9 ms·

A Censorship-Resistant Web

83 points by panarky 16y ago

jdp23 16y ago
It's ambitious, but between Tor, Freenet, and other building blocks there's a lot to start with. Seems like a great Summer of Code project.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Freenet is great as an uncensorable web-like-system. But it's kind of monolithic. It would be nice to build a freenet-like system out of modular parts. I think Tribble has the beginnings of something like this. http://www.tribler.org/ http://www.tribler.org/ It overlays a "gossip network" on top of the bittorent protocol. I'd see the ideal uncensorable Internet as consisting of fall-backs from the ordinary protocols and processes. If the user can't find the DNS of a site, they look using an alternative dns system. If they can't find the IP, they use something like Tribble to find the thing. This would be done as a browser plugin. Another piece would be to have particular authors embed their public keys into whatever text they write. A user could search with Tribble or whatever for more works by that author out of outside of ordinary web search. Such a system would verify authorship and "source" without the need for a centralized certificating authority.
borism 16y ago
If you're reading this, care and have some spare bandwidth, may I suggest you set up Tor relay? Because you know, Tor wouldn't be possible without people and organisations willing to volunteer. The setup is pretty trivial with Vidalia UI and UPnP router, and you don't have to be using Tor yourself.
- anamax 16y ago
  It may soon be even easier than that. http://www.geekosystem.com/tor-router/ http://www.geekosystem.com/tor-router/
  - getsat 16y ago
    This is great! I'm hoping that it does, in fact, allow you to run as a relay with the option to run as an exit node. Running a relay is nowhere near as (potentially) legally problematic as running an exit node based upon what I've read.
- igravious 16y ago
  I have 2 problems with Tor relays even though I am essentially (strongly) in favour of the idea of distributing our information load to protect privacy. 1) I am a student, I use the bandwidth of the campus - could my position as a student be hurt by some of the material that flows through Tor? What I am saying here is that really one should not run a Tor relay unless you are paying for your own bandwidth. 2) I am uneasy about what kind of information I might inadvertently relay. Some of the information could be very objectionable, very unethical, downright criminal, couldn't it? I would love to think that my Tor relay is being used 100% by victims of oppressed regimes but I have a feeling other less desirable types would use it too and I don't want to be a part of that. How would you respond to these observations / queries ?
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    "I would love to think that my Tor relay is being used 100% by victims of oppressed regimes but I have a feeling other less desirable types would use it too and I don't want to be a part of that." How else could it work, though? If it is indeed anonymous then a) you have no way of knowing to what ends it is serving, and b) it is eminently usable by people doing very objectionable, very unethical, downright criminal things. But that's the only way it could be of true value to victims of oppressed regimes, etc. You'll have to weigh the net gain or loss.
    - borism 16y ago
      2) by being Tor relay, well, you relay traffic for other Tor users. If you find some content objectionable (be it child pornography or cnn.com) you can block that content from being reachable to your relay with other tools (ip/dns blacklisting, content filtering etc.). Your relay will then be relaying content you haven't blocked. 1) ownership of bandwidth is a gray area. I run my Tor relay on the ISP link I pay for, but that doesn't necessarily mean I own the link or it's alright by ISP's ToS. But as long as you're not using most up/downlink 24x7 (not possible on most home links due to asymmetry anyway), I think ISPs won't bother counter-measuring you.
      - 16y ago
some1else 16y ago
We could start by making a browser plugin that lets users report suspected censorship, and provide alternate domains or ip's for the site.
- drdaeman 16y ago
  Replacing one authority (ICANN and their subsidized registrars) with another (plugin authors) is not a real solution. With automated submissions, scammers of all sorts won't take long, trying their best to report that google.com is censored and real Google is now at xxxbestsearchenginexxx.net. A sufficiently large botnet operation is hardly distinguishable from valid mass reports. On the other hand, censors would also be very happy to submit thousands of completely fake reports to give system some hard time trying to find what's really going on. They may go as far as creating WikiLeaks-looking fake sites, containing bogus dummy papers instead of the troublesome content (so having digital signatures on site contents is a must). Building a system, capable to successfully withstand such attacks is extremely hard. And average Aunt Tillie won't install any complicated software or use anything with UI much harder than "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at wikileaks.com. This site seem to be under the US government censorship, so please click here for the list of mirrors." Which seems to be inherently incompatible with actually required level of security and censorship-resistance.
