this only works if Mallory and Eve are not the government run ISP.
in the case of China, the people you want to hide from, "Mallory and Eve" have access to all traffic coming from you, and see your IP connecting to the 'secret' ip.
No what they'd see is you connecting to a website which hosts large irrelevant picture files. What they'd see is you connecting via port 80, or another high traffic port. What they'd see is you are connecting to a series of websites over and over. The point is that it's easy to mask or hide from traffic analysis. You can make your connections look like something else.
Mallory and Eve will think you are connecting to the internet when its actually the darknet.They might see you are connecting to an IP address in America but from their end it will look like ordinary websites.
at least it gets people thinking in the right direction
And that direction is the opposite of anywhere that would seek to limit the free exchange of information, whether by heavy-handed government fiat or by para-legal "intellectual property" laws.
I hope to see a new arms race, between China, who wants to subvert the West's system of intellectual property and the US, that seeks to subvert China's limitation on open communications. It's the only kind of arms race where the rest of us win.
I'm afraid that the opposite is going to happen though: China will become more compliant to the US' corporate information lockdown and the US will become more tolerant of China's heavy hand. Both governments ultimately want the same thing: a weak and malleable work'n'consume force that will keep the corporations rich and the ownership elite richer, while not expecting too much and not threatening the hegemony of the monied. Good shoppers who will calmly strive for a lifestyle that is just out of reach so they can't make any lifestyle choices that would threaten the system.
At least the people in the Matrix had a nice dream. Our future is more along the lines of Metropolis only with large-screen TVs bought on credit.
Yeah but what they want and what they'll get are two different things. I'm sure the money elites didn't want the economy to melt down but it has. Now all their plans are ruined. It's simply impossible to continue with business as usual, something will change or we will sink into a global depression and we wont get out of that until something changes.
But it requires keeping the access point a secret. Very little stays secret forever. From moles to coercion to just plain stupid mistakes, they have ways of getting out.
Infinite amount of potential access points. When one secret is discovered 10 more are created. It's impossible for the government to catch them all and it's not meant to stay secret forever, just long enough to connect Alice and Bob to darknet.
Trust can be expressed by digital currency. An individual with a lot of trust has a lot of digital currency to give to individuals he or she trusts. If one or some of those individuals are found out to work for the government or suspected, then trust is lost.
Digital currency could be used to buy access to locked darknets within the darknet. This would create infinite layers to the darknet so that the most trusted are also at the deepest layers. This means Alice trusts Bob so Alice bets points on Bob. If Bob is Mallory or Gordon, Alive loses 500 trust points and cannot get into the layers of the darknet which require X amount of trust points. The darknet could be self segregating and color coded by level of trust. The colors will go from white all the way to black. Also the points can be expressed as titles. This would create a darknet nobility which would be extremely difficult to crack as it would take months or years to gain nobility and nobility could be lost in one bad bet.
Read the mission statement of the CIA, and the CyberCommand. To win the hearts and minds of these individuals and help them to overthrow their oppressive regimes we have to promote anti censorship. It just so happens that in other situations we promote dictators and oppressive regimes. So it's all about winning the cyberwar against China and North Korea.
I2P is nice but isn't it written in Java? I suppose it's part of the ideal system but thats not the issue. The issue is getting into the darknet without being detected. If you download I2P then it's too late, you are detected.
Revolution worked far better before we even had the technology we do. In fact, technology made people lazy and unwilling to fight censorship.
Just because you have the technology it doesnt mean you are trained to use it. Most of the time the technology isn't the problem, it's the fact that Alice can't trust Bob.
I agree with you but at least it gets people thinking in the right direction. In my opinion and in anyones opinion the main roadblock is inability to find the access points. So its not difficult for a group of friends to agree to go to a specific site at a specific time and just one of them posts the access point and now they all have it. In fact it could be put up in an IRC chat or anywhere really.
So no this doesn't really make a big difference practically speaking but it does help China to beef up their censorship now that China knows whats coming next.
If the access points to the darknet are kept secret, Alice and Bob remain safe from Mallory, Eve, even Gordon if trust is absolute between Alice and Bob it is an unbreakable chain. It's the basis behind PGP's web of trust protocol.
Darknets are the best way to beat censorship. This does not mean providing tools to hide the data on known sites. That's not going to be good enough. A darknet means having a secret internet within the internet itself accessed by a covert channel. The channel could be hidden by steganography but the channel is just an access point. This could be the seed nodes to freenet. This could be the seednodes to a series of proxies to bounce the information from point A to point B.
