Re: [Freedombox-discuss] Dumb idea: Alternative to Tor that promotes good behavior

On 27 October 2013 21:07, Bill Cox wrote:

On 10/27/2013 3:31 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

On 27 October 2013 18:26, Bill Cox wrote:

...

I would love feedback on an idea for promoting more internet freedom.

Here's the problem: Tor has little public support, because most Tor traffic is wasted on supporting bad behavior. When I ran a Tor node, it became clear that most of my bandwidth was being wasted on video downloads. People want to promote free speech, not child pornography.

Here's my solution: Build a Tor-like network for routing anonymous data, but track behavior of all users' secret identities, and make their Internet history public. Allow node operators to choose categories of public identities they which to support.

For example, I would choose to promote all forms of non-violent free speech. I should be able to contribute my bandwidth to this purpose. If a dissident in China goes by the public ID of ChinaCat, and has a high reputation for promoting freedom, they are welcome to use my bandwidth. If someone just wants access to redtube.com, they can get that access from someone else.

There are various technical aspects to this idea. For example, would prefer that the social graph between secret identities be public so I can use a simple network flow algorithm over trust edges between identities to determine how much I trust someone. The entire social network should be P2P, like Tor, and it should route a lot of dummy traffic to help hide the real traffic. With the considerably lower bandwidth that is needed to promote freedom rather than free porn, this should be no problem.

What do you guys think?

I like it a lot. But who is going to volunteer to do this work, when people are already busy (not least in coding up things like freedombox)

I am willing to write it myself. P2P algorithms is something I enjoy coding, and this is one of those applications that may be able to do some real good for the world.

I think you would need an economy to incentivize people to do the categorization etc.

Maybe in return for someone helping you route your traffic, you could keep an encrypted backup of their data or contribute a code patch to their project etc.

We're thinking along the same lines. I would like to add a Ripple based economy to the public social network, based on trust relationships between peers as in the original Ripple algorithm. With secret identities in the social network, it is less important to keep transactions and the trust network secret, which was a problem in the original Ripple algorithm. I imagine transactions being done in tiny fractions of a cent, for services like helping download files faster in a torrent or providing encrypted storage.

I believe the retroshare project (noted on this list many times) is in the process of implementing a P2P ripple (a la Ryan Fugger's original protocol) system, or have done so already. Dr Bob told me you can plug in other protocols such as GNUNet quite easily. I'm unsure how this would gel with Tor tho. I'm also looking at translating all of the crypto currency work to a web based system. Would be very happy to hear if you make any progress on this. Or perhaps we can discuss off list if some stuff is off topic. My current line of thinking is hacking the economy so that fbx users get their own coins that they can spend with each other, and to give, say, 10% of all new coins to the FSF to help lower hardware costs of plug computers ...

Bill

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