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ZeroNet – Uncensorable websites using Bitcoin crypto and BitTorrent network

tfeldmann 10y ago
No comment about ZeroNet itself, but am I alone in the opinion that this website takes grid layout too far? It looks outright cluttered and overloaded.
- timlyo 10y ago
  Kind of reminds me of the old table layouts, although it doesn't bother me personally.
- CraftThatBlock 10y ago
  Looks great on mobile however
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Yeah, the advantage. Tables on steroids.
    - nojvek 10y ago
      I love the design. Looks great on mobile. Not sure about desktop. Loads really fast too.
- iamatworknow 10y ago
  I think it's the seemingly random colors more so than the grid itself that makes it a bit unpleasant to look at.
DeepYogurt 10y ago
Presumably you only download the site you want when you visit it. If that's the case then can you view revisions of the web sites or do you only have the current copy?
- r3bl 10y ago
  If you click on "How does it work?" you get redirected to a short and sweet presentation[0]. According to the presentation, when you, as the site owner, push an update, content.json gets updated, the peers get a notification (using the WebSocket API) that a new content is available, and then they download the new version of content.json that contains the sitemap of the updated version of the website. Cleverly thought out! [0] - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9Yu7Au2l551t3XBgyTSvilew/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.g9a1cce9ee_0_4 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9...
  - shakna 10y ago
    Unless your site is too big: [0]. Then you can have users end up browsing stale versions of the site. Still an issue as of before Christmas last year. [0] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/598 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/598
thriftwy 10y ago
This is what I've waited for for quite some time.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Freenet has done this for over a decade.
ThePadawan 10y ago
Cannot access this at work for zeronet.io being involved in P2P activity. I cannot help but feel disappointed and unamused.
- akerro 10y ago
  https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
jlebrech 10y ago
I always wondered why you couldn't just download a torrent of torrents for the month.
- mirap 10y ago
  It would be interesting to create a distributed catalog of torrents itself.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    Maybe I'm not picking up what you're putting down, but how does this differ from DHT?
    - forgottenpass 10y ago
      It might be possible with the DHT alone, but I think for what the grandparent poster wants it would depend on the ability to query the DHT. Both in general and by popularity and insert date. That might be possible, but with the prvelence of magnet links instead of everyone using that, I just assumed not.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        It's possible to do something fully distributed, but not just with the existing DHT network: https://www.tribler.org/ https://www.tribler.org/
  - kpcyrd 10y ago
    if you substitute torrents with ipfs this is trivial: # create empty folder FOLDER=`ipfs object new unixfs-dir` # add folders to object FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-01 "$HASH_2017_01"` FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-02 "$HASH_2017_02"` FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-03 "$HASH_2017_03"` # print final hash echo $FOLDER This would result in a hash that has the folders for January, February and March, which can have arbitrary nested folders and files in them.
mirap 10y ago
The zeronet.io is hosted on vultr.com. Why don't they use zeronet to deliver its own website?
- thatcat 10y ago
  Like bittorrent, zeronet requires a client. The client acts as local server and displays the pages in your browser
  - mirap 10y ago
    That explains it, thank you.
- amag 10y ago
  Because that would require everyone to have the zeronet client installed before they can go to the zeronet website to download the client...
- funny666 10y ago
  ZeroNet client has hosted on itself"s network,You can keep it updated without outside net.the site is own by zeronet's DEV:nofish.the update site is sync with github's project,the site is:http://127.0.0.1:43110/zeroupdate.bit http://127.0.0.1:43110/zeroupdate.bit
HugoDaniel 10y ago
It would be great if a simpler webtorrent version was available just for fun.
- shakna 10y ago
  There's a year-old project called peercloud that might scratch that itch: * https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud * https://peercloud.io/ https://peercloud.io/
Jabanga 10y ago
A little known fact: the Namecoin blockchain's cost-adjusted hashrate [1] is the third highest in the world, after Bitcoin and Ethereum, making it unusually secure given its relative obscurity (e.g. its market capitalisation is only $10 million). [1] hashrates can't be compared directly due to different hashing algorithms having different costs for producing a hash.
- mccoyspace 10y ago
  Namecoin has a number of innovations. It's the first 'alt-coin' fork from Bitcoin, and it pioneered the technique of "merge mining" where a miner could do Proof of Work on both the Bitcoin chain and the NameCoin chain simultaneously. A lot of mining pools implemented merged mining. Even though the alt-coin space has become much more crowded and noisy, NameCoin retains that early hashing advantage. It's a very secure chain.
  - glitch003 10y ago
    > It's a very secure chain. But this guy said that a single miner has 65% of the hashing power: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043038
    - Jabanga 10y ago
      IIRC, that's one mining pool, not one miner. The power of mining pools is relatively limited. If the workers see that the pool is attacking Namecoin and devaluing their NMC (not to mention ruining a cool project), they're liable to switch to a different pool.
eeZah7Ux 10y ago
The project looks very promising but relies on running a lot of javascript from untraceable sources in the browser. Given the long history of vulnerabilities in the the browsers, trusting js from a well-known website might be OK, trusting js from zeronet is unreasonable. If ZeroNet could run with js code generated only by the local daemon or without js it would be brilliant.
- blitmap 10y ago
  Chrome added a feature a long while back I really wanted for ages. The ability to specify the checksum of a linked asset, so that it can be verified as it's downloaded (and untrusted/discarded if not). I just can't find the docs for it. :( My Google-fu is not strong. EDIT: Found it :D https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/ https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/
  - gog 10y ago
    It's called Subresource Integrity, see https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/09/subresource-integrity-in-firefox-43/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/09/subresource-integrity-in-f... and https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/ https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/ Browser support is noted here: http://caniuse.com/#feat=subresource-integrity http://caniuse.com/#feat=subresource-integrity
    - blitmap 10y ago
      It's kind of a shame they didn't let their imagination fly with that one... I wish integrity were a global attribute, because I could totally see using it for things like images and audio/video.
      - Ajedi32 10y ago
