The Nym network, based on Loopix, should operational very soon. https://nymtech.net/docs/overview/network-privacy/ On Wed, Sep 1, 2021, 8:11 AM jim bell wrote:

On Tuesday, August 31, 2021, 07:22:00 PM PDT, grarpamp wrote:

On 8/31/21, jim bell wrote:

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TorrentFreak: Movie Companies Want VPNs to Log User Data and Disconnect Pirates.

https://torrentfreak.com/movie-companies-want-vpns-to-log-user-data-and-disc...

Hollywood US movies suck ass, downhill quality since decades. China etc also owning more of Hollywood.

Stupid pirate scene hasn't evolved much since days of FTP... some crews are still using it, lol. They advanced to decrypt Blu-Ray and DVD, screencap, etc... but still hardly taking distribution seriously.

[delete]

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Unfortunately, Tor Project is fixated on disallowing its users any freedom to make their own tradeoff choices as to how to use and deploy its [formerly] flexible overlay software as such... with that Tor Project is destroying users ability to share freely as they see fit. That is quite bad for enabling of freedom, the very thing Tor Project claims to be about. The Tor Project is arbitrarily censoring its own protocols, revoking features, against the needs of its users, pontificating and claiming ultimate authority over "security" vs users right to make knowledgeable use case tradeoffs, and censoring users who make that case. Hypocrites.

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tor should be forked, and v2 onions maintained therein, until other mass distribution solutions are developed.

Jim Bell's comment:

Well over a year ago, I suggested a substitute for the TOR anonymization network. Not a replacement: Another system, in addition to TOR, to be used if somebody wants that.

Not that I, a person generally not knowledgable about the details of such anonymization networks, know of any specific failures or weaknesses. It's just that I have generally read, occasionally, that people can worry about the potential for mischief, especially since the funding for TOR tends to come from either the US Federal Government or, by now, funding by educational institutions that are somehow beholden to that same Federal government.

Things were changing. For example, Centurylink had begun offerring optical-fiber Internet service, with a speed of 940 megabits/second. But it was much more important that they were offering an unlimited monthly data, up from the 1 terabyte limit common there and elsewhere. 'Unlimited data' is good if you want to build a network that uses chaff, meaningless traffic that obscures not only the meaning of communication, but even the existence of communication. Chaff would cost money to send, or at least use up part of a fixed allocation of monthly data. If there's no limit, there's no extra cost.

I proposed that a new network be build, using the Raspberry Pi 4 computer. Not that I'm somehow attached to that design: Not at all, merely that it was new, and it apparently had plenty of power and features to accomplish the task. At the time, it was available for about $85 in single-piece quantity, substantially less in large quantity. Due to inflation, it's somewhat more expensive now.

I also suggested that perhaps every node should, potentially, be able to be an exit node. But with a difference: Being an exit node might be legally tenuous, in large part because 'suspicious' traffic could emerge from it. My idea is that all output traffic be encrypted, at least enough so that if such traffic is monitored by a hostile entity (e.g. a government) all they could see is that seemingly random data is emerging. The decrypt key would be delivered from another node.

I'd say there's no less reason today to implement an alternative anonymization system today, than a couple of years ago. The cost seems to be small, maybe a subsidy per node of $35 per month, enough so that a person can upgrade to a 940 mbit/second service. Or a total of about $420,000 per year for 1000 nodes.

Jim Bell