-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > Well, it would certainly be useful in China at present, judging from the > level of effort they have put in previously to block stuff (a bit, but > not a massive amount).
I went back through some of my posts in this thread to find places where I addressed this specific point, but ended up copying a dozen chunks of text restating in different ways why what you suggest is a bad way to go. I've trimmed that down to this one: "In the near term, Freenet will operate on the small scale (from the government's perspective), so it will work fine, since it won't be attacked. This would be good, as it would help individuals who need help. However, if Freenet grows to match the claim of a "globally scalable darknet", or maybe even if it just garners enough press for people to think it does, it would then become worth attacking, and hence, *less secure* than if it didn't grow." What you're proposing is a dangerous game - get large enough to be useful, but /stay small enough not to perceived as a threat/. > Whether in future they get pissed off enough that they put in the > significant amount of effort required to detect, deter and block > freenet/dark, we will see. This brings up another thing I said earlier: "Any statements regarding the anonymity of Freenet when it isn't under attack are meaningless, if not misleading" If they don't put in the effort required to detect, deter, and block Freenet/dark, there's no need to go through all the trouble of building such a complicated anonymity focused system - there are much simpler alternatives, especially since Freenet/dark already depends upon existing trust relationships. If they do put in the effort required to detect, deter, and block Freenet/dark, then Freenet/dark is shut down, users prosecuted, or worse. As for the cost of some attacks that a state level adversary could mount, consider this - a few months back, my colo provider blackholed my machine based on their automated traffic analysis of their network. After explaining that no, such high UDP data rates with a diverse set of peers is perfectly normal, as I'm developing a comm system, they put my box back online. It is a large ISP, used by many high bandwidth servers, and a measly 60KBps wouldn't even be a blip on their radar. However, they knew my machine was acting 'strange', and after an admin determined that yes, it was sending lots of UDP packets to lots of peers, they shut it down. This was standard operating procedure for the ISP - continuous monitoring for abnormal behavior. Its just good business practice. Now, imagine all ISPs with that SOP, with a mandate that certain categories of abnormal behavior be included in the (software driven) pattern detection (perhaps through a government provided software or firmware update), and that their administrators verify and notify some agency when the mattern matches (instead of, as in my case, blackhole the box). Is it still necessary for me to go into a detailed cost analysis of some attacks that a state level adversary can mount to pierce Freenet/dark's obscurity, or do you understand what I'm saying? =jr -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDTFz0WYfZ3rPnHH0RAkxnAJ96nYvyZi646hNyIAScrUNXI7qjwgCcCzfY ct01zXbc4uA9hl6hijNmQac= =b0py -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
