4 ms·

The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they

The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth." So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.

zzalpha 9y ago
How so? If it's under individual control, you'll just end up with sub-networks where people will agree to distribute that type of content. You cannot pair anonymity and security with censorship. They are fundamentally incompatible. So either accept that nasty content will be out there, or acknowledge that you don't actually want perfect anonymity and security.
- saurik 9y ago
  FWIW, if you look at Tor, Facebook now runs a hidden service that allows people to access Facebook's website. This is essentially the same thing as someone having provided a number of exit nodes that will only route to Facebook. The problem, though, is that this requires the client and maybe even the website to be modified to use the .onion URLs for all accesses back to the site (at least, any absolute URL on the site back to the site will cause a problem). I will personally contend that it is worth it to allow Facebook to do this, or to allow anyone to do this for any website, in order to get more people using the network for everything, as the more users you can get using the service to do normal traffic the more easily you can hide everyone. This is particularly noticeable given that in some countries, such as the United States where I live, simply accessing the Tor website to download Tor will end up flagging you for further monitoring. If Tor had only as many users and exit nodes as it does right now, but additionally had, for example, a billion people in China accessing Wikipedia through exit nodes that refused to go anywhere but Wikipedia, that makes a world of difference. As it stands, people are actually actively discouraged and even shamed for using Tor to access random websites or ones that use a lot of bandwidth, as that means that they are using (or even "abusing") a limited amount of donated bandwidth that somehow needs to be reserved for those who "really need it" (and thereby, will be targeted just for that). https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-nsa-targets-tor-users https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-ns...
saurik 9y ago
That is absolutely our intention! While users who run nodes can choose to forward content to anywhere on the Internet, we want to provide people a feeling of control over the usage of their bandwidth, as we believe that (along with being paid to forward traffic!) will increase the number of people who are willing to provide bandwidth to the service. Being able to say "I am only willing to help users get to Wikipedia, or the New York Times" is something that we think is very important to being able to have enough people using the service to provide the levels of security needed for everyone on the network.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > While users who run nodes can choose to forward content to anywhere on the Internet, we want to provide people a feeling of control ... Are you concerned that, 1. If node operators have the power to control content, they will be held responsible for the content by authorities? For example, consider a node operator in mainland China who allows access to criticism of President Xi. 2. Unpopular content will be censored by node operators just like it is now by more centralized powers?
  - saurik 9y ago
    As these are more answers of opinion rather than factual questions about the network, I'm going to add a massive disclaimer here that "opinions may differ about what is or is not concerning". 1) No, because I would personally advise people in China do not whitelist sites whose purpose is to access such content. It is not even clear to me that people in China would want to run an exit node at all. There are billions of people in the world in countries other than China that can run exit nodes for that content so people in China will be able to access it without fear, and without anyone in China taking on that level of liability. 2) No, but with the great benefit that because everyone is using the same network, even if somehow (and I do not think this will be the case) there are only a small number of nodes willing to access that content (and one would expect that, in the eventual limit, this number should not be smaller than the number of Tor exit nodes that currently exist; though again: I think it will be much larger), then they will be cloaked within the content everyone else is accessing. Essentially, it doesn't work to say "people who need access to a secure messaging service should use a secure protocol and everyone else can use Snapchat", and it also doesn't work to say "people who need to access criticism of President Xi can use Tor and everyone else can use the regular Internet". I want a billion people who are also doing things that would be considered insane on Tor--like browsing Netflix!--to be using this service, and to pull that off we need lots of exit nodes, which in turn means incentivized traffic and whitelists. Put another way: I don't care if there are only 0.0001% of nodes that let you access criticism of President Xi if that is 0.0001% of some insanely large number and the result is "at least as many nodes as Tor", as that itself solves the #1 problem using Tor: that even accessing the Tor website already marks you as someone who is suspicious (as it is here in the United States and the surveillance programs we see). https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-nsa-targets-tor-users https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-ns...
throwawaysml 9y ago
For that purpose I would think optional whitelisting would make more sense. Instead of spyware lists you subscribe to in uBlock Origin, you would subscribe to a vetted, whitelist of known to be generally acceptable Orchid content. Others might want to have empty filter list to be a complete transit/peer. Therefore I don't think there's much room for users who want to blacklist but are not rather looking for a whitelist. The blacklist will grow and grow, while the whitelist size will be pretty stable. That said, I haven't used it, so the implemented blacklist approach might already support the above cases and be sufficient.
- saurik 9y ago
  FWIW, as the person who has been doing the initial implementation, I can tell you that we currently only have a whitelist. I can appreciate why the person who was editing the FAQ for the website put in the world "blacklist" as it makes the sentence flow really well, but I agree with you about the issues (and there are also problems doing the distributed hashtable search to find nodes that don't have some property rather than ones that do have some property). I will poke about this to see if I can get it changed ASAP!
- kirillseva 9y ago
  If you're only using a "stable whitelist" of websites on the internet then you're not the target audience
  - throwawaysml 9y ago
    I know what you mean, but for this to be more widely used than Tor there is a need for me to know that nodes I operate only process stuff that won't be identified by 3rd party to sue me into a jail or financial ruin. When I say whitelist, I do assume prefixes in the DHT (or whatever design they're using) can be used, as otherwise the whitelist may also grow too big to be practical. If however it will gain the concept of domains or such (which is also kinda a prefix), a whitelist will also be more practical. Tor exit nodes are not operated by many in various places where they would/could because of concerns of the exit node addresses being enough to legally ruin operators' lives, even though technically it's a pure transit. Nobody sues the county because someone committed vehicular manslaughter on their public road. But because laws are skewed against the Internet right now, all someone needs is an exit node IP to make you regret. If, and there's little to analyze/go by right now public, nodes and everyone is totally oblivious to what packets are transmitted; and if also the packets stored on nodes' disks are encrypted/sealed, then one could assume a filterless system to be practical. This is all speculation, based on the little info there is. I really hope the team has come up with better designs that obliviate the concerns surrounding Tor, and ideally also not suffer from Freenet like slowness. EDIT: Of course, once you have a filter, you will need to deal with the responsibility like Youtube does. If you do not know what's on disk or passing through, which is the ideal technically, then it would be best for the Internet and free communication. So, I'm not sure if a filter is a good idea, if that means you get subpoena'd and held liable for enabling one too many whitelist subscriptions.