        It might work (though I'm not completely sure) if you specify a hash in the img-src directive of the CSP header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Security-Policy/img-src https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co... Another option would be to just use a subresource-integrity protected script to check the hash of a downloaded image/video before displaying it.
avodonosov 10y ago
As for uncensorable, if the content is illegal, the torrent peers may be incriminated distribution of illegal content
- ballenf 10y ago
  Neither argument has been tested, but the defense would that you were acting as an ISP with dumb pipes. Which logically leads to an unrelated question -- if ISPs are doing DPI on every packet, they at least theoretically 'know' whether you're transmitting 'illegal' content. If I were a rights holder, I'd be making that argument against ISPs. I don't know how I'd sleep at night, maybe, but I wouldn't let ISPs have their cake (valuable user data) and eat it too (immunity based on status as ISP-only).
  - shakna 10y ago
    > Neither argument has been tested, but the defense would that you were acting as an ISP with dumb pipes. Unlikely. To become a peer, you must first visit the website, fully downloading the content. Which makes an argument to you consenting to share the information.
    - ballenf 10y ago
      Just like an ISP has to take your request and transmit it and the response. No difference in theory. In practice, I would worry whether courts would ignore theory.
      - shakna 10y ago
        But there is no person involved directly in the pipeline with an ISP. Every request goes through an automated process. Governments do and have asked ISPs to update and block against certain websites. Thus, the automated system is expected to behave adequately. However, as a person becomes involved, they become an active participant in the pipeline. That is a huge theoretical difference. A person is not automated, they have common reason, and intellect that goes beyond the rules that can be encoded in a dumb system. This reasoning is what allows us to hold a person accountable to their actions. If you visited a ZeroNet site, found it was bad stuff, immediately left and deleted the cache, you might have a case for innocence. But if you immediately left, but continued to actively share the content... It's a different message. You could become part of a child pornography ring, for example. And courts enjoy making examples of distributors of such materials. Pleading your innocence, becomes difficult at that point. You've shared illegal content from your own property.
wcummings 10y ago
I thought it was pretty easy to disrupt / censor torrents, hasn't that been going on for a while?
- kbart 10y ago
  "I thought it was pretty easy to disrupt / censor torrents, hasn't that been going on for a while?" Not torrents themselves, only torrent search engines. Torrents are distributed by design, but traditional torrent directories/aggregators/search engines are centralized, thus easy targets for DCMA take-downs, ISP blocks, trials etc.
  - thriftwy 10y ago
    ...And that's exactly the first thing they should put in ZeroNet.
    - dane-pgp 10y ago
      Yup, torrent search engines are the weak link when it comes to protecting the public's access to arbitrary large files, and also the front lines in the battle between the media industries and an uncensored internet. ZeroNet is perhaps not enough on its own to solve this problem, though, since a good torrent search engine suffers from the same limitation as a good forum, which is the need to have some form of community-based moderation. If people can't remove spam search results, and spam comments, then the medium can be too easily exploited (using Sybil attacks, etc.) and become useless. The missing piece which is holding back so many decentralised technology projects is a lack of a decentralised trust platform. A necessary step towards this would be a decentralised (and privacy-preserving) identity platform, which would have the added benefit of removing the "Log in with Facebook/Google" problem from the web.
      - thriftwy 10y ago
        Just sort search results by torrent popularity. People aren't going to seed bad content.
shakna 10y ago
Has the code quality improved since I was told to screw off for bringing up security? * 2 years out of date gevent-websocket * Year old Python-RSA, which included some worrying security bugs in that time. [0](Vulnerable to side-channel attacks on decryption and signing.) * PyElliptic is both out of date, and actually an unmaintained library. But it's okay, it's just the OpenSSL library! * 2 years out of date Pybitcointools, with just a few bug fixes around confirmation things are actually signed correctly. * A year out of date pyasn1, which is the type library. Not as big a deal, but covers some constraint verification bugs. [1] * opensslVerify is actually up to date! That's new! And exciting! * CoffeeScript is a few versions out of date. 1.10 vs the current 1.12, which includes moving away from methods deprecated in NodeJS, problems with managing paths under Windows and compiler enhancements. Not as big a deal, but something that shouldn't be happening. Then of course, we have the open issues that should be high on the security scope, but don't get a lot of attention. Like: * Disable insecure SSL cryptos [3] * Signing fail if Thumbs.db exist [4] * ZeroNet fails to notice broken Tor hidden services connection [5] * ZeroNet returns 500 server error when received truncated referrer [6] (XSS issues) * port TorManager.py to python-stem [7] i.e. Stop using out of date, unsupported libraries. I gave up investigating at this point. Doubtless there's more to find. As long as: a) The author/s continues to use out-dated, unsupported libraries by directly copying them into the git repository, rather than using any sort of package management. b) The author/s continue to simply pass security problems on to the end user ... ZeroNet is unfit for use. As simple as that. People have tried to help. I tried to help before the project got as expansive as it is. But then, and now, there is little or no interest in actually fixing the problems. ZeroNet is an interesting idea, implemented poorly. [0] https://github.com/sybrenstuvel/python-rsa/issues/19 https://github.com/sybrenstuvel/python-rsa/issues/19 [1] https://github.com/etingof/pyasn1/issues/20 https://github.com/etingof/pyasn1/issues/20 [3] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/830 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/830 [4] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/796 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/796 [5] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/794 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/794 [6] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/777 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/777 [7] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/758 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/758
- 10y ago
rawells14 10y ago
Sounds incredible, we'll probably be seeing much more of this type of thing in the near future.
jwilk 10y ago
> Page response time is not limited by your connection speed. Huh? What do they mean?
- emucontusionswe 10y ago
  If you have previously visited a page then the response time will be limited by your computers ability to locate and open the correct html document. If you haven't previously visited a page then the response time will be limited by how many peers are available <b>and then</b> by your connection speed.
- hossbeast 10y ago
  I assumed they meant offline browsing of cached content
emucontusionswe 10y ago
I would recommend use of Freenet over ZeroNet. More or less the same concept/functionality however with 15 years more experience. Freenet: https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/
- djsumdog 10y ago
  They have different goals. FreeNet is about total anonymity. In the FreeNet world, everyone helps server small pieces of all the data, yet no one person knows what data is on the portion of their local drives. Things like Javascript are also disabled on FreeNet. ZeroNet uses the torrent protocol and serves up the content you've chosen to view. You know what you're serving.
  - doublec 10y ago
    JavaScript is disabled through the Freenet proxy but it's possible to use the Freenet API to access the raw data and have a proxy that doesn't disable JavaScript. It would be possible to do something very ZeroNet like but with Freenet as the backend. ZeroNet doesn't really use the torrent protocol. It has its own file sharing service that it runs to receive requests from other users for files. It uses the torrent trackers to map site addresses to IP or onion address. You know what you're serving initially but the site author can add any files they choose and you'll start serving them if you've visited the site and are seeding it. You have no control over malicious sites that decide to store arbitrary data.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Freenet is a great idea with 15 years of failure to get traction with sane (by which I mean non-paedophile) people. Also, it's written in Java.
  - loup-vaillant 10y ago
    > Also, it's written in Java. (Not sure if that's a praise or a criticism.) As much as I dislike Java (ML outclasses it as a language), that's probably much better than the obvious alternatives (C and C++): there aren't nearly as many undefined behaviours, and that eliminates a whole class of potential security vulnerabilities. If it were written now, Rust could be a viable alternative: just as safe, potentially faster, with less dependencies (at least as far as the compiled binaries are concerned).
mtgx 10y ago
Speaking of which, what's the progress on IPFS?
- diggan 10y ago
  We're moving forward as always. Latest features would include distributed pubsub, filestore (allows you to add files without duplicating them) and interop between the browser and desktop nodes. Any specific part you're looking at?
  - ashark 10y ago
    1) What's the status of (supported as a real feature, not just manually changing the bootstrap nodes and hoping everyone else does too) private IPFS networks? If it's there already, how stable is its configuration (i.e. if I get my friends on a private IPFS network will I likely have to get them all to update a bunch of config in 6 months or a year)? 2) Does filestore also let you store, say, newly pinned files in your regular file tree? That is, can you pin a hash for a file (or tree) you don't already have and provide an ordinary file system location where it should go when it's downloaded? Or do you have to copy it out of IPFS' normal repo manually, then re-add it in the new location? Also: how does filestore behave if files are moved/deleted? 3) What rate of repo changes requiring upgrades can we expect for the future? That is, how stable is the current repo structure expected to be? Is the upgrade process expected to improve and/or become automated any time soon? 4) Is there a table of typical resource requirements somewhere? I'm looking for "if you want to host 10TB and a few 10s of thousands of files, you need a machine X GB of memory. If you want to host 500MB, you only need Y GB of memory. If you have 2TB but it's in many, many small files, you need Z GB of memory", or else a formula for a achieving a best-guess for that. For that matter, how predictable is that at this point? The use case I've been excited to use IPFS for since I found out about it is a private, distributed filesystem for my friends and family. Easy automated distributed backups/integrity checking on multiple operating systems, access your files at someone else's house easily, that sort of thing. Filestore finally landed, which was a big piece of the puzzle (the files have to remain accessible to ordinary tools and programs or I'll never get buy-in from anyone else), so that's exciting. Now I'm just waiting for docs to improve (so I'm not searching through issue notes to learn which features exist and how to use them) and for a sense that it's stable enough that I won't be fixing brokenness on everyone's nodes several times a year.
lossolo 10y ago
There is single point of failure, kill the tracker = kill the whole network. You can get all the IPs from the tracker that are visiting certain site, it's not so secure if someone is not using tor.
- the8472 10y ago
  Bittorrent supports more peer sources than just trackers, DHT being the most important one among the others.
  - lossolo 10y ago
    It's not supported by ZeroNet.
    - the8472 10y ago
      there are libraries, it shouldn't be difficult for them to add that. Oh, they say the following on their issue tracker: > zeronet protocol is different from torrent, so libtorrent will not work. So the headline is misleading?
      - testaccount2017 10y ago
        Yes, it's misleading. It's peer to peer but it doesn't speak the same protocol. You can look at the docs of its network protocol. https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/help_zeronet/network_protocol/ https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/help_zeronet/networ...
    - Ajedi32 10y ago
      You sure about that? Their presentation [says][1] "Tracker-less peer exchange is also supported". Any idea what that's referring to? [1]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9Yu7Au2l551t3XBgyTSvilew/pub?slide=id.g9a3b93883_1_0 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9...
      - 10y ago
vasili111 10y ago
Lack of anonymity in ZeroNet is a big problem.
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  Seems like it's just as anonymous as the existing web; you can use Tor to hide your IP, but that's optional.
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
> Anonymity: Full Tor network support with .onion hidden services instead of ipv4 addresses How does this track with the Tor Project's advice to avoid using BitTorrent over Tor [1]? I can imagine that a savvy project is developed with awareness of what the problems are and works around them, but I don't see it addressed. [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-go...
- nonsince 10y ago
  I'm also suspicious, since they say that your blockchain address is used for authentication - couldn't colluding websites track your public key and use it to track you between websites?
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    Seems like that's only for publishing new content, not for merely browsing. Though I guess unless you create a new identity for every site you want to post a comment on, your comments on one site could be proven to be posted by the same person as your comments on another site.
  - wyager 10y ago
    Presumably since they're using BIP32, they create a new address for every website you visit.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Tor Project doesn't like people pushing HD video through its relays, because that degrades performance for other users. Torrent clients are very good at saturating links. This project is about hosting generally. But if it were used for HD video streaming, Tor Project would be just as unhappy.
  - shakna 10y ago
    The linked article refers to three ways bittorrent can deanonymise you behind Tor. That's a privacy concern, not a load problem.
jlebrech 10y ago
a youtube replacement in zeronet would rock
Kinnard 10y ago
In other news ZeroNet has been banned from giving its TEDtalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039219
- Neliquat 10y ago
  I quit giving TED my clicks long ago. They occasionally have some good talks, but many more that are pseudoscience garbage. Don't even get me started on TEDx. I hope ZeroNet find a better stage for their talk. Perhaps an organizer could contact them.
hollander 10y ago
Several years ago I had Tor running on a server at home. It was a regular Tor node, not an exit node. Later I was put on a blacklist because of this. What is the risk of using this?
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Would you mind defining "blacklist" in this context? That's kind of scary!
  - hollander 10y ago
    Sorry for the late reply. One website didn't work anymore. I mailed them and they reported this as the reason why they blocked me.
- glenneroo 10y ago
  I ran a relay for years and never noticed any strange behaviour. Where and how were you blacklisted?
  - hollander 10y ago
    Sorry for the late reply. One website didn't work anymore. I mailed them and they reported this as the reason why they blocked me.
daliwali 10y ago
I don't see how this could decentralize web applications though. Wouldn't each client have to be running the server software? Someone has to pay for that, too.
- bachstelze 10y ago
  Yeah every client have to run the software or you use a proxy. If you have a site with many spreads you don't need a running instance. But if you have a an unknown site you would have to run a little server permanently.
vitiral 10y ago
This seems similar to ipfs. What are the main differences?
- diggan 10y ago
  IPFS is more low-level in terms of that IPFS is a protocol (in reality a collection of protocols) for P2P data transfer. Together with IPLD, you'll get a full suite of protocols and data structures for creating fully distributed P2P applications. ZeroNet is a application for distributing P2P applications, using Bittorrent for the P2P layer. In theory, ZeroNet could leverage IPFS to get a better and more modular stack for the actual connectivity and transfering.
  - vitiral 10y ago
    gotcha, thanks for the explanation. It sure seems like they have many similar goals so it makes sense that ZeroNet could leverage IPFS
freedaemon 10y ago
Love the ZeroNet project! Been following them for a year and they've made great progress. One thing that's concerning is the use of Namecoin for registering domains. Little known fact: A single miner has close to 65% or more mining power on Namecoin. Reported in this USENIX ATC'16 paper: https://www.usenix.org/node/196209 https://www.usenix.org/node/196209. Due to this reason some other projects have stopped using Namecoin. I'm curious what the ZeroNet developers think about this issue and how has their experience been so far with Namecoin.
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  Also, if you ever lose control of a namecoin domain you can say goodbye to it forever. A squatter will take it instantly and hold on to it forever unless you buy it from them for actual money.
  - freedaemon 10y ago
    Has squatting gotten worse on Namecoin? Squatting is fairly hard to handle in decentralized naming systems in general. Namecoin got a lot of squatting issues mostly because of the pricing function (price of names dropped over x years, and now it's almost free to register names). Here is another paper from WEIS'15 that studied squatting in Namecoin: http://randomwalker.info/publications/namespaces.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/namespaces.pdf
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    Isn't that true of normal domains, too?
    - loup-vaillant 10y ago
      Depends on the toplevel suffix. For instance, .fr (France) domains have a "no taking" period after the expiration date, where nobody can take it from their previous owners. The owner can then take it back, but it won't be re-activated for a couple of weeks, I believe. So the punishment for screwing up is a temporary blackout of your domain name. .com, .net, .org domains are handled differently, and may be easier to lose permanently.
roansh 10y ago
We need more projects like these. Whether this project solves the question of a truly distributed Internet* is out of question. What we need is a movement, a big cognitive investment towards solving the Big Brother problem. *I am referring to concentrated power of the big players here, country-wide firewalls, and bureaucracy towards how/what we use.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  We need multiple internets, a big confusion, governments can't handle confusion, but if everything is standardized over Facebook and WhatsApp it's easy for them.
  - rdiddly 10y ago
    Agreed - what they like is "legibility" as defined here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call... ZeroNet does appear to take an important step in that direction with decentralization.
  - antocv 10y ago
    They can. Well. Look, even if you have multiple internets, decentralized everything, distributed all systems, no more Google no more Facebook. What does the communication patterns in such a system look like? Do you use the system after work before going to sleep? Your and everyone else usage patterns, traffic can be analyzed. The endpoints, many of them would be honeypots run by Spooks, revealing even more what you are up to and giving you a false sense of safety while the Spooks could run the entire decentralized inter-network. So your system would have to fake it somehow, fake requesting some hashes here and there, fake request/post comments and follows. Otherwise, the social data available when the SPOOKS join your social-network even if it is distributed like patchwork on scuttlebot, defeats its purpose. That is what bitmessage does, but then you pay in high bandwidth costs. And yet, you cant just do random shit, random can easily be filtered out so you need more advanced method of finding fake social relations and using those to do fake data to actually conceal what you and everyone else is doing on the interweb. EDIT: Im not saying "give up", its a very worthy cause, just the problem is harder and enters the social space quite fast - the problem is the same as "we are all nice developers and hackers" yet 99% seem to be employed by NSA/similar-services/Google and think they are doing great James Bond like type of jobs, while they are actually anti-hackers and anti-developers, in fact, anti-society.
dillon 10y ago
There's also GNUNet: https://gnunet.org/ https://gnunet.org/ As others have mentioned there's also FreeNet: https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/ I haven't looked deep into any of these projects, but I do think they are neat and hoping at least one of them gains a lot of traction.
- zobzu 10y ago
  the main difference is that zeronet is fast.
- shakna 10y ago
  Considering a Freenet user is currently [jailed indefinently](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indefinitely-for-refusing-to-decrypt-hard-drives-loses-appeal/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef...), there does seem to be some problems.
digitalzombie 10y ago
Anybody read this as Netzero the free internet dial up in the 90s?
arcaster 10y ago
This project is cool, but I'm more interested in future releases by the Askasha project.

No comment about ZeroNet itself, but am I alone in the opinion that this website takes grid layout too far? It looks outright cluttered and overloaded.

timlyo 10y ago
Kind of reminds me of the old table layouts, although it doesn't bother me personally.
CraftThatBlock 10y ago
Looks great on mobile however
- mirimir 10y ago
  Yeah, the advantage. Tables on steroids.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    I love the design. Looks great on mobile. Not sure about desktop. Loads really fast too.
iamatworknow 10y ago
I think it's the seemingly random colors more so than the grid itself that makes it a bit unpleasant to look at.

DeepYogurt 10y ago

Presumably you only download the site you want when you visit it. If that's the case then can you view revisions of the web sites or do you only have the current copy?

r3bl 10y ago
If you click on "How does it work?" you get redirected to a short and sweet presentation[0]. According to the presentation, when you, as the site owner, push an update, content.json gets updated, the peers get a notification (using the WebSocket API) that a new content is available, and then they download the new version of content.json that contains the sitemap of the updated version of the website. Cleverly thought out! [0] - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9Yu7Au2l551t3XBgyTSvilew/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.g9a1cce9ee_0_4 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9...
- shakna 10y ago
  Unless your site is too big: [0]. Then you can have users end up browsing stale versions of the site. Still an issue as of before Christmas last year. [0] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/598 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/598

thriftwy 10y ago

This is what I've waited for for quite some time.

dublinben 10y ago
Freenet has done this for over a decade.

ThePadawan 10y ago

Cannot access this at work for zeronet.io being involved in P2P activity. I cannot help but feel disappointed and unamused.

akerro 10y ago
https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

jlebrech 10y ago

I always wondered why you couldn't just download a torrent of torrents for the month.

mirap 10y ago
It would be interesting to create a distributed catalog of torrents itself.
- omginternets 10y ago
  Maybe I'm not picking up what you're putting down, but how does this differ from DHT?
  - forgottenpass 10y ago
    It might be possible with the DHT alone, but I think for what the grandparent poster wants it would depend on the ability to query the DHT. Both in general and by popularity and insert date. That might be possible, but with the prvelence of magnet links instead of everyone using that, I just assumed not.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      It's possible to do something fully distributed, but not just with the existing DHT network: https://www.tribler.org/ https://www.tribler.org/
- kpcyrd 10y ago
  if you substitute torrents with ipfs this is trivial: # create empty folder FOLDER=`ipfs object new unixfs-dir` # add folders to object FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-01 "$HASH_2017_01"` FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-02 "$HASH_2017_02"` FOLDER=`ipfs object patch "$FOLDER" add-link 2017-03 "$HASH_2017_03"` # print final hash echo $FOLDER This would result in a hash that has the folders for January, February and March, which can have arbitrary nested folders and files in them.

mirap 10y ago

The zeronet.io is hosted on vultr.com. Why don't they use zeronet to deliver its own website?

thatcat 10y ago
Like bittorrent, zeronet requires a client. The client acts as local server and displays the pages in your browser
- mirap 10y ago
  That explains it, thank you.
amag 10y ago
Because that would require everyone to have the zeronet client installed before they can go to the zeronet website to download the client...
funny666 10y ago
ZeroNet client has hosted on itself"s network,You can keep it updated without outside net.the site is own by zeronet's DEV:nofish.the update site is sync with github's project,the site is:http://127.0.0.1:43110/zeroupdate.bit http://127.0.0.1:43110/zeroupdate.bit

HugoDaniel 10y ago

It would be great if a simpler webtorrent version was available just for fun.

shakna 10y ago
There's a year-old project called peercloud that might scratch that itch: * https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud * https://peercloud.io/ https://peercloud.io/

Jabanga 10y ago

A little known fact: the Namecoin blockchain's cost-adjusted hashrate [1] is the third highest in the world, after Bitcoin and Ethereum, making it unusually secure given its relative obscurity (e.g. its market capitalisation is only $10 million). [1] hashrates can't be compared directly due to different hashing algorithms having different costs for producing a hash.

mccoyspace 10y ago
Namecoin has a number of innovations. It's the first 'alt-coin' fork from Bitcoin, and it pioneered the technique of "merge mining" where a miner could do Proof of Work on both the Bitcoin chain and the NameCoin chain simultaneously. A lot of mining pools implemented merged mining. Even though the alt-coin space has become much more crowded and noisy, NameCoin retains that early hashing advantage. It's a very secure chain.
- glitch003 10y ago
  > It's a very secure chain. But this guy said that a single miner has 65% of the hashing power: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043038
  - Jabanga 10y ago
    IIRC, that's one mining pool, not one miner. The power of mining pools is relatively limited. If the workers see that the pool is attacking Namecoin and devaluing their NMC (not to mention ruining a cool project), they're liable to switch to a different pool.

eeZah7Ux 10y ago

The project looks very promising but relies on running a lot of javascript from untraceable sources in the browser. Given the long history of vulnerabilities in the the browsers, trusting js from a well-known website might be OK, trusting js from zeronet is unreasonable. If ZeroNet could run with js code generated only by the local daemon or without js it would be brilliant.

blitmap 10y ago
Chrome added a feature a long while back I really wanted for ages. The ability to specify the checksum of a linked asset, so that it can be verified as it's downloaded (and untrusted/discarded if not). I just can't find the docs for it. :( My Google-fu is not strong. EDIT: Found it :D https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/ https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/
- gog 10y ago
  It's called Subresource Integrity, see https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/09/subresource-integrity-in-firefox-43/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/09/subresource-integrity-in-f... and https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/ https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/ Browser support is noted here: http://caniuse.com/#feat=subresource-integrity http://caniuse.com/#feat=subresource-integrity
  - blitmap 10y ago
    It's kind of a shame they didn't let their imagination fly with that one... I wish integrity were a global attribute, because I could totally see using it for things like images and audio/video.
    - Ajedi32 10y ago
      It might work (though I'm not completely sure) if you specify a hash in the img-src directive of the CSP header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Security-Policy/img-src https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co... Another option would be to just use a subresource-integrity protected script to check the hash of a downloaded image/video before displaying it.

avodonosov 10y ago

As for uncensorable, if the content is illegal, the torrent peers may be incriminated distribution of illegal content

ballenf 10y ago
Neither argument has been tested, but the defense would that you were acting as an ISP with dumb pipes. Which logically leads to an unrelated question -- if ISPs are doing DPI on every packet, they at least theoretically 'know' whether you're transmitting 'illegal' content. If I were a rights holder, I'd be making that argument against ISPs. I don't know how I'd sleep at night, maybe, but I wouldn't let ISPs have their cake (valuable user data) and eat it too (immunity based on status as ISP-only).
- shakna 10y ago
  > Neither argument has been tested, but the defense would that you were acting as an ISP with dumb pipes. Unlikely. To become a peer, you must first visit the website, fully downloading the content. Which makes an argument to you consenting to share the information.
  - ballenf 10y ago
    Just like an ISP has to take your request and transmit it and the response. No difference in theory. In practice, I would worry whether courts would ignore theory.
    - shakna 10y ago
      But there is no person involved directly in the pipeline with an ISP. Every request goes through an automated process. Governments do and have asked ISPs to update and block against certain websites. Thus, the automated system is expected to behave adequately. However, as a person becomes involved, they become an active participant in the pipeline. That is a huge theoretical difference. A person is not automated, they have common reason, and intellect that goes beyond the rules that can be encoded in a dumb system. This reasoning is what allows us to hold a person accountable to their actions. If you visited a ZeroNet site, found it was bad stuff, immediately left and deleted the cache, you might have a case for innocence. But if you immediately left, but continued to actively share the content... It's a different message. You could become part of a child pornography ring, for example. And courts enjoy making examples of distributors of such materials. Pleading your innocence, becomes difficult at that point. You've shared illegal content from your own property.

wcummings 10y ago

I thought it was pretty easy to disrupt / censor torrents, hasn't that been going on for a while?

kbart 10y ago
"I thought it was pretty easy to disrupt / censor torrents, hasn't that been going on for a while?" Not torrents themselves, only torrent search engines. Torrents are distributed by design, but traditional torrent directories/aggregators/search engines are centralized, thus easy targets for DCMA take-downs, ISP blocks, trials etc.
- thriftwy 10y ago
  ...And that's exactly the first thing they should put in ZeroNet.
  - dane-pgp 10y ago
    Yup, torrent search engines are the weak link when it comes to protecting the public's access to arbitrary large files, and also the front lines in the battle between the media industries and an uncensored internet. ZeroNet is perhaps not enough on its own to solve this problem, though, since a good torrent search engine suffers from the same limitation as a good forum, which is the need to have some form of community-based moderation. If people can't remove spam search results, and spam comments, then the medium can be too easily exploited (using Sybil attacks, etc.) and become useless. The missing piece which is holding back so many decentralised technology projects is a lack of a decentralised trust platform. A necessary step towards this would be a decentralised (and privacy-preserving) identity platform, which would have the added benefit of removing the "Log in with Facebook/Google" problem from the web.
    - thriftwy 10y ago
      Just sort search results by torrent popularity. People aren't going to seed bad content.

shakna 10y ago

Has the code quality improved since I was told to screw off for bringing up security? * 2 years out of date gevent-websocket * Year old Python-RSA, which included some worrying security bugs in that time. [0](Vulnerable to side-channel attacks on decryption and signing.) * PyElliptic is both out of date, and actually an unmaintained library. But it's okay, it's just the OpenSSL library! * 2 years out of date Pybitcointools, with just a few bug fixes around confirmation things are actually signed correctly. * A year out of date pyasn1, which is the type library. Not as big a deal, but covers some constraint verification bugs. [1] * opensslVerify is actually up to date! That's new! And exciting! * CoffeeScript is a few versions out of date. 1.10 vs the current 1.12, which includes moving away from methods deprecated in NodeJS, problems with managing paths under Windows and compiler enhancements. Not as big a deal, but something that shouldn't be happening. Then of course, we have the open issues that should be high on the security scope, but don't get a lot of attention. Like: * Disable insecure SSL cryptos [3] * Signing fail if Thumbs.db exist [4] * ZeroNet fails to notice broken Tor hidden services connection [5] * ZeroNet returns 500 server error when received truncated referrer [6] (XSS issues) * port TorManager.py to python-stem [7] i.e. Stop using out of date, unsupported libraries. I gave up investigating at this point. Doubtless there's more to find. As long as: a) The author/s continues to use out-dated, unsupported libraries by directly copying them into the git repository, rather than using any sort of package management. b) The author/s continue to simply pass security problems on to the end user ... ZeroNet is unfit for use. As simple as that. People have tried to help. I tried to help before the project got as expansive as it is. But then, and now, there is little or no interest in actually fixing the problems. ZeroNet is an interesting idea, implemented poorly. [0] https://github.com/sybrenstuvel/python-rsa/issues/19 https://github.com/sybrenstuvel/python-rsa/issues/19 [1] https://github.com/etingof/pyasn1/issues/20 https://github.com/etingof/pyasn1/issues/20 [3] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/830 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/830 [4] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/796 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/796 [5] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/794 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/794 [6] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/777 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/777 [7] https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/758 https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet/issues/758

10y ago

rawells14 10y ago

Sounds incredible, we'll probably be seeing much more of this type of thing in the near future.

jwilk 10y ago

> Page response time is not limited by your connection speed. Huh? What do they mean?

