I never said they did. I guess this just means that they already managed to "implement the measures to exclude" that part of the "vulnerable groups" so far. If they could now only find a way to exclude the rest (males, 18-80?) too, AND ban the "addiction-inducing elements" (i.e., the women), or "make them less interesting" (only allow in fat, blue-haired feminazi women?), the goal would be reached and the rules would finally be fitting modern society (in more than one way...).

They are practically FILLED with "addiction-sensitive elements" that need to be removed ('almost winning' effects, visually arousing effects, ability to keep starting interactions with beautiful women one after the other, for even more 'almost winning' effects, and suchlike). Measures to exclude vulnerable groups (males, ages 12-80) really NEED to be implemented, NOW!!!!!!!!11 (...or, we could just stop the over-regulation bullsh*t and let people be responsible for their own stupid behavior, perhaps?)

I heard that these same clever and inventive americans have already drawn up the plans for the next generation of this "system of the future" too! It allows you to use your mobile phone to make a video of yourself using a telegraph to compose a morse code message to the bank clerk. You then upload this video to YouTube from your mobile phone, where bank employees will stand by to decode and take your order. With their mobile phones of course, I mean, it is the 21st century after all, duh.

So then you say, a "society which due to purely internal factors" has the capacity to produce, say, one crazy person who manages to press the nuke button, or one crazy person who finds his own race superior and thus finds it appropriate to invade half a continent with military force, and plan to invade the rest of the world the same way too, or, as in this case, a bitter bitch coming up with an ideology that makes half the population think they are being treated "unfair" if they are not allowed to go against nature the way it evolved for millions of years, would have proven to be a "non-functional society" to begin with, therefore deserving this, and nothing could consequently possibly ever be done to stop it since it was inherently "non-functional"? Yeah, that sounds like female logic alright... Well then, if one of more people WOULD actually manage to put an end to the above mentioned person with the nuke button, the crazy man with military world domination plans, or the stupid bitter bitch who felt like ending the human race at that particular time of the month when she threw together that nice little ideology of hers (and the damage it has done so far), wouldn't that be a "change due to purely internal factors" in this society too, which would in turn prove that the society in question was functional after all, and rather just had a temporary lapse of sanity due to people with broken logic managing to fool enough people to believe that it was sound?

Yes, with OneSwarm you are always only directly connected to people that you personally know and trust, that is correct. And yes, a securely anonymized system will sadly _always_ be slower than an otherwise equal non-anonymized system, that is the sad truth. :-/ There are a bunch of mitigating factors in the case of OneSwarm though: 1. As soon as a file becomes popular on the network, there will be very few hops to it on average (in many cases only one single hop, just like with BitTorrent or whatever), while still without any possibility to prove that you're downloading it directly from your connected peer! And it actually also uses BitTorrent under the anonymization (F2F) layer, meaning that it will distribute and parallelize the load over all routing paths as optimal as possible too. 2. You can throttle the proxying speed so that it never takes up any more of your upload/download capacity than you want to provide. There is also prioritization of your own downloads compared to proxied data. 3. As people's internet connections get better globally, their speed in relation to the size of e.g. an HD movie won't be much of a problem. Me for one, for example, am sitting on a 100 Mb/s connection in my home, which is common in my country, and it can handle _many_ HD movies at once...

Actually, OneSwarm solves _both_ these problems in a _very_ elegant way, where the "darknet" just happens to be all the OneSwarm users in the whole world, while still only being directly connected to (and thus traceable by) people that you personally know and trust! I can really recommend taking a closer look at this project, and read the paper (http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/f2f_tr.pdf), since the other info on their website is rather shortcoming and even misleading at times.

Once this short and partial relapse to centralized commercial services will unevitably be sued to pieces (I mean, duh...), the next evolutionary step _will_ be anonymized P2P. The excellent OneSwarm protocol (implemented and working today!) has a very good change of becoming "the sh*t" when it comes to this I think, and I'm very surprised by the low buzz concerning it: http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/ And for more general use, something like the (not equally yet implemented) Phantom protocol will probably have a place in the market too: http://code.google.com/p/phantom/wiki/MainPage