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Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing Is Booming
PatPending writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend. In other words, it's a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders. RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there's been a surge in downloads. 'The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,' he said."
Clamp down on torrents, clamp down on file sharing sites, what do you expect? People to meekly give up sharing files?
It only takes one person to write a darknet program like this and the game is back on.
It sounds a lot like a program I'd considered writing before and if done right it's basically impossible to shut down, or compromise effectively, without severely screwing up the internet. Which is probably the next step.
It's the first time I've ever seen any attempt at copyright protection that didn't resulted in worse outcome for their customers! For example...
. Funny sectors on floppy disks. Legitimate users can't make backup copies, pirates (with the copy protection removed) can make all the copies they want.
. "Find the nth word in the nth paragraph on the nth page of the manual". Legitimate users have to dig up the manual every time they want to play a game, while pirates (with the copy protection removed) can play any time they want without such annoyances
. Parallel port dongles. Legitimate users have to muck around with parallel port dongles that interfere with their printer. Pirates don't.
. Funny sectors on CDROM's. As per floppy disks, but it turns out that some CDROM drives couldn't play the games at all (RA2? or was it C&C2?). Pirates have no such problems
. Phone home via internet every time you want to play?... you see where this is going
It seems like every time the software industry introduces a new copy protection scheme, it really only annoys their paying customers. It doesn't hinder the pirates one little bit.
But it is still way faster than going to a real store, buying it and playing it. Especially if you are on a budget.
But on the other hand now it seems that the software industry has put enough pressure on the illegal file sharers that doing it that way is harder, or at least slower than it was. If the software industry allowed you to download the game direct from them for a reasonable price, they might be in with a chance. We all know they'll still continue to screw it up though.
Private darknets are a step backwards, IMO. At the one end you could have a large number of small networks between people who trust each other very well, but are limited in the size of the shared pool of material. At the other end you have less trusted large networks with a more material, but still nowhere near as large the entire internet, thus you would often not be able to find what you want. And the larger a network is, the less you are likely to trust everyone on it and the more vulnerable it is to infiltration. Even a small network could be compromised by someone who decided to betray all of their 'friends' (not necessarily out of malice).
'Breaking into the scene' of private darknets is diffcult for anyone who doesn't have pre-existing, probably real-world contacts (much like having ready access to good drugs, it might be easy for kids in a college environment, not so much for your average person). And at the end of the day, if you are going to limit your file sharing activities with a few people you know, you might as well just use email.
For a true culture of free information exchange, we need to look to systems that anyone with a connection and the right software can access and preferably search. This is far more technically challenging, and due to the measures taken to preserve anonymity, usually less convenient than what we are currently used to. But this will improve in due course. Tor, Freenet, I2P and others like them are the future, not walled gardens.
Retroshare itself may not require any centralized resource at all, but... how do you find like-minded friends in the first place and establish a web of trust? You're going to need a centralized forum/chatroom, aren't you, where you can meet people and identify those with common interests and focus? Retroshare simply shifts the focus of the centralized resource from the actual sharing of data to the social aspect of creating and maintaining that web of trust.
And apparently all it would take, as hinted by someone else here, is one traitorous bastard in your web of trust to lay the whole thing out bare for the exploitation by others with selfish motives.
Problem is, there are a thousand and one different schemes like these, from freenet to gnunet to oneswarm to - whatever this thing was called. And you need to know a good deal about cryptography to figure out which ones are safe, and a good deal about social dynamics on the net to know which one is actually going to get used for anything you're interested in. And you need friends who use it (in most cases).
The fragmentation is killing these efforts. The "connect only to friends"-model is hard enough to get to work in practice, without umpteen different incompatible implementations trying it.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers."