Creating a Backboneless Internet? 370
Peter Trepan asks: "The Internet is the best thing to happen to the free exchange of ideas since... well... maybe ever. But it can also be used as a tool for media control and universal surveillance, perhaps turning that benefit into a liability. Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States. In the age of ubiquitous e-mail and filtering software, budding McCarthys are able and willing to do so. I Am Not A Network Professional, but it seems like all this potential for abuse depends upon bottlenecks at the level of ISPs and backbone providers. Is it possible to create an internet that relies instead on peer-to-peer connectivity? How would the hardware work? How would the information be passed? What would be the incentive for average people to buy into it if it meant they'd have to host someone else's packets on their hard drive? In short, what would have to be done to ensure that at least one internet remains completely free, anonymous, and democratized?"
Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Peer to Peer internet would be horrible. Not only would it be unreliable, but at time slow.
Sure some agencies can access our information because it's centralized, but if we don't want them to see something, it's not hard to encrypt it. Hell I'm even working on an encryption application.
Yes, but not really. (Score:3, Insightful)
That is the "backbone" and where the "bottleneck" is.
Tier 1s? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for, you know, the Tier 1 ISPs, on whose networks practically all our traffic passes at some point.
Control them, and you control the net.
The Solution Is Crypto (Score:4, Insightful)
The government can still do some traffic analysis (they sniff headers rather than read the contents of the messages) and they can learn a lot from that, but such is life.
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially what the submitter is interested in is a meshed network, which to my knowledge is the only network topology yet created which does not use hubs, centers, or buses to carry conglomerated traffic. Remember that things like bittorrent, bgp (less so), and other similar protocols are really creating "virtual" meshes, not real ones - all of your traffic (and that of every other person in your segment) is still travelling to your ISP, and that to their backbone. So anyone who sits at those hubs or backbones would be able to see all your torrent traffic, and who it is going to/from - it is only the separation of the ISPs and the RIAA/MPAA/FBI that keeps them from knowing your every move on the Internet! (Encryption and proxies help, but it aren't a foolproof solution, btw.)
Also, TCP is designed to be fault-tolerant, but also semi-optimizing, taking the shortest perceived route to its destination. So unless a backbone is down, most (if not all) traffic from you to a host between which the backbone sits will travel on that backbone, very predictably. TCP is not privacy-sensitive.
The short answer is that in a wired world, there is no feasible way to create a mesh. The strength of the mesh is algorithmically tied to the number of other nodes each node is connected to. So unless you're going to dig up the yard between you and, say, three of your neighbors, and they and two more of theirs, and so on, across the entire country, you will end up with a topology which looks more like what you've already got, with a smaller number of larger rings and stars, each funneling through a central location.
In a wireless environment, the possibilities are much better. Some police precincts in the U.S. have been experimenting with mesh-networked radios, where each radio is a repeater as well as a transceiver. Thus a linear configuration of radios could extend the range from perhaps a 30-mile radius to a 60-mile-per-radio diameter for as long as the chain is unbroken. This isn't the optimum configuration, however, since it is presumed that one would want redundancy, so you would be forced to configure the mesh in such a way that you could talk to at least three other nodes at any given time. This requires a very high density of nodes, so it would work much better in a more densely-populated area than one nodes are scarce.
I hope that answers the question.
Re:How did this make it to the front page? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone is a networking guru (I know I'm not). I'm sure many people without much networking background have wondered the same thing as the article poster at some point or another, quite likely while reading all the "government/telcos/corporations/Godzilla are going to eat our Internet" stories here on Slashdot. The comments in this story are the perfect place to give these people a better understanding of how the internet works.
This isn't a question that's easy to Google if you don't already know what to look for (in which case you don't need to), and the poster shouldn't have to take a networking course just to get an answer. I would say it's a perfect question for Ask Slashdot - if you don't like the user's ignorance, you could take the time to educate him and the many other Slashdot readers like him with a more informative post.
Absolutely. Encryption, or self-deception. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, I sure the hell wouldn't put it past the gov't to outlaw encryption. It's not like they haven't done it before.
been there, done that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Useless and pointless... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) The algorithm gets shot down in about fifteen minutes by several people who really know their stuff,
2) Someone posts, "Oh, this is exactly the same thing as that zippity-zing-zang algorithm that Chuck Dumbo 'invented' some years back. It's completely bogus."
3) Someone posts a follow-up question, and based on the reply given by the OP you suddenly realize that he has no clue whatsoever about crypto design.
It really is not that hard to research some basic, layer-1 information about networking and deduce some fundamental operating principles (as someone already pointed out, one of which is physical cabling). Cisco has plenty of introductory material that even my wife the musician can understand. Do your homework first, and then come back.
why I won't lose sleep over this... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm even less worried about any persistent efforts by the United States government to snoop on me. Oh, they'll try. But it is doubtful they will ever be very effective at it. I'll admit it is technically possible to monitor all traffic on tcp port 25 that is going through any of the (relatively few) access points that route traffic internationally. With furious effort, you could even store a lot of it -- and think about how much of it would be p0rn spam. Of course, in the modern era, a lot of SMTP traffic is encrypted with SSL, some of it is over VPNs, and some of it might be accessed via other protocols. Some of that email might be accessed through webmail and it won't be immediately obvious how to fish the emails out. Yeah, Yahoo! and MSN might roll over and hand the emails over to a big bad government. But you'd have to be looking in a lot of places all of the time to build an effective police state on top of the Internet we have today. Given infinite resources and incredible competence it might be possible, just barely.
