Not something I would call thorough, but here are some observations and thoughts I put together this morning.
Before I paste this I think it's worth noting that the PDF describing the Proposal says "The Government desires that all technical data or computer software that is developed or delivered under this program should be furnished to the Government with *at least Government Purpose Rights*. If there is client side software and/or technical data, the Government *desires that software and/or technical data be freely redistributable.* " We could keep the changes we make! I think this is good news :) Ok, here it goes. Again, not what I would call thorough - just a starter: DARPA-BAA-10-69 Safer Warfighter Communications ================================================ *DEADLINE FOR PROPOSAL* 7/6/10 >From http://www.darpa.mil/tcto/solicitations/BAA-10-69.html: General requirements: "safe, resilient communications over the Internet, particularly in situations in which a third-party is attempting to discover the identity or location of the end users, or block the communication" and "required to support applications such as instant messaging, electronic mail, social networking, streaming video, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), video conferencing, and other media that promote effective communication." Freenet particularly does not fit the bill for supporting existing social networking sites, instant messaging, streaming video or VoIP. Freenet to my knowledge does not have software that allows access to the non-anonymous internet. What do people think about developing software to make this possible? Would it be possible to speed freenet up quite a bit by perhaps not making encryption mandatory in all cases or selecting a different routing algorithm? My technical knowledge of freenet is maybe poor by comparison to the rest of Freenet-devl, I'm just throwing ideas out. From https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=317c763016b2af11ac6370670e650e84&tab=core&_cview=0 : A sightly better example of what they are looking for is given: "any and all technologies that allow anonymous Internet communications to bypass techniques that suppress, localize, and/or corrupt information such as: Internet Protocol (IP)-address filtering... Domain Naming Service (DNS) hijacking... filtering that captures and analyzes the content of the user's network traffic through deep packet inspection.." IP Address Filtering - This is with respect to the web/internet as it exists and Freenet has no current capabilities even to access the web/internet let alone bypassing filtering by IP. /** Perhaps an app could be developed to allow individuals to access a computer on the Tor network as a relatively quick and dirty hack? **/ DNS Hijacking - Freenet obviously is very suited to avoid this. The question again becomes access to the non-Freenet Internet. /** It's also worth noting that in the case of connecting to a Tor node, the hijacking vulnerability moves to wherever the gateway is operating.**/ Deep packet inspection - Freenet fits the bill on this one pretty well, right? /** Vulnerability again moved to Tor node **/ After reviewing the general requirements it seems to me that Freenet is missing: 1. Anonymous Access to the Web/Other internet services 2. The speed required to stream data Probably not obvious problems to solve with our current code base. I'm not sure if DARPA is looking for a "strength in numbers" approach like Tor or if something of that nature would be acceptable to them. This might be slightly discouraging, but remember that all that needs to be submitted is a good solution and we could get funding to develop as we needed! :) It also seems to me that the general features requested from DARPA here would be desirable for the public as well and may bring more attention to Freenet if implemented well. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20100530/31646b6f/attachment.html>