Alice and Bob both want to communicate but they don't want to be discovered by Mallory or by Eve. So they both have a shared secret and that secret is the access point to the darknet. As long as this access point remains secret Mallory and Eve do not know it exists. The access point could be contained via steganography within an image. Inside the image would be IP addresses to the secret proxies or connection points to the darknet which could be Freenet. The traffic would look like browing lolcats or 4chan, just looking at pictures but it wouldn't display pictures on Alice or Bob's sites, it would display something else.
Technically it's not all that difficult in theory. In practice is a different story. First of all Alice has to be able to trust Bob enough to give the access point. The access point is the secret and once smoeone enters the darknet they can stay in it via a web of trust. It's not all that different from PGP where Alice vouches for Bob, so Bob is invited into the darknet. Now Bob can see whats going on and if Bob posts then Bob wins the opportunity to invite someone into the darknet. You could have websites like https://www.slashdot.dark/ instead of.com which can ONLY be accessed by individuals who not only have the right seed nodes but authentication from the web of trust.
The friend to friend model is proven to be the most secure way to do it. And really if you are in China going up against the government it's the only way to do it.
Because now China, North Korea and Australia know to look for it. They'd have been better off releasing this at a hacker convention than to do it through university channels. Don't you think they (the Chinese) keep track of it?
To win this sort of arms race, you need secret weaponry. You cannot announce it to the global media before it's finished or too soon because whatever vulnerability it exploits will be fixed soon later and then what would the purpose be?
On the other hand it's the right direction at least. Censorship can only be defeated by technology. But as this technology to beat censorship is created it will only make the censorship that much more oppressive because it will train the immune system of the censorship regime. Organized censorship almost always has more money and resources than organized resistance.
I never cheated, thats why I had a normal (2.x) GPA. I think this anti cheating technology is going to be very expensive and unless a critical percentage of students are cheating its probably not worth the investment. I'm sure some students who have a perfect 4.0GPA are or were cheating, but with hard work it is very possible to get a 3.0 or 3.5 GPA without any cheating.
Let them catch the cheaters, then watch the avg GPA go down, then watch the grades at ivy league schools and expensive private universities inflate as powerful parents threaten to take their kids out of schools that don't. Ultimately this wont do anything to change the fact that a lot of kids get grades they haven't earned regardless of if they cheated or if they just literally buy good grades.
Certainly they won't give it to whatever directorate's in charge of conducting espionage. Spies are the most honorable government officials there are, and nobody in Moscow's looking to get ahead by bending any rules.
It will help with their IT troubles now that they will be given the complete sourcecode to Windows 7. This just goes to show me that Microsoft is evil. Stick to Open Source software. If It isn't open for everyone then something is wrong with that.
I doubt this type of thing will be all that useful. For short distances, getting on/off isn't going to be much of a time saver. For longer distances, there are a lot more practical and safer ways to move people, such as a small automated subway type of car. With that type of system, your maintenance is less, you don't have to have the entire system functional all the time (what happens if a 5 meter chunk of your sidewalk fails), you don't have people falling down all the time, you don't need to figure out how to accelerate people from 0 to 30mph and back safely from any point, you can even have the cars travel above the walkways and be out of pedestrians way, etc.. It would also be more like a fun amusement park ride.
I don't see much advantage to a moving sidewalk, except that you might be able to enter from more points along the line, if you dare.
I doubt this type of thing will be all that useful. For short distances, getting on/off isn't going to be much of a time saver. For longer distances, there are a lot more practical and safer ways to move people, such as a small automated subway type of car. With that type of system, your maintenance is less, you don't have to have the entire system functional all the time (what happens if a 5 meter chunk of your sidewalk fails), you don't have people falling down all the time, you don't need to figure out how to accelerate people from 0 to 30mph and back safely from any point, you can even have the cars travel above the walkways and be out of pedestrians way, etc.. It would also be more like a fun amusement park ride.
I don't see much advantage to a moving sidewalk, except that you might be able to enter from more points along the line, if you dare.
Why would I want or need a car if I'm pulling a cart or bag of groceries up a hill? Explain.
"Ozcan plans on starting case studies in Africa to see how the microscope can help revolutionize global medicine"
Okay, if the goal is really to revolutionize global medicine, where's the parts list, schematic, and software download repository?
Imagine the power of open software, along with the hardware? The software could handle the diagnosis so that it's no longer amateur diagnosis. The software could track blood sugar levels, check all sorts of stuff to completely prevent diseases which are entirely preventable.