Oh, but did I mention instant messaging (with how many incompatible protocols)? Did I mention online fora?
Resources and competence seem to be rare goods in the U.S. Government these days. Why should halfhearted snooping be somehow special?
Remember, this is the same government that didn't connect the dots on 9-11.
Remember, this is the same government that connected dots that weren't there in Iraq.
Remember, this is the same government that botches monster iT projects (the FAA and the FBI) all the time.
Remember, this is the same government that still hasn't translated all of the documents captured in Afghanistan.
Remember, this is the same government that did a heck of a job on New Orleans.
Remember, this is the same government that hasn't captured Osama, and took years to capture someone hiding in North Carolina.
Re:Tier 1s? (Score:2, Insightful)
When congress starts legislating your network architecture is meaningless. If your worried about invasion of privacy you should address it with your vote as well as your intelligence. If you can explain the issue perhaps you will get more votes. Its tough to fight the force of the media, but its not impossible.
Re:Maybe Possible and Makes Sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All mail was read in WWII (Score:3, Insightful)
The capacity to read everything did not exist.
This was during all out war not some informal war with no timetable.
This data was not kept indefinitely.
Lastly the computing power did not exist for a politician to do an SQL query on your life history to determine if you are "desirable".
Dangerous and misleading analogy.
What People Seem to be Forgetting... (Score:2, Insightful)
(OT) Re:ignorance is so painful (Score:3, Insightful)
But that doesn't justify taking the lives and families of Japanese Citizens of the US and throwing them in concentration camps. That does not justify locking my grandparents up like criminals for years, kept away from their kids.
McCarthy didn't just go after traitors. He went after communists, people with alternative sexualities, liberals, those that believed in social support, those that felt capitalism needed work, and anyone that anyone was willing to name to get themselves out of trouble. Just like being ethnically japanese made people potential traitors in WW2, being of the opinion that pure capitalism is broken was enough to get you thrown in jail. Even agreeing with Adam Smith that the pure capitalist system eventually breaks down was enough to get people blacklisted, thrown out of work and schools, careers and futures taken away from them. And remember, Social Security was considered a liberal, communist thought. There is a lot of ugly, pointless history [schoolnet.co.uk] there.
And its happening again. Now we're throwing people in Guantanamo if we suspect them of being a terrorist. And a terrorist is anyone who disagrees with the war on terrorism. Being a darkie, of course, doesn't hurt, just like racism played into our concentration camps in WW2 and our ideological purge by McCarthy.
You're a history teacher. You should know better. If you can't see the connection, history is most assuredly doomed to repeat itself. And who knows who it will be next time: lots of countries have purged their intellectuals.
Re:The Solution Is Crypto (Score:3, Insightful)
If people want to read all the little love letters I send my wife all day... or the email to my Dad about the cool car I saw on the way in to school this morning.... then go right ahead...
What I'm wondering is why people feel the need to hide their e-mail activities. The only situations I can think of are when you need to send sensitive information quickly (the secretary for my advisor asked for my Full Name, SSN, Address and Telephone number through email recently.... I promptly walked up to her office and told her what they were... but people not paying attention _might_ just hit reply)... but people should be aware of those situations and just avoid doing it (or use encryption on those case by case basis).
Think about it this way... when you send something using the US Postal service you can't guarantee that the message won't be read by dozens of people along the way. How many people do you know of that use secret code languages to communicate with regular mail? That's what I thought.
In summary, not everyone is worried that others are looking....
Friedmud
Wait! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, if you're a common carrier you can't make any decisions about blocking (allegedly) illegal content at all, because it would be too easily abused.
Re:The Solution Is Crypto (Score:4, Insightful)
Oddly enough, I'd say that a significant part of it is the chicken-and-egg problem: it's only really useful for cryptography if a lot of people have PGP (note that signing your emails using PGP shows that they're really from you, but does not actually encrypt them; for that, you need to encrypt using the public key of the recipient, and this would require most recipients to have public keys in the first place). For Joe User who hasn't heard of an IP address let alone public key encryption, you'd need some way to automatically set up PGP for him, since he certainly can't do it. and there's no economic motivation for companies to create automatic PGP stuff, since it's not really useful until more people adopt it (as I said earlier), though this is precisely why more people don't adopt it.
On a related note, if you have a PGP key and then buy a new computer, you have to either know what you're doing in order to get your private key onto the new computer, which Joe User also can't do (And if there is a way to automate this process, anyone could write a virus that would use the automated version to steal your private key), or remove your original key and create a new one, which would confuse Joe's friends when their PGP systems suddenly don't trust Joe's email any more.
Sadly, the only way that PGP will become popular is to educate the general populace so that they know as much about computers as we, the computer nerds, do. and although I don't want to admit it, this is never going to happen.
Re:ignorance is so painful (Score:2, Insightful)
Non-corporate Tier1, that's how. (Score:2, Insightful)
By creating a non-profit organization whose sole purpose is to enhance and extend the internet backbone, you've solved the problem of petty ownership and government blustering. Funding would be an adventure, but it's been done by lesser qualified organizations. And no more Level3-Cogent spats!