zzalpha 9y ago

How so? If it's under individual control, you'll just end up with sub-networks where people will agree to distribute that type of content. You cannot pair anonymity and security with censorship. They are fundamentally incompatible. So either accept that nasty content will be out there, or acknowledge that you don't actually want perfect anonymity and security.

saurik 9y ago
FWIW, if you look at Tor, Facebook now runs a hidden service that allows people to access Facebook's website. This is essentially the same thing as someone having provided a number of exit nodes that will only route to Facebook. The problem, though, is that this requires the client and maybe even the website to be modified to use the .onion URLs for all accesses back to the site (at least, any absolute URL on the site back to the site will cause a problem). I will personally contend that it is worth it to allow Facebook to do this, or to allow anyone to do this for any website, in order to get more people using the network for everything, as the more users you can get using the service to do normal traffic the more easily you can hide everyone. This is particularly noticeable given that in some countries, such as the United States where I live, simply accessing the Tor website to download Tor will end up flagging you for further monitoring. If Tor had only as many users and exit nodes as it does right now, but additionally had, for example, a billion people in China accessing Wikipedia through exit nodes that refused to go anywhere but Wikipedia, that makes a world of difference. As it stands, people are actually actively discouraged and even shamed for using Tor to access random websites or ones that use a lot of bandwidth, as that means that they are using (or even "abusing") a limited amount of donated bandwidth that somehow needs to be reserved for those who "really need it" (and thereby, will be targeted just for that). https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-nsa-targets-tor-users https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-ns...

saurik 9y ago

That is absolutely our intention! While users who run nodes can choose to forward content to anywhere on the Internet, we want to provide people a feeling of control over the usage of their bandwidth, as we believe that (along with being paid to forward traffic!) will increase the number of people who are willing to provide bandwidth to the service. Being able to say "I am only willing to help users get to Wikipedia, or the New York Times" is something that we think is very important to being able to have enough people using the service to provide the levels of security needed for everyone on the network.

