8 ms·

We need to invent the following things so we can be forever truly free: 1) A secure, peer to peer DNS system with no registrars and a dynamic, heterarchical ne

We need to invent the following things so we can be forever truly free: 1) A secure, peer to peer DNS system with no registrars and a dynamic, heterarchical network of trust. 2) An encrypted version of TCP that we can drop in without anyone noticing. 3) A way of distributing keys for our encrypted transport layer without certificate authorities and again with a dynamic, heterarchical network of trust. 4) A secure, peer to peer, federated social network with all the features that we and the rest of the world want and need. Then we will at least have some breathing space while we work on that whole planetwide wifi mesh thing.

charliesome 15y ago
We've already got Namecoin and Diaspora, but neither appear to be catching on.
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  Namecoin is pretty great, but as with all these things, there's the problem of the network effect. Diaspora has all sorts of problems. With the SSL certificate thing, there's Convergence, which basically solves the whole lot at a stroke. See http://convergence.io/ http://convergence.io/ and the guy's Blackhat talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
  - phodo 15y ago
    "problem of network effect" if you accept the premises that: a) the diaspora's of the world are the solution (or at least a step in the right direction) b) the problem is that of a network effect (translation: the cold start problem) ... then one solution is for a well known, highly trafficked brand, that has nothing to lose, to implement "a". ... a.k.a.... what if someone like yahoo which still has vast reach, but is not a player in social, took something like diaspora and promoted heavily. That would solve the cold start problem.
jakeonthemove 15y ago
But then you'd still be subject to existing laws - it's not like they're going away. With the same amount of effort, you could get the governments to stop making stupid decisions/laws or at least consult someone before they do. But then again, they have tech consultants who never get a say because ruling in favor of those with money is better for the lawmakers' careers or pockets. I do believe that most people are pretty comfortable with the current situation... when it'll start affecting more individuals, then the "anti-" movements will ramp up - it's always been that way...
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  > you could get the governments to stop making stupid decisions/laws I know we live in an age of hitherto unimagined prosperity and wealth and miracles, but you may be reaching a little too far.
  - gnaritas 15y ago
    It's not governments that make stupid decisions, it's people; take the decision away from government, and someone else will make those stupid decisions, but stupid they will be.
    - JoshTriplett 15y ago
      > It's not governments that make stupid decisions, it's people; take the decision away from government, and someone else will make those stupid decisions, but stupid they will be. Except that only a government can make me care what they decide.
      - gnaritas 15y ago
        > Except that only a government can make me care what they decide. Simply not true; it's just that only they can do it legally, but to even say legally, you need a government to enforce legality.
angersock 15y ago
I wouldn't suggest that we need a social network, but your first suggestion isn't too far from the truth. The exact thing needed is very boring, very low-level, and very unsexy, and I believe can be summarized thusly: We need a method for locating hosts on a network graph which does not have a central point of failure and which cannot be easily disabled. We then need a method for authentically routing messages back and forth between these hosts without fear of man-in-the-middle attacks that can change the contents of the messages. This is pure transport-layer engineering. As long as we can locate anyone connected to our network, and communicate with them without interference, we can build whatever else we need to on top of that. We shouldn't confuse our efforts by trying to make a social network, or new hashcoin lottery, or advanced supergovernment, or whatever else. We shouldn't worry about interception of message contents--that way lies madness; as long as I know my message reached somebody in one piece, and as long as they know that a message signed by me is from me, we can fix the rest later. This is a pure, straightforward, fucking hard engineering problem.
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  Yeah, I edited my list to include a CA-free encrypted replacement for TCP, just before I saw your comment. To all the super-geniuses reading this: burn your socialmobilelocal startup to the ground tomorrow and do this instead. Start by watching this Blackhat talk I linked elsewhere in the thread, the guy has the right kind of ideas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
  - dasil003 15y ago
    ie. if you really want to change the world instead of paying lip service to it and going for the money grab, here's one opportunity.
    - nupark2 15y ago
      How do you pay for it? I have a team of capable engineers, and relationships with network/wifi hardware/firmware developers. What I don't have is $2-10M to spend designing open protocols (and building the software), especially with no obvious commercial upside.
naner 15y ago
You can't invent around policy problems.
- angersock 15y ago
