-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- "Phillip M. Hallam-Baker" <hallam@ai.mit.edu> writes:

Mission:

Singapore and China are blocking certain net groups. I think this is a bad thing, question is how can we stop it? The Web was conceived as offering despots and dictators a choice between remaining in the dark ages and allowing freedom of speech. Blocking and filtering schemes threaten this ideal.

Requirements:

A scheme which makes blocking of individual IP addresses impractical. <snip> Considerations: [i.e. areas needing brainstorming]

1) Copyright. Clearly copyright holders such as CNN etc would need to be involved. Although proxies have long been a part of the Web and the scheme does not threaten their interests it would be as well to get them on board at an early stage.

I believe that the new copyright regs explicitly allow web surfing. Copyright should not be an issue, I think. IANAL.

2) How can one prevent the proxies themselves being blocked? Some ideas that come to mind:

2a) Only issue new sites gradually so that blocking requires continuous updates.

2b) Use DHCP to change network addresses regularly.

2c) Some crypto hack I can't quite work out (hence the post to cypher punks). I can phrase the challenge more compactly though. We have two sets of opposed groups A and M. The A group wish to establish a continued conversation with groups B and C. M is willing to permit communication with group B but not C. Whenever M discovers that a member of group B is willing to act on behalf of group C, M transfers that member to the C group.

The problem is to keep A's channels of communication open despite the efforts of M for very large group sizes.

I'm not sure if this is a pure crypto challenge or a game theory problem.

Secure connections from proxy to client would eliminate driftnet scanning. That's probably about all the crypto. One idea would to put /cgi-bin/redirect in all the distributions of apache, apache-SSL, etc. That way, anyone who cared at all about privacy or was clueless would have an anonymizer on their web server. People who really cared could run web spiders that looked for sites with the redirect, and have cgi-bins that returned a randomized list of 10 or so. They could periodically post the list to semi-relavent newsgroups. The idea here is to reduce the chance of a denial of service attack against the anonymizer pool. The points of attack that I can think of are: 1) Filter out out anonymized connections. Crypto helps solves this one. Of course, then the evil empire filters out crypto, but that's bad for business. 2) Make the list of anonymizers dissappear This is a bit easier for the bad guys. Stego could help solve the problem, especially if combined with crypto. (i.e stego the list, encrypted with a few key underground folks public keys, into a pic of the great wall of china or something. 3) Make it illegal to use anonymizers and enforec randomly. FUD. I dunno how to solve this one. Put anphetamines in the water supply?

Comments? If people are willing to work on this I can provide some facilities and act as a media contact.

Distribution wins. (BTW, look at www.anonymizer.com) Jer "standing on top of the world/ never knew how you never could/ never knew why you never could live/ innocent life that everyone did" -Wormhole -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQB1AwUBMuZwuMkz/YzIV3P5AQEb5gL/aOgddVJ91jtZUPrDcsnqdhOFpKLx1IAH UMZi+HkdB+ZUsRhLxCSy0enpqxikwyFVOMINSr3uLRtYSIcuPK2JFdSACI79yISk 7oZWxwTO5TDMYtbBRAAZv/d9VyCT/EVE =OIEP -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----