rmc 16y ago
This is inspired by the recent Wikileaks censoring, however it doesn't solve the problem they had. This scheme seems to make it hard for someone to interstate another site, however that wasn't wikileaks' problem, their problem was that people were able to shut down their hosting.
- gbhn 16y ago
  Another big problem in the Wikileaks case is the ability of adversaries to make it much harder for supporters to give them money or other forms of support.
  - rmc 16y ago
    I wonder do wikileaks accept bitcoins. And if so, does they then sell those bitcoins for dollars/euro to raise money?
jeremymims 16y ago
Wikileaks is like Napster. It's a single point that can be taken down. The future of "leaking" or whistleblowing will look much more like the bittorrent sites that came after it. The governments don't realize it yet, but having Wikileaks as a focal point was a benefit because it could presumably be negotiated with. Wikileaks has actively attempted to prevent people from being physically hurt or killed by classified leaks by working through journalists and factcheckers at newspapers and magazines to redact some information. However, mere embarrassment isn't a quality standard by which to withhold information from the public. Other groups won't necessarily be so discerning. The governments trying to prevent Wikileaks from operating will ultimately be faced with much more distributed and fragmented leaking sites.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  The governments don't realize it yet, but having Wikileaks as a focal point was a benefit because it could presumably be negotiated with. I am not sure that government doesn't realize this. I suspect that government has to talk as if Wikileaks is the devil for it's own credibility regardless of the benefit they might perceive they're deriving from the situation or how much worse the situation might turn out for them later. In fact, having a fixed enemy to freeze and discredit is immensely useful. Makes you wonder why they haven't found Bin Laden yet... ...Perhaps Wikileaks will exist forever with Julian Assange continually shunted from country to country while all manner of intelligence agencies think-up new ways to discredit and/or control him. Or Perhaps he can just join Osama "somewhere in Pakistan"... well, it would make a fine movie...
  - notahacker 16y ago
    Whilst talking tough and doing nothing is probably the most sensible position as well as the default, I don't think "the governments" are sufficiently co-ordinated to have a coherent strategy for dealing with centralised whistleblowers. I'm sure there are some agencies motivated to get carefully selected (and quite possibly false) helpful material "leaked" onto Wikileaks whilst other agencies sincerely do what they can to try to get the operation shut down. Net result: a huge amount of attention is drawn to Wikileaks by leaning on their support network despite the relative lack of dynamite and large amount of noise in what is leaked, but some of the most ardent supporters of government policy amongst the general public are too angry with the very existence of the website to consider reading it...
dododo 16y ago
this reminds me of ross anderson's eternity service from ~1997: The Internet was designed to provide a communications channel that is as resistant to denial of service attacks as human ingenuity can make it. In this note, we propose the construction of a storage medium with similar properties. The basic idea is to use redundancy and scattering techniques to replicate data across a large set of machines (such as the Internet), and add anonymity mechanisms to drive up the cost of selective service denial attacks. The detailed design of this service is an interesting scientific problem, and is not merely academic: the service may be vital in safeguarding individual rights against new threats posed by the spread of electronic publishing. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/eternity/eternity.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/eternity/eternity.html an implementation of which can be found here (also from similar time): http://www.cypherspace.org/eternity/ http://www.cypherspace.org/eternity/
aristus 16y ago
A cool thing about this design is that it also allows for redundant, independent internet archives. But some of those pieces look like they are interlocking instead of stacked. I also don't quite get how you can assume the existence of a non-evil, non-coercible certificate authority.

