driving a car on the road with no supervision even though you have no idea how to drive a car.
So we should have a government run licensing program, whereby you must have a government issues license before connecting to the internet? That's going to improve things how?
as much as corporations talk the talk about free markets, they all want to be a monopoly. they all want 100% market capitalization.
yes, we're free to choose between several walled gardens, and a precious few open platforms. give the corporations their way, and the shiniest, sexiest walled garden would become monopoly, and there'd be just as much control as you'd get from a censor-happy government.
governments and corporations all want control, but for different reasons.
I don't think the argument that corporations threaten free speech holds water.
We disagree. I think that corporations present a greater threat than the government. With the government, we at least have the constitution and some sort of influence over how it behaves. Not enough, but some. With corporations we have none. And nearly everything we do is in a corporation's control at some point or another.
I have an iPhone. It comes with a user agreement that specifics how I can use the phone. If I don't like it, I can get another phone and/or another provider.
I don't have to have an iPhone. I don't have to use AT&T.
In the US, your choices of providers is extremely limited -- is it three nowadays? The smaller ones simply resell the service of the larger ones so they don't count. You can get another phone, sure, but when they are all behaving in the same fashion -- as they do -- then this choice is illusory.
And you do have to use AT&T. If you use the internet or telephone service of any sort, the odds are overwhelming that AT&T is handling your communication as some point in its travels, even if you aren't their direct customer.
Using tools to get around restrictions set up by the government (as in China, etc) is NOT the same thing as getting around restrictions placed on a device by the manufacture.
I think they're exactly the same thing.
I think I see where we differ. You see a difference between corporations and government. I think that they have effectively merged and there is little functional difference, except that corporations operate with far fewer safeguards. Corporations do the things that are illegal for the government, and vice versa, but they work hand in hand. The end result is the loss of liberty overall.
Darkneting won't save us. They can deep packet inspect, or block service to TOR nodes, or simply disconnect anyone who tries. They can - will- turn the internet very quickly into an old fashioned telephone system, with your real name required and full tracking on at all times. Bandwidth throttling, for instance, while ostensibly to stop "hogs" and kill Netflix, is very useful to discourage people from running TOR nodes. Hard to run encrypted virtual pipes when they constrict at will.
They can pass any law they like and criminalize any trick we can come up with. The spooks behind this are not uninformed, and read the same boards we do.
Young people, 30 and below in age, are not concerned. They have never, if you think about it, lived in a free world. They laid face-down on the hallway floors in high school while giant thugs let dogs sniff their crotches, looking for drugs like aspirin and Dayquil. They have been fingerprinted, watched, recorded, and monitored to the point where their school-issued laptops were taking pictures of them in their underwear for years. They have never lived in a world where such things are insane; this is everyday life to them. As they grew up, they have to give pee tests, saliva tests, stop for random searches by cops, swear to moral turpitude, sign up to homeowner and condo associations that pretty much are prison systems with nicer plumbing, and submit every movement on the internet and in person to GPS/IP-registerd locations. They don't understand why privacy is important; they are indoctrinated by the sheer banality of the evil. People who live by sewage filtration plants don't smell the shit, and young people don't smell the loss of their liberties.
Solutions have to be hardware based combined with newer communication tech. Simple WiFi with encryption won't work; they'll make it illegal.
Ideas: go to LEDs in a tube to transmit optical signals over short distances, home to home, building to building. Infrared lasers to act as backbones to a TOR-like network that does-not-interface with the old internet. The old internet is dead, people; they commercialized it, gave to the corporations and the police states of the world.
Wild ideas: finally solve the problem of radio interference- it is a hardware/software limitation, not a real one. Thousands can transmit and receive over a single frequency if we solve this riddle, and then bandwidth is effectively infinite enough that TOR-like radio mesh networks could actually work with low latency and high throughput, with encryption.
3-D printing of custom network nodes that do not conform to the government's ideas of MAC addresses and complete surveillance. We'll need our own custom 3-D printers as well; they will easily require mass-produced printers to ID themselves in the products.
Well out there ideas: Quantum entanglement as a communications method. Don't laugh too hard; think about it. A transmission system that doesn't actually transmit through the air, but instead transmits at a distance without any detectable means. It can be done; I'm not the genius to do it. Believe it that the military will do it if it can be done. We all can do it too.
Your first sentence made me spit water on my monitor laughing. Pray tell, WHO are these "intelligent" and "well-informed" people? the politicians have proven that they know squat about the internet while boasting their knowledge of it. The corporations seem intent on crippling a thing that has massively increased their profits.