  Sir or madam, with that attitude, I'm surprised you are here, in a place called Hacker News. A great many of us make good money working around broken systems and architectures. We live for this shit!
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    And yet when it comes to government enforcement, there seem to be an awful lot of problems we haven't been able to hack around: - Brokenness of patents causing anti-competitive behavior - Absurd copyright laws preventing the building of an untold number of innovative products - The emergence of true competition in the wireless space. I could go on. We're very good at making end runs around corporations, big and small, but mostly because they can't kick your door down in the middle of the night.
- gnaritas 15y ago
  Yes you can, if you make the invention critical before they realize the consequences.
  - ecdavis 15y ago
    The Internet has become critical and "they" are beginning to realise the consequences, which is leading to increasingly invasive and ill-informed policy.
    - vidarh 15y ago
      Yet they're still nowhere near putting the genie back in the bottle, and the internet is so embedded in the economy that they can't, they can only try to minimize the impact. It's time for the next leap - making the internet properly fault tolerant.
1010100101 15y ago
Could it be that some or all of these things either already exist or are possible using existing "tools", but are simply not widely known nor in widespread use? However statements like "all the features that we need or want" are troublesome. How can we possibly agree on those? What if someone built the low-level, _boring_ "platform", and offered a _simple_ (as little code as possible), _old_, boring but workable conceptual vision, then let all the high-level enthusiasts address (argue about) usability and features?
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  >However statements like "all the features that we need or want" are troublesome. How can we possibly agree on those? That last one was the least important and the most flippantly stated (apart from the global mesh network.) >What if someone built the low-level, _boring_ "platform", and offered a _simple_, _old_, boring but workable conceptual vision, then let all the high-level ethusiasts address usability and features? That's exactly what's going (think positive!) to happen, having a p2p facebook is just the last piece of the puzzle, the cherry on the cake.
  - 1010100101 15y ago
    Ah, that's good to know. Now, sadly, I must ask, is someone going to try to make this proprietary and embedded, contained within hermetically sealed hardware enclosures, complete with convoluted bootloader and behavioural studies rootkit, to try to make billions from it? To my knowledge the low-level part can happen right now using freely available code. Is it naive to think we could keep this simple and open? Even the p2p FB piece is possible, assuming you do not need to have 1000's of friends on each of your separate social networks.
    - bobwaycott 15y ago
      Now, sadly, I must ask, is someone going to try to make this proprietary and embedded, contained within hermetically sealed hardware enclosures, complete with convoluted bootloader and behavioural studies rootkit, to try to make billions from it? If the problem is submitted to the market, then yes. That's what the market and capital does. So sad. It'd be great if the world's geeks would stop laboring for the fucking market, increasing the surplus value exacted from their labor, and winding up fucked by their own creations. EDIT: formatting
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
lhnn 15y ago
http://tcpcrypt.org/ http://tcpcrypt.org/ Passive encryption... not the best, it prevents lazy MITM.
nextparadigms 15y ago
The P2P Yacy search engine seems to have been announced very timely.
viraptor 15y ago
I was thinking about 1) and it seems like a really cool idea. If you could also query the sites trusted by some person, that would be like a HN with domains only to some extent (and if you can have any domain you want, you'd probably use one per site, rather than making a hierarchy again). Realistically I probably need only 20 or so domains on a typical day anyways, so that would only require trusting 5 or so other developers.
joejohnson 15y ago
I think that 1-3 are necessities now. I don't know if 4 is.
lancewiggs 15y ago
Or just use a registrar and top level domain that won't respond to the take-down requests. .nz domains, for example, are protected by a rigorous process in a domain (New Zealand) that prevents this sort of thing.
- archangel_one 15y ago
  Do you know how far that goes? No doubt it works against any schlub who comes along asking for a domain to be shut down, but would they really stand against it if the US put serious pressure on them for hosting thepiratebay.org.nz?
granitepail 15y ago
If it were more usable, I'd point towards Freenet. They've been at building a system like this since 2000 -- it's just a shame it runs so slowly.
jamesgeck0 15y ago
Sounds like a great project for Mozilla to jump on. I'm slightly surprised they don't appear to have worked on this problem before. Or have they?
spoiledtechie 15y ago
Sounds like you know exactly what is needed. Why not start the process of making this happen? Where would one need to begin to have a secure peer to peer DNS system?
RobertKohr 15y ago
1) Namecoin - http://dot-bit.org/ http://dot-bit.org/ 2) Tor 3) I think 1 & 2 should solve this. 4) This probably isn't that difficult to implement on top of Tor.

charliesome 15y ago

We've already got Namecoin and Diaspora, but neither appear to be catching on.