emucontusionswe 10y ago
If you have previously visited a page then the response time will be limited by your computers ability to locate and open the correct html document. If you haven't previously visited a page then the response time will be limited by how many peers are available <b>and then</b> by your connection speed.
hossbeast 10y ago
I assumed they meant offline browsing of cached content

emucontusionswe 10y ago

I would recommend use of Freenet over ZeroNet. More or less the same concept/functionality however with 15 years more experience. Freenet: https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/

djsumdog 10y ago
They have different goals. FreeNet is about total anonymity. In the FreeNet world, everyone helps server small pieces of all the data, yet no one person knows what data is on the portion of their local drives. Things like Javascript are also disabled on FreeNet. ZeroNet uses the torrent protocol and serves up the content you've chosen to view. You know what you're serving.
- doublec 10y ago
  JavaScript is disabled through the Freenet proxy but it's possible to use the Freenet API to access the raw data and have a proxy that doesn't disable JavaScript. It would be possible to do something very ZeroNet like but with Freenet as the backend. ZeroNet doesn't really use the torrent protocol. It has its own file sharing service that it runs to receive requests from other users for files. It uses the torrent trackers to map site addresses to IP or onion address. You know what you're serving initially but the site author can add any files they choose and you'll start serving them if you've visited the site and are seeding it. You have no control over malicious sites that decide to store arbitrary data.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Freenet is a great idea with 15 years of failure to get traction with sane (by which I mean non-paedophile) people. Also, it's written in Java.
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  > Also, it's written in Java. (Not sure if that's a praise or a criticism.) As much as I dislike Java (ML outclasses it as a language), that's probably much better than the obvious alternatives (C and C++): there aren't nearly as many undefined behaviours, and that eliminates a whole class of potential security vulnerabilities. If it were written now, Rust could be a viable alternative: just as safe, potentially faster, with less dependencies (at least as far as the compiled binaries are concerned).

mtgx 10y ago

Speaking of which, what's the progress on IPFS?

diggan 10y ago
We're moving forward as always. Latest features would include distributed pubsub, filestore (allows you to add files without duplicating them) and interop between the browser and desktop nodes. Any specific part you're looking at?
- ashark 10y ago
  1) What's the status of (supported as a real feature, not just manually changing the bootstrap nodes and hoping everyone else does too) private IPFS networks? If it's there already, how stable is its configuration (i.e. if I get my friends on a private IPFS network will I likely have to get them all to update a bunch of config in 6 months or a year)? 2) Does filestore also let you store, say, newly pinned files in your regular file tree? That is, can you pin a hash for a file (or tree) you don't already have and provide an ordinary file system location where it should go when it's downloaded? Or do you have to copy it out of IPFS' normal repo manually, then re-add it in the new location? Also: how does filestore behave if files are moved/deleted? 3) What rate of repo changes requiring upgrades can we expect for the future? That is, how stable is the current repo structure expected to be? Is the upgrade process expected to improve and/or become automated any time soon? 4) Is there a table of typical resource requirements somewhere? I'm looking for "if you want to host 10TB and a few 10s of thousands of files, you need a machine X GB of memory. If you want to host 500MB, you only need Y GB of memory. If you have 2TB but it's in many, many small files, you need Z GB of memory", or else a formula for a achieving a best-guess for that. For that matter, how predictable is that at this point? The use case I've been excited to use IPFS for since I found out about it is a private, distributed filesystem for my friends and family. Easy automated distributed backups/integrity checking on multiple operating systems, access your files at someone else's house easily, that sort of thing. Filestore finally landed, which was a big piece of the puzzle (the files have to remain accessible to ordinary tools and programs or I'll never get buy-in from anyone else), so that's exciting. Now I'm just waiting for docs to improve (so I'm not searching through issue notes to learn which features exist and how to use them) and for a sense that it's stable enough that I won't be fixing brokenness on everyone's nodes several times a year.

lossolo 10y ago

There is single point of failure, kill the tracker = kill the whole network. You can get all the IPs from the tracker that are visiting certain site, it's not so secure if someone is not using tor.

the8472 10y ago
Bittorrent supports more peer sources than just trackers, DHT being the most important one among the others.
- lossolo 10y ago
  It's not supported by ZeroNet.
  - the8472 10y ago
    there are libraries, it shouldn't be difficult for them to add that. Oh, they say the following on their issue tracker: > zeronet protocol is different from torrent, so libtorrent will not work. So the headline is misleading?
    - testaccount2017 10y ago
      Yes, it's misleading. It's peer to peer but it doesn't speak the same protocol. You can look at the docs of its network protocol. https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/help_zeronet/network_protocol/ https://zeronet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/help_zeronet/networ...
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    You sure about that? Their presentation [says][1] "Tracker-less peer exchange is also supported". Any idea what that's referring to? [1]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9Yu7Au2l551t3XBgyTSvilew/pub?slide=id.g9a3b93883_1_0 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_2qK1IuOKJ51pgBvllZ9...
    - 10y ago

vasili111 10y ago

Lack of anonymity in ZeroNet is a big problem.

Ajedi32 10y ago
Seems like it's just as anonymous as the existing web; you can use Tor to hide your IP, but that's optional.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

> Anonymity: Full Tor network support with .onion hidden services instead of ipv4 addresses How does this track with the Tor Project's advice to avoid using BitTorrent over Tor [1]? I can imagine that a savvy project is developed with awareness of what the problems are and works around them, but I don't see it addressed. [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-go...

nonsince 10y ago
I'm also suspicious, since they say that your blockchain address is used for authentication - couldn't colluding websites track your public key and use it to track you between websites?
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  Seems like that's only for publishing new content, not for merely browsing. Though I guess unless you create a new identity for every site you want to post a comment on, your comments on one site could be proven to be posted by the same person as your comments on another site.
- wyager 10y ago
  Presumably since they're using BIP32, they create a new address for every website you visit.
mirimir 10y ago
Tor Project doesn't like people pushing HD video through its relays, because that degrades performance for other users. Torrent clients are very good at saturating links. This project is about hosting generally. But if it were used for HD video streaming, Tor Project would be just as unhappy.
- shakna 10y ago
  The linked article refers to three ways bittorrent can deanonymise you behind Tor. That's a privacy concern, not a load problem.

jlebrech 10y ago

a youtube replacement in zeronet would rock

Kinnard 10y ago

In other news ZeroNet has been banned from giving its TEDtalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039219

Neliquat 10y ago
I quit giving TED my clicks long ago. They occasionally have some good talks, but many more that are pseudoscience garbage. Don't even get me started on TEDx. I hope ZeroNet find a better stage for their talk. Perhaps an organizer could contact them.

hollander 10y ago

Several years ago I had Tor running on a server at home. It was a regular Tor node, not an exit node. Later I was put on a blacklist because of this. What is the risk of using this?

