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

On 27 October 2013 18:26, Bill Cox <waywardgeek@gmail.com> 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.

Bill

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