JonnieCache 15y ago
Namecoin is pretty great, but as with all these things, there's the problem of the network effect. Diaspora has all sorts of problems. With the SSL certificate thing, there's Convergence, which basically solves the whole lot at a stroke. See http://convergence.io/ http://convergence.io/ and the guy's Blackhat talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
- phodo 15y ago
  "problem of network effect" if you accept the premises that: a) the diaspora's of the world are the solution (or at least a step in the right direction) b) the problem is that of a network effect (translation: the cold start problem) ... then one solution is for a well known, highly trafficked brand, that has nothing to lose, to implement "a". ... a.k.a.... what if someone like yahoo which still has vast reach, but is not a player in social, took something like diaspora and promoted heavily. That would solve the cold start problem.

jakeonthemove 15y ago

But then you'd still be subject to existing laws - it's not like they're going away. With the same amount of effort, you could get the governments to stop making stupid decisions/laws or at least consult someone before they do. But then again, they have tech consultants who never get a say because ruling in favor of those with money is better for the lawmakers' careers or pockets. I do believe that most people are pretty comfortable with the current situation... when it'll start affecting more individuals, then the "anti-" movements will ramp up - it's always been that way...

pavel_lishin 15y ago
> you could get the governments to stop making stupid decisions/laws I know we live in an age of hitherto unimagined prosperity and wealth and miracles, but you may be reaching a little too far.
- gnaritas 15y ago
  It's not governments that make stupid decisions, it's people; take the decision away from government, and someone else will make those stupid decisions, but stupid they will be.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    > It's not governments that make stupid decisions, it's people; take the decision away from government, and someone else will make those stupid decisions, but stupid they will be. Except that only a government can make me care what they decide.
    - gnaritas 15y ago
      > Except that only a government can make me care what they decide. Simply not true; it's just that only they can do it legally, but to even say legally, you need a government to enforce legality.

angersock 15y ago

I wouldn't suggest that we need a social network, but your first suggestion isn't too far from the truth. The exact thing needed is very boring, very low-level, and very unsexy, and I believe can be summarized thusly: We need a method for locating hosts on a network graph which does not have a central point of failure and which cannot be easily disabled. We then need a method for authentically routing messages back and forth between these hosts without fear of man-in-the-middle attacks that can change the contents of the messages. This is pure transport-layer engineering. As long as we can locate anyone connected to our network, and communicate with them without interference, we can build whatever else we need to on top of that. We shouldn't confuse our efforts by trying to make a social network, or new hashcoin lottery, or advanced supergovernment, or whatever else. We shouldn't worry about interception of message contents--that way lies madness; as long as I know my message reached somebody in one piece, and as long as they know that a message signed by me is from me, we can fix the rest later. This is a pure, straightforward, fucking hard engineering problem.

JonnieCache 15y ago
Yeah, I edited my list to include a CA-free encrypted replacement for TCP, just before I saw your comment. To all the super-geniuses reading this: burn your socialmobilelocal startup to the ground tomorrow and do this instead. Start by watching this Blackhat talk I linked elsewhere in the thread, the guy has the right kind of ideas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
- dasil003 15y ago
  ie. if you really want to change the world instead of paying lip service to it and going for the money grab, here's one opportunity.
  - nupark2 15y ago
    How do you pay for it? I have a team of capable engineers, and relationships with network/wifi hardware/firmware developers. What I don't have is $2-10M to spend designing open protocols (and building the software), especially with no obvious commercial upside.

naner 15y ago

You can't invent around policy problems.