Only thing I would be worried about is (if this hits a free market and consumers can buy the products for this) that people interested in diagnosing their own conditions would attempt self diagnosis. This may drastically help the NGOs in third world countries who are limited by funds to help treat those without access to even basic healthcare. Who knows, it may even bring down the cost of medical care here in the US. Hey, one can dream right?
As if that would be a bad thing? If someone knows something is wrong with them they can take necessary steps to prevent it from getting worse. Prevention saves money. I just got a blood test today in fact, if I could test my own blood and get the results immediately that would revolutionize everything.
If you want to test yourself for STDs, test your liver, or check yourself for diabetes, you can do that in your living room. That's definitely better than paying money for that.
And build it for bikes, not just walking. Put a location to park your bike and put cameras monitoring it for thieves, and I can see it being very useful.
For large cities an idea like this would be very neat. I live near Chicago, am not fat, and would love to be able to travel around the city on 30mph moving walkways. Ideally they would be structured like a highway with multiple lanes, one going 10mph, next one over is 20mph, fastest is 30mph.
Something like this would have maintenance costs sure, but it would also remove a huge load off public transit, and reduce taxi traffic majorly. You'd really only need a shuttle for people with large/heavy items, or elderly.
Think about how pleasant it would be if you could stroll down the street at 30mph directly toward your destination, rather than having decide which subway or bus will get you to your destination in a roundabout way (possibly even needing to change bus/trains mid-trip).
Of course this idea will never happen because of the cost and effort - but it is a lovely utopian idea.
There are places to build it where it makes sense. But why not build bike lanes into these moving sidewalks? The bike on a 30mph sidewalk approaches motorcycle type speed. At this speed I can see it being very useful. I'd want to be able to get on my bike and get around uphill or on slopes.
When walking up a hill sometimes I wish I did have a moving sidewalk. But the majority of the time it's not a big deal to walk. If someone is too fat to walk perhaps they should eat less and walk more.
Slashdot Mirror
this only works if Mallory and Eve are not the government run ISP.
in the case of China, the people you want to hide from, "Mallory and Eve" have access to all traffic coming from you, and see your IP connecting to the 'secret' ip.
No what they'd see is you connecting to a website which hosts large irrelevant picture files. What they'd see is you connecting via port 80, or another high traffic port. What they'd see is you are connecting to a series of websites over and over. The point is that it's easy to mask or hide from traffic analysis. You can make your connections look like something else.
Mallory and Eve will think you are connecting to the internet when its actually the darknet.They might see you are connecting to an IP address in America but from their end it will look like ordinary websites.
And that direction is the opposite of anywhere that would seek to limit the free exchange of information, whether by heavy-handed government fiat or by para-legal "intellectual property" laws.
I hope to see a new arms race, between China, who wants to subvert the West's system of intellectual property and the US, that seeks to subvert China's limitation on open communications. It's the only kind of arms race where the rest of us win.
I'm afraid that the opposite is going to happen though: China will become more compliant to the US' corporate information lockdown and the US will become more tolerant of China's heavy hand. Both governments ultimately want the same thing: a weak and malleable work'n'consume force that will keep the corporations rich and the ownership elite richer, while not expecting too much and not threatening the hegemony of the monied. Good shoppers who will calmly strive for a lifestyle that is just out of reach so they can't make any lifestyle choices that would threaten the system.
At least the people in the Matrix had a nice dream. Our future is more along the lines of Metropolis only with large-screen TVs bought on credit.
Yeah but what they want and what they'll get are two different things. I'm sure the money elites didn't want the economy to melt down but it has. Now all their plans are ruined. It's simply impossible to continue with business as usual, something will change or we will sink into a global depression and we wont get out of that until something changes.
Freenet is written in Java as well, but you didn't have any problems with that when you were recommending Freenet in your GP post.
I don't like the fact that Freenet is written in Java either.
But it requires keeping the access point a secret. Very little stays secret forever. From moles to coercion to just plain stupid mistakes, they have ways of getting out.
Infinite amount of potential access points. When one secret is discovered 10 more are created. It's impossible for the government to catch them all and it's not meant to stay secret forever, just long enough to connect Alice and Bob to darknet.
Trust can be expressed by digital currency. An individual with a lot of trust has a lot of digital currency to give to individuals he or she trusts. If one or some of those individuals are found out to work for the government or suspected, then trust is lost.
