Huh? What's this guy's fixation on -illegal- actitivty? The point is anonymous activity (including monetary) that can happen to bypass observation & control by authorities. It may or may not be illegal. The legality, in fact, is largely irrelevant once the transactions start moving through such a blacknet. The reason this matters is precisely because we shouldn't be equating illegal activity with anonymous activity. "You're using a blacknet therefore you're breaking the law". Next we'll be saying that a Tor network is for illegally observing or transmitting information. -TD

From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> To: transhumantech@yahoogroups.com, cypherpunks@jfet.org Subject: [zooko@zooko.com: [p2p-hackers] darknet ~= (blacknet, f2f net)] Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:49:10 +0100

----- Forwarded message from zooko@zooko.com -----

From: zooko@zooko.com Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:03:13 -0400 To: "Peer-to-peer development." <p2p-hackers@zgp.org> Subject: [p2p-hackers] darknet ~= (blacknet, f2f net) Reply-To: zooko@zooko.com, "Peer-to-peer development." <p2p-hackers@zgp.org>

It's a shame that the distinct concepts of "friend-to-friend net" [1] and "blacknet" [2, 3, 4, 5] are being munged together in the media under the rubric "darknet".

The word "darknet" was coined, as far as I know, by Biddle, England, Peinado, Willman [6]. Last time I read their paper, it appeared to me to describe a system like Tim May's Blacknet -- an anonymous, secure, decentralized network which is used to transfer information illegally. It didn't mention anything about using friend-to-friend techniques to build such a network.

However, the media seems to have started using the word "Darknet" to mean a friend-to-friend net and/or a blacknet [7, 8], thus simultaneously making it harder for people to think about blacknets which are based on other than friend-to-friend architectures and making it harder for people to think about friend-to-friend networks which are used for other than illegal information sharing.

I place some of the blame for this development on the Freenet folks, who may be the first to promulgate this munging, and if they aren't the first they're certainly the most effective.

Of course, courting controversy in the mass media is part of the Freenet strategy, and I'm not saying it's a bad strategy.

But oh well. It is too late to change media usage, and it isn't a good idea to maintain technical jargon which is related to but subtly different from media terminology, so how about us technical folks, when we wish to denote a network-used-for-illegal-information-trading, use the original term "blacknet", and when we wish to denote a network-built-on-friend-to-friend, use "friend-to-friend net" or "f2f", and when we wish to refer to both of them together or to confuse visiting reporters, we use "darknet".

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend [2] http://www.privacyexchange.org/iss/confpro/cfpuntraceable.html [3] http://www.ussrback.com/crypto/misc/blacknet.html [4] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ludlow/worries.txt [5] http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/08/msg00538.html [6] http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/msdrm/darknet.htm [7] http://www.darknet.com/ [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@zgp.org http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences

----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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