angersock 15y ago
Sir or madam, with that attitude, I'm surprised you are here, in a place called Hacker News. A great many of us make good money working around broken systems and architectures. We live for this shit!
- potatolicious 15y ago
  And yet when it comes to government enforcement, there seem to be an awful lot of problems we haven't been able to hack around: - Brokenness of patents causing anti-competitive behavior - Absurd copyright laws preventing the building of an untold number of innovative products - The emergence of true competition in the wireless space. I could go on. We're very good at making end runs around corporations, big and small, but mostly because they can't kick your door down in the middle of the night.
gnaritas 15y ago
Yes you can, if you make the invention critical before they realize the consequences.
- ecdavis 15y ago
  The Internet has become critical and "they" are beginning to realise the consequences, which is leading to increasingly invasive and ill-informed policy.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    Yet they're still nowhere near putting the genie back in the bottle, and the internet is so embedded in the economy that they can't, they can only try to minimize the impact. It's time for the next leap - making the internet properly fault tolerant.

1010100101 15y ago

Could it be that some or all of these things either already exist or are possible using existing "tools", but are simply not widely known nor in widespread use? However statements like "all the features that we need or want" are troublesome. How can we possibly agree on those? What if someone built the low-level, _boring_ "platform", and offered a _simple_ (as little code as possible), _old_, boring but workable conceptual vision, then let all the high-level enthusiasts address (argue about) usability and features?

JonnieCache 15y ago
>However statements like "all the features that we need or want" are troublesome. How can we possibly agree on those? That last one was the least important and the most flippantly stated (apart from the global mesh network.) >What if someone built the low-level, _boring_ "platform", and offered a _simple_, _old_, boring but workable conceptual vision, then let all the high-level ethusiasts address usability and features? That's exactly what's going (think positive!) to happen, having a p2p facebook is just the last piece of the puzzle, the cherry on the cake.
- 1010100101 15y ago
  Ah, that's good to know. Now, sadly, I must ask, is someone going to try to make this proprietary and embedded, contained within hermetically sealed hardware enclosures, complete with convoluted bootloader and behavioural studies rootkit, to try to make billions from it? To my knowledge the low-level part can happen right now using freely available code. Is it naive to think we could keep this simple and open? Even the p2p FB piece is possible, assuming you do not need to have 1000's of friends on each of your separate social networks.
  - bobwaycott 15y ago
    Now, sadly, I must ask, is someone going to try to make this proprietary and embedded, contained within hermetically sealed hardware enclosures, complete with convoluted bootloader and behavioural studies rootkit, to try to make billions from it? If the problem is submitted to the market, then yes. That's what the market and capital does. So sad. It'd be great if the world's geeks would stop laboring for the fucking market, increasing the surplus value exacted from their labor, and winding up fucked by their own creations. EDIT: formatting

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

lhnn 15y ago

http://tcpcrypt.org/ http://tcpcrypt.org/ Passive encryption... not the best, it prevents lazy MITM.

nextparadigms 15y ago

The P2P Yacy search engine seems to have been announced very timely.

viraptor 15y ago

I was thinking about 1) and it seems like a really cool idea. If you could also query the sites trusted by some person, that would be like a HN with domains only to some extent (and if you can have any domain you want, you'd probably use one per site, rather than making a hierarchy again). Realistically I probably need only 20 or so domains on a typical day anyways, so that would only require trusting 5 or so other developers.

joejohnson 15y ago

I think that 1-3 are necessities now. I don't know if 4 is.

lancewiggs 15y ago

Or just use a registrar and top level domain that won't respond to the take-down requests. .nz domains, for example, are protected by a rigorous process in a domain (New Zealand) that prevents this sort of thing.

archangel_one 15y ago
Do you know how far that goes? No doubt it works against any schlub who comes along asking for a domain to be shut down, but would they really stand against it if the US put serious pressure on them for hosting thepiratebay.org.nz?

granitepail 15y ago

If it were more usable, I'd point towards Freenet. They've been at building a system like this since 2000 -- it's just a shame it runs so slowly.

jamesgeck0 15y ago

Sounds like a great project for Mozilla to jump on. I'm slightly surprised they don't appear to have worked on this problem before. Or have they?

spoiledtechie 15y ago

Sounds like you know exactly what is needed. Why not start the process of making this happen? Where would one need to begin to have a secure peer to peer DNS system?

RobertKohr 15y ago

1) Namecoin - http://dot-bit.org/ http://dot-bit.org/ 2) Tor 3) I think 1 & 2 should solve this. 4) This probably isn't that difficult to implement on top of Tor.