Digital currency could be used to buy access to locked darknets within the darknet. This would create infinite layers to the darknet so that the most trusted are also at the deepest layers. This means Alice trusts Bob so Alice bets points on Bob. If Bob is Mallory or Gordon, Alive loses 500 trust points and cannot get into the layers of the darknet which require X amount of trust points. The darknet could be self segregating and color coded by level of trust. The colors will go from white all the way to black. Also the points can be expressed as titles. This would create a darknet nobility which would be extremely difficult to crack as it would take months or years to gain nobility and nobility could be lost in one bad bet.
Read the mission statement of the CIA, and the CyberCommand. To win the hearts and minds of these individuals and help them to overthrow their oppressive regimes we have to promote anti censorship. It just so happens that in other situations we promote dictators and oppressive regimes. So it's all about winning the cyberwar against China and North Korea.
I2P is nice but isn't it written in Java? I suppose it's part of the ideal system but thats not the issue. The issue is getting into the darknet without being detected. If you download I2P then it's too late, you are detected.
Encrypt the message first, then use steganography to insert it into cartoons of kim jung il making out with julia gillard.
And when the gov knows and knocks on your door asking you about it?
"Censorship can only be defeated by technology."
Revolution worked far better before we even had the technology we do. In fact, technology made people lazy and unwilling to fight censorship.
Just because you have the technology it doesnt mean you are trained to use it. Most of the time the technology isn't the problem, it's the fact that Alice can't trust Bob.
I agree with you but at least it gets people thinking in the right direction. In my opinion and in anyones opinion the main roadblock is inability to find the access points. So its not difficult for a group of friends to agree to go to a specific site at a specific time and just one of them posts the access point and now they all have it. In fact it could be put up in an IRC chat or anywhere really.
So no this doesn't really make a big difference practically speaking but it does help China to beef up their censorship now that China knows whats coming next.
If the access points to the darknet are kept secret, Alice and Bob remain safe from Mallory, Eve, even Gordon if trust is absolute between Alice and Bob it is an unbreakable chain. It's the basis behind PGP's web of trust protocol.
Darknets are the best way to beat censorship. This does not mean providing tools to hide the data on known sites. That's not going to be good enough. A darknet means having a secret internet within the internet itself accessed by a covert channel. The channel could be hidden by steganography but the channel is just an access point. This could be the seed nodes to freenet. This could be the seednodes to a series of proxies to bounce the information from point A to point B.
Alice and Bob both want to communicate but they don't want to be discovered by Mallory or by Eve. So they both have a shared secret and that secret is the access point to the darknet. As long as this access point remains secret Mallory and Eve do not know it exists. The access point could be contained via steganography within an image. Inside the image would be IP addresses to the secret proxies or connection points to the darknet which could be Freenet. The traffic would look like browing lolcats or 4chan, just looking at pictures but it wouldn't display pictures on Alice or Bob's sites, it would display something else.
Technically it's not all that difficult in theory. In practice is a different story. First of all Alice has to be able to trust Bob enough to give the access point. The access point is the secret and once smoeone enters the darknet they can stay in it via a web of trust. It's not all that different from PGP where Alice vouches for Bob, so Bob is invited into the darknet. Now Bob can see whats going on and if Bob posts then Bob wins the opportunity to invite someone into the darknet. You could have websites like https://www.slashdot.dark/ instead of .com which can ONLY be accessed by individuals who not only have the right seed nodes but authentication from the web of trust.
The friend to friend model is proven to be the most secure way to do it. And really if you are in China going up against the government it's the only way to do it.
If it involves steganography it's useless now.
Because now China, North Korea and Australia know to look for it.
They'd have been better off releasing this at a hacker convention than to do it through university channels. Don't you think they (the Chinese) keep track of it?
To win this sort of arms race, you need secret weaponry. You cannot announce it to the global media before it's finished or too soon because whatever vulnerability it exploits will be fixed soon later and then what would the purpose be?
On the other hand it's the right direction at least. Censorship can only be defeated by technology. But as this technology to beat censorship is created it will only make the censorship that much more oppressive because it will train the immune system of the censorship regime. Organized censorship almost always has more money and resources than organized resistance.
I never cheated, thats why I had a normal (2.x) GPA. I think this anti cheating technology is going to be very expensive and unless a critical percentage of students are cheating its probably not worth the investment. I'm sure some students who have a perfect 4.0GPA are or were cheating, but with hard work it is very possible to get a 3.0 or 3.5 GPA without any cheating.
Let them catch the cheaters, then watch the avg GPA go down, then watch the grades at ivy league schools and expensive private universities inflate as powerful parents threaten to take their kids out of schools that don't. Ultimately this wont do anything to change the fact that a lot of kids get grades they haven't earned regardless of if they cheated or if they just literally buy good grades.
