Hi all, just wanted to introduce myself, and share a bit more about Tahrir, which I believe has been discussed here recently. I'm the founder and coordinator of the Freenet project, perhaps the earliest P2P anti-censorship technology, the first version being released in March 2000. Freenet has been under active development ever since, employing one full-time developer for much of the decade since we began. In a recent survey<http://freedomhouse.org/images/File/special_reports/LOtF_China.pdf>of Chinese anti-censorship tool users, Freenet came out on top, so it seems the project is still very relevant today. One of my more recent projects is called Tahrir. Tahrir was inspired by my conversations over the years about the real needs of democracy activists in a variety of countries that lack freedom of speech, and over a decade of experience building anti-censorship tools (and many many mistakes doing so!). I've realized that many anti-censorship tools lean heavily towards attacking the problems their developers find intellectually stimulating, rather than those actually experienced by people in the trenches. We've certainly been guilty of that from time to time with Freenet. One example of this is that bandwidth can be very limited in many of the countries we are interested in helping, particularly China, and yet most P2P systems treat bandwidth like a near-infinite resource. Tahrir aims to tackle this and other problems head-on. It is an ultra-low-bandwidth secure, decentralized microblogging platform. The initial release is intended to have functionality similar to Twitter, but it will be extensible well beyond that. Initially it will be a desktop app that requires a (slow) internet connection, but down the line it can run on mobile phones, and operate in an "ad-hoc" mode relaying over wifi and other short-range connections. I've been working on Tahrir since March, although other pressures on my time have prevented me from making much progress in recent months. My approach has been ground-up and I've attempted to stick closely to modern best-practices for Java coding. So far I've implemented: - A low-level encrypted reliable UDP transport capable of UDP hole-punching - A very space-efficient serialization mechanism to convert POJOs into bytes and back again - A very convenient RPC mechanism built on top of the above two mechanisms (similar to the approach used by GWT) - A convenient set of cryptographic primitives that integrates nicely with the above You can read more about this architecture here: https://github.com/sanity/tahrir/wiki/Architecture I have been keeping relatively quiet about my work on Tahrir so as not to distract too much attention from Freenet, but I really want to move things forward after several months of dormancy. To do this I primarily need smart Java coders, who I will be happy to bring up to speed on the codebase. The top priority is to get to a working prototype ASAP, and then begin iteratively improving from there (in line with the "release early, release often" open source mantra). You can learn a lot more about what I've done to-date here, in addition to checking out the source code: https://github.com/sanity/tahrir/wiki I'm also very happy to answer any questions anyone might have about Tahrir, and I hope that some of you are interested in helping. Ian. -- Ian Clarke Blog: http://blog.locut.us/ _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE