So: Right now, Freenet 0.5 is blocked on session bytes. I estimate that to block both I2P and Freenet 0.5 (fixed to not have session bytes) via harvesting would cost around $10K.
In the short term, we have a system which cannot be blocked by session bytes (and therefore works when it is released), and cannot be harvested (therefore needs a political or near-political level of effort from the state to block). It can be identified by strictly local traffic analysis. Lets call it $1M. In the medium term, we sacrifice the "real time" aspect. This lets us do all sorts of somewhat-safe stego. You seem to be admitting below that this will be much more difficult to identify. It is possible, but you would have to do local analysis, and then confirm it by comparing patterns to the peers of a supposed node. Lets say this costs $10M. In the long term, we don't use the internet at all. We use private wifi links, physical exchange via disks, mobile devices with wifi, etc etc. Essentially you have to find the network one link at a time at this point. Some of it is a matter of infiltrating the social network. Some of it is technological (tracing wifi links). Some of it is legislative, potentially (restricting wifi technology, imposing serious penalties for underground networking, possibly mandating TCPA or keyloggers). Lets call this $10B. Now, we can dispute all the above figures, but the fact remains, that Freenet 0.7/Dark will be far superior to any other scalable communications system usable in moderately hostile regimes. And it does have an upgrade path. What actually happens may be completely different to what I outline above, but it gives me reason to think that it's a useful step along the way. The Chinese know how to build FM radio transmitters; the big problem with these is how to get the data _to_ the transmitter safely, and between stations (I have talked to Western radio pirates...). There are many technologies that could be useful, and I don't mean to discourage anyone working on them. On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 04:48:15PM -0400, jrandom at i2p.net wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > > And in the meantime, they have a system which costs $10M to block (any > > time you have to involve politicians you get into big money, for a > > start), instead of $10K. This is bad how...? > > As I've said, what, 4, 5 times so far in this thread, Freenet/dark will > be fine and good in the small scale. But once it reaches the large > scale, it will not be, as you seem to now agree (beyond research > purposes). > > What does this mean - that you shouldn't build it? No, but it does mean > it shouldn't be hyped as a "globally scalable darknet", since once it > grows, it won't be usable for those its intended for. > > In your other mail, you say: > > If we sacrifice real-time delivery, then we can make freenet traffic > > look vaguely plausible, but it will still be between the same set of > > peers. So it should be reasonably easy to build a back-end to find it, > > over a longish period, say 6 months, based on traffic data kept... > > I'm not as convinced as you that high latency comm would fail - the > amount of traffic that needs to be hidden is much, much less than the > total amount of traffic of the "carrier channel" - if you go to > thousands of websites a month, two of which have stego for you, analysis > is not trivial. > > The trouble comes when dealing with low latency and high traffic. > > In any case, we do disagree about the necessity of scale, but that we > can safely agree to disagree. Most people involved in various political > or activist groups fall for the dream of The People United. I do not. > But reasonable people, even with many common aims, disagree. C'est la > vie. > > =jr > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQFDTXTSWYfZ3rPnHH0RAnyXAJ0eYYo1EjQds/FEyXF/OLoN3eMF+ACeOP0f > cX0UPtBagqzv5nQnNxzo72E= > =s2r0 > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > Tech at freenetproject.org > http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech -- Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/tech/attachments/20051012/a9620df7/attachment.pgp>