forapurpose 9y ago
> While users who run nodes can choose to forward content to anywhere on the Internet, we want to provide people a feeling of control ... Are you concerned that, 1. If node operators have the power to control content, they will be held responsible for the content by authorities? For example, consider a node operator in mainland China who allows access to criticism of President Xi. 2. Unpopular content will be censored by node operators just like it is now by more centralized powers?
- saurik 9y ago
  As these are more answers of opinion rather than factual questions about the network, I'm going to add a massive disclaimer here that "opinions may differ about what is or is not concerning". 1) No, because I would personally advise people in China do not whitelist sites whose purpose is to access such content. It is not even clear to me that people in China would want to run an exit node at all. There are billions of people in the world in countries other than China that can run exit nodes for that content so people in China will be able to access it without fear, and without anyone in China taking on that level of liability. 2) No, but with the great benefit that because everyone is using the same network, even if somehow (and I do not think this will be the case) there are only a small number of nodes willing to access that content (and one would expect that, in the eventual limit, this number should not be smaller than the number of Tor exit nodes that currently exist; though again: I think it will be much larger), then they will be cloaked within the content everyone else is accessing. Essentially, it doesn't work to say "people who need access to a secure messaging service should use a secure protocol and everyone else can use Snapchat", and it also doesn't work to say "people who need to access criticism of President Xi can use Tor and everyone else can use the regular Internet". I want a billion people who are also doing things that would be considered insane on Tor--like browsing Netflix!--to be using this service, and to pull that off we need lots of exit nodes, which in turn means incentivized traffic and whitelists. Put another way: I don't care if there are only 0.0001% of nodes that let you access criticism of President Xi if that is 0.0001% of some insanely large number and the result is "at least as many nodes as Tor", as that itself solves the #1 problem using Tor: that even accessing the Tor website already marks you as someone who is suspicious (as it is here in the United States and the surveillance programs we see). https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-nsa-targets-tor-users https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-ns...

throwawaysml 9y ago

For that purpose I would think optional whitelisting would make more sense. Instead of spyware lists you subscribe to in uBlock Origin, you would subscribe to a vetted, whitelist of known to be generally acceptable Orchid content. Others might want to have empty filter list to be a complete transit/peer. Therefore I don't think there's much room for users who want to blacklist but are not rather looking for a whitelist. The blacklist will grow and grow, while the whitelist size will be pretty stable. That said, I haven't used it, so the implemented blacklist approach might already support the above cases and be sufficient.

saurik 9y ago
FWIW, as the person who has been doing the initial implementation, I can tell you that we currently only have a whitelist. I can appreciate why the person who was editing the FAQ for the website put in the world "blacklist" as it makes the sentence flow really well, but I agree with you about the issues (and there are also problems doing the distributed hashtable search to find nodes that don't have some property rather than ones that do have some property). I will poke about this to see if I can get it changed ASAP!
kirillseva 9y ago
If you're only using a "stable whitelist" of websites on the internet then you're not the target audience
- throwawaysml 9y ago
  I know what you mean, but for this to be more widely used than Tor there is a need for me to know that nodes I operate only process stuff that won't be identified by 3rd party to sue me into a jail or financial ruin. When I say whitelist, I do assume prefixes in the DHT (or whatever design they're using) can be used, as otherwise the whitelist may also grow too big to be practical. If however it will gain the concept of domains or such (which is also kinda a prefix), a whitelist will also be more practical. Tor exit nodes are not operated by many in various places where they would/could because of concerns of the exit node addresses being enough to legally ruin operators' lives, even though technically it's a pure transit. Nobody sues the county because someone committed vehicular manslaughter on their public road. But because laws are skewed against the Internet right now, all someone needs is an exit node IP to make you regret. If, and there's little to analyze/go by right now public, nodes and everyone is totally oblivious to what packets are transmitted; and if also the packets stored on nodes' disks are encrypted/sealed, then one could assume a filterless system to be practical. This is all speculation, based on the little info there is. I really hope the team has come up with better designs that obliviate the concerns surrounding Tor, and ideally also not suffer from Freenet like slowness. EDIT: Of course, once you have a filter, you will need to deal with the responsibility like Youtube does. If you do not know what's on disk or passing through, which is the ideal technically, then it would be best for the Internet and free communication. So, I'm not sure if a filter is a good idea, if that means you get subpoena'd and held liable for enabling one too many whitelist subscriptions.