JBReefer 10y ago
Would you mind defining "blacklist" in this context? That's kind of scary!
- hollander 10y ago
  Sorry for the late reply. One website didn't work anymore. I mailed them and they reported this as the reason why they blocked me.
glenneroo 10y ago
I ran a relay for years and never noticed any strange behaviour. Where and how were you blacklisted?
- hollander 10y ago
  Sorry for the late reply. One website didn't work anymore. I mailed them and they reported this as the reason why they blocked me.

daliwali 10y ago

I don't see how this could decentralize web applications though. Wouldn't each client have to be running the server software? Someone has to pay for that, too.

bachstelze 10y ago
Yeah every client have to run the software or you use a proxy. If you have a site with many spreads you don't need a running instance. But if you have a an unknown site you would have to run a little server permanently.

vitiral 10y ago

This seems similar to ipfs. What are the main differences?

diggan 10y ago
IPFS is more low-level in terms of that IPFS is a protocol (in reality a collection of protocols) for P2P data transfer. Together with IPLD, you'll get a full suite of protocols and data structures for creating fully distributed P2P applications. ZeroNet is a application for distributing P2P applications, using Bittorrent for the P2P layer. In theory, ZeroNet could leverage IPFS to get a better and more modular stack for the actual connectivity and transfering.
- vitiral 10y ago
  gotcha, thanks for the explanation. It sure seems like they have many similar goals so it makes sense that ZeroNet could leverage IPFS

freedaemon 10y ago

Love the ZeroNet project! Been following them for a year and they've made great progress. One thing that's concerning is the use of Namecoin for registering domains. Little known fact: A single miner has close to 65% or more mining power on Namecoin. Reported in this USENIX ATC'16 paper: https://www.usenix.org/node/196209 https://www.usenix.org/node/196209. Due to this reason some other projects have stopped using Namecoin. I'm curious what the ZeroNet developers think about this issue and how has their experience been so far with Namecoin.

tokenizerrr 10y ago
Also, if you ever lose control of a namecoin domain you can say goodbye to it forever. A squatter will take it instantly and hold on to it forever unless you buy it from them for actual money.
- freedaemon 10y ago
  Has squatting gotten worse on Namecoin? Squatting is fairly hard to handle in decentralized naming systems in general. Namecoin got a lot of squatting issues mostly because of the pricing function (price of names dropped over x years, and now it's almost free to register names). Here is another paper from WEIS'15 that studied squatting in Namecoin: http://randomwalker.info/publications/namespaces.pdf http://randomwalker.info/publications/namespaces.pdf
- marssaxman 10y ago
  Isn't that true of normal domains, too?
  - loup-vaillant 10y ago
    Depends on the toplevel suffix. For instance, .fr (France) domains have a "no taking" period after the expiration date, where nobody can take it from their previous owners. The owner can then take it back, but it won't be re-activated for a couple of weeks, I believe. So the punishment for screwing up is a temporary blackout of your domain name. .com, .net, .org domains are handled differently, and may be easier to lose permanently.

roansh 10y ago

We need more projects like these. Whether this project solves the question of a truly distributed Internet* is out of question. What we need is a movement, a big cognitive investment towards solving the Big Brother problem. *I am referring to concentrated power of the big players here, country-wide firewalls, and bureaucracy towards how/what we use.

fiatjaf 10y ago
We need multiple internets, a big confusion, governments can't handle confusion, but if everything is standardized over Facebook and WhatsApp it's easy for them.
- rdiddly 10y ago
  Agreed - what they like is "legibility" as defined here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call... ZeroNet does appear to take an important step in that direction with decentralization.
- antocv 10y ago
  They can. Well. Look, even if you have multiple internets, decentralized everything, distributed all systems, no more Google no more Facebook. What does the communication patterns in such a system look like? Do you use the system after work before going to sleep? Your and everyone else usage patterns, traffic can be analyzed. The endpoints, many of them would be honeypots run by Spooks, revealing even more what you are up to and giving you a false sense of safety while the Spooks could run the entire decentralized inter-network. So your system would have to fake it somehow, fake requesting some hashes here and there, fake request/post comments and follows. Otherwise, the social data available when the SPOOKS join your social-network even if it is distributed like patchwork on scuttlebot, defeats its purpose. That is what bitmessage does, but then you pay in high bandwidth costs. And yet, you cant just do random shit, random can easily be filtered out so you need more advanced method of finding fake social relations and using those to do fake data to actually conceal what you and everyone else is doing on the interweb. EDIT: Im not saying "give up", its a very worthy cause, just the problem is harder and enters the social space quite fast - the problem is the same as "we are all nice developers and hackers" yet 99% seem to be employed by NSA/similar-services/Google and think they are doing great James Bond like type of jobs, while they are actually anti-hackers and anti-developers, in fact, anti-society.

dillon 10y ago

There's also GNUNet: https://gnunet.org/ https://gnunet.org/ As others have mentioned there's also FreeNet: https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/ I haven't looked deep into any of these projects, but I do think they are neat and hoping at least one of them gains a lot of traction.

zobzu 10y ago
the main difference is that zeronet is fast.
shakna 10y ago
Considering a Freenet user is currently [jailed indefinently](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indefinitely-for-refusing-to-decrypt-hard-drives-loses-appeal/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef...), there does seem to be some problems.

digitalzombie 10y ago

Anybody read this as Netzero the free internet dial up in the 90s?

arcaster 10y ago

This project is cool, but I'm more interested in future releases by the Askasha project.