83 points by panarky 16y ago

jdp23 16y ago

It's ambitious, but between Tor, Freenet, and other building blocks there's a lot to start with. Seems like a great Summer of Code project.

joe_the_user 16y ago
Freenet is great as an uncensorable web-like-system. But it's kind of monolithic. It would be nice to build a freenet-like system out of modular parts. I think Tribble has the beginnings of something like this. http://www.tribler.org/ http://www.tribler.org/ It overlays a "gossip network" on top of the bittorent protocol. I'd see the ideal uncensorable Internet as consisting of fall-backs from the ordinary protocols and processes. If the user can't find the DNS of a site, they look using an alternative dns system. If they can't find the IP, they use something like Tribble to find the thing. This would be done as a browser plugin. Another piece would be to have particular authors embed their public keys into whatever text they write. A user could search with Tribble or whatever for more works by that author out of outside of ordinary web search. Such a system would verify authorship and "source" without the need for a centralized certificating authority.

borism 16y ago

If you're reading this, care and have some spare bandwidth, may I suggest you set up Tor relay? Because you know, Tor wouldn't be possible without people and organisations willing to volunteer. The setup is pretty trivial with Vidalia UI and UPnP router, and you don't have to be using Tor yourself.

anamax 16y ago
It may soon be even easier than that. http://www.geekosystem.com/tor-router/ http://www.geekosystem.com/tor-router/
- getsat 16y ago
  This is great! I'm hoping that it does, in fact, allow you to run as a relay with the option to run as an exit node. Running a relay is nowhere near as (potentially) legally problematic as running an exit node based upon what I've read.
igravious 16y ago
I have 2 problems with Tor relays even though I am essentially (strongly) in favour of the idea of distributing our information load to protect privacy. 1) I am a student, I use the bandwidth of the campus - could my position as a student be hurt by some of the material that flows through Tor? What I am saying here is that really one should not run a Tor relay unless you are paying for your own bandwidth. 2) I am uneasy about what kind of information I might inadvertently relay. Some of the information could be very objectionable, very unethical, downright criminal, couldn't it? I would love to think that my Tor relay is being used 100% by victims of oppressed regimes but I have a feeling other less desirable types would use it too and I don't want to be a part of that. How would you respond to these observations / queries ?
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  "I would love to think that my Tor relay is being used 100% by victims of oppressed regimes but I have a feeling other less desirable types would use it too and I don't want to be a part of that." How else could it work, though? If it is indeed anonymous then a) you have no way of knowing to what ends it is serving, and b) it is eminently usable by people doing very objectionable, very unethical, downright criminal things. But that's the only way it could be of true value to victims of oppressed regimes, etc. You'll have to weigh the net gain or loss.
  - borism 16y ago
    2) by being Tor relay, well, you relay traffic for other Tor users. If you find some content objectionable (be it child pornography or cnn.com) you can block that content from being reachable to your relay with other tools (ip/dns blacklisting, content filtering etc.). Your relay will then be relaying content you haven't blocked. 1) ownership of bandwidth is a gray area. I run my Tor relay on the ISP link I pay for, but that doesn't necessarily mean I own the link or it's alright by ISP's ToS. But as long as you're not using most up/downlink 24x7 (not possible on most home links due to asymmetry anyway), I think ISPs won't bother counter-measuring you.
    - 16y ago

some1else 16y ago

We could start by making a browser plugin that lets users report suspected censorship, and provide alternate domains or ip's for the site.

drdaeman 16y ago
Replacing one authority (ICANN and their subsidized registrars) with another (plugin authors) is not a real solution. With automated submissions, scammers of all sorts won't take long, trying their best to report that google.com is censored and real Google is now at xxxbestsearchenginexxx.net. A sufficiently large botnet operation is hardly distinguishable from valid mass reports. On the other hand, censors would also be very happy to submit thousands of completely fake reports to give system some hard time trying to find what's really going on. They may go as far as creating WikiLeaks-looking fake sites, containing bogus dummy papers instead of the troublesome content (so having digital signatures on site contents is a must). Building a system, capable to successfully withstand such attacks is extremely hard. And average Aunt Tillie won't install any complicated software or use anything with UI much harder than "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at wikileaks.com. This site seem to be under the US government censorship, so please click here for the list of mirrors." Which seems to be inherently incompatible with actually required level of security and censorship-resistance.