Certainly they won't give it to whatever directorate's in charge of conducting espionage. Spies are the most honorable government officials there are, and nobody in Moscow's looking to get ahead by bending any rules.
I smell sarcasm.
It will help with their IT troubles now that they will be given the complete sourcecode to Windows 7. This just goes to show me that Microsoft is evil. Stick to Open Source software. If It isn't open for everyone then something is wrong with that.
Firefox needs to have better built in support for Ironkey, smartcards and security tokens. So we can once and for all switch away from passwords.
If Firefox actually supports security tokens, it's not very intuitive.
If you are carrying heavy objects would you want to walk up a hill with it? What about the elderly?
I doubt this type of thing will be all that useful. For short distances, getting on/off isn't going to be much of a time saver. For longer distances, there are a lot more practical and safer ways to move people, such as a small automated subway type of car. With that type of system, your maintenance is less, you don't have to have the entire system functional all the time (what happens if a 5 meter chunk of your sidewalk fails), you don't have people falling down all the time, you don't need to figure out how to accelerate people from 0 to 30mph and back safely from any point, you can even have the cars travel above the walkways and be out of pedestrians way, etc.. It would also be more like a fun amusement park ride.
I don't see much advantage to a moving sidewalk, except that you might be able to enter from more points along the line, if you dare.
I doubt this type of thing will be all that useful. For short distances, getting on/off isn't going to be much of a time saver. For longer distances, there are a lot more practical and safer ways to move people, such as a small automated subway type of car. With that type of system, your maintenance is less, you don't have to have the entire system functional all the time (what happens if a 5 meter chunk of your sidewalk fails), you don't have people falling down all the time, you don't need to figure out how to accelerate people from 0 to 30mph and back safely from any point, you can even have the cars travel above the walkways and be out of pedestrians way, etc.. It would also be more like a fun amusement park ride.
I don't see much advantage to a moving sidewalk, except that you might be able to enter from more points along the line, if you dare.
Why would I want or need a car if I'm pulling a cart or bag of groceries up a hill? Explain.
From the summary"
"Ozcan plans on starting case studies in Africa to see how the microscope can help revolutionize global medicine"
Okay, if the goal is really to revolutionize global medicine, where's the parts list, schematic, and software download repository?
Imagine the power of open software, along with the hardware? The software could handle the diagnosis so that it's no longer amateur diagnosis. The software could track blood sugar levels, check all sorts of stuff to completely prevent diseases which are entirely preventable.
Only thing I would be worried about is (if this hits a free market and consumers can buy the products for this) that people interested in diagnosing their own conditions would attempt self diagnosis. This may drastically help the NGOs in third world countries who are limited by funds to help treat those without access to even basic healthcare. Who knows, it may even bring down the cost of medical care here in the US. Hey, one can dream right?
As if that would be a bad thing? If someone knows something is wrong with them they can take necessary steps to prevent it from getting worse. Prevention saves money. I just got a blood test today in fact, if I could test my own blood and get the results immediately that would revolutionize everything.
If you want to test yourself for STDs, test your liver, or check yourself for diabetes, you can do that in your living room. That's definitely better than paying money for that.
It shouldn't be a matter of walking vs driving. We can build movable bike lanes.
And build it for bikes, not just walking. Put a location to park your bike and put cameras monitoring it for thieves, and I can see it being very useful.
For large cities an idea like this would be very neat. I live near Chicago, am not fat, and would love to be able to travel around the city on 30mph moving walkways. Ideally they would be structured like a highway with multiple lanes, one going 10mph, next one over is 20mph, fastest is 30mph.
Something like this would have maintenance costs sure, but it would also remove a huge load off public transit, and reduce taxi traffic majorly. You'd really only need a shuttle for people with large/heavy items, or elderly.
Think about how pleasant it would be if you could stroll down the street at 30mph directly toward your destination, rather than having decide which subway or bus will get you to your destination in a roundabout way (possibly even needing to change bus/trains mid-trip).
Of course this idea will never happen because of the cost and effort - but it is a lovely utopian idea.
There are places to build it where it makes sense. But why not build bike lanes into these moving sidewalks? The bike on a 30mph sidewalk approaches motorcycle type speed. At this speed I can see it being very useful. I'd want to be able to get on my bike and get around uphill or on slopes.
When walking up a hill sometimes I wish I did have a moving sidewalk. But the majority of the time it's not a big deal to walk. If someone is too fat to walk perhaps they should eat less and walk more.