rmc 16y ago

This is inspired by the recent Wikileaks censoring, however it doesn't solve the problem they had. This scheme seems to make it hard for someone to interstate another site, however that wasn't wikileaks' problem, their problem was that people were able to shut down their hosting.

gbhn 16y ago
Another big problem in the Wikileaks case is the ability of adversaries to make it much harder for supporters to give them money or other forms of support.
- rmc 16y ago
  I wonder do wikileaks accept bitcoins. And if so, does they then sell those bitcoins for dollars/euro to raise money?

jeremymims 16y ago

Wikileaks is like Napster. It's a single point that can be taken down. The future of "leaking" or whistleblowing will look much more like the bittorrent sites that came after it. The governments don't realize it yet, but having Wikileaks as a focal point was a benefit because it could presumably be negotiated with. Wikileaks has actively attempted to prevent people from being physically hurt or killed by classified leaks by working through journalists and factcheckers at newspapers and magazines to redact some information. However, mere embarrassment isn't a quality standard by which to withhold information from the public. Other groups won't necessarily be so discerning. The governments trying to prevent Wikileaks from operating will ultimately be faced with much more distributed and fragmented leaking sites.

joe_the_user 16y ago
The governments don't realize it yet, but having Wikileaks as a focal point was a benefit because it could presumably be negotiated with. I am not sure that government doesn't realize this. I suspect that government has to talk as if Wikileaks is the devil for it's own credibility regardless of the benefit they might perceive they're deriving from the situation or how much worse the situation might turn out for them later. In fact, having a fixed enemy to freeze and discredit is immensely useful. Makes you wonder why they haven't found Bin Laden yet... ...Perhaps Wikileaks will exist forever with Julian Assange continually shunted from country to country while all manner of intelligence agencies think-up new ways to discredit and/or control him. Or Perhaps he can just join Osama "somewhere in Pakistan"... well, it would make a fine movie...
- notahacker 16y ago
  Whilst talking tough and doing nothing is probably the most sensible position as well as the default, I don't think "the governments" are sufficiently co-ordinated to have a coherent strategy for dealing with centralised whistleblowers. I'm sure there are some agencies motivated to get carefully selected (and quite possibly false) helpful material "leaked" onto Wikileaks whilst other agencies sincerely do what they can to try to get the operation shut down. Net result: a huge amount of attention is drawn to Wikileaks by leaning on their support network despite the relative lack of dynamite and large amount of noise in what is leaked, but some of the most ardent supporters of government policy amongst the general public are too angry with the very existence of the website to consider reading it...

dododo 16y ago

this reminds me of ross anderson's eternity service from ~1997: The Internet was designed to provide a communications channel that is as resistant to denial of service attacks as human ingenuity can make it. In this note, we propose the construction of a storage medium with similar properties. The basic idea is to use redundancy and scattering techniques to replicate data across a large set of machines (such as the Internet), and add anonymity mechanisms to drive up the cost of selective service denial attacks. The detailed design of this service is an interesting scientific problem, and is not merely academic: the service may be vital in safeguarding individual rights against new threats posed by the spread of electronic publishing. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/eternity/eternity.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/eternity/eternity.html an implementation of which can be found here (also from similar time): http://www.cypherspace.org/eternity/ http://www.cypherspace.org/eternity/

aristus 16y ago

A cool thing about this design is that it also allows for redundant, independent internet archives. But some of those pieces look like they are interlocking instead of stacked. I also don't quite get how you can assume the existence of a non-evil, non-coercible certificate authority.