On 6/22/16, konstant@mail2tor.com <konstant@mail2tor.com> wrote:

I posted steps on how to connect Freenet nodes over Onioncat and Garlicat for Tor/I2P. I am looking to scale it into an Opennet inside Tor with a lot of peers:

https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/2016-June/039056.html https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/2016-June/039059.html

Cool. You may want to review two recent threads regarding # bittorrent https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2016-June/041355.html # onioncat https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-April/010847.html (Some portion of these threads are on tor-talk, tor-dev, cypherpunks, etc so you'll need to search those for full context. They may span multiple months so you'll have to dig those out. And note that torproject's archives destroy useful things like cc, attachments, crypto sigs. Cypherpunks is intact.)

Is the extra traffic desirable in Tor? Reading asn's comment, I was under the impression that you are interested in adding higher latency traffic such as Freenet or mixnets for better anonymity: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/crowdfunding-future-hidden-services

From the operations and UX side, as opposed to theory and design side...

Some [officials] within torproject will decry traffic, and have even gone so far as to suggest they'll deploy coded countermeasures (which since the traffic is anonymous, and the code is opensource, doesn't work and kills someone else's good as well). In the end, just like video on clearnet, users and their traffic will come, and utilize whatever capacity and features they can, nothing you can do about it. A more qualified thought... I find ongoing intentional exclusive use of exits so people can basically get their trivial entertainment LOL's using filesharing apps such as bittorrent (or any other use that is known to tax networks)... to be rather immature to unethical. However I do see fine use in performing initial import of clearnet datasets via exits (if maintaining anonymity of such import action is necessary), provided they then cut their clients over to run exclusively within the anonymous networks. (In the case of bittorrent, that means disconnecting the split horizon network path to clearnet, swapping out clearnet trackers for trackers within the anonymous overlay networks, using PEX / DHT within those nets, and possibly managing running two instances over various datasets.) ie: Someone might import the latest opensource unix iso's via clearnet without use of exits, then cut and seed exclusively via anon overlay nets. Same person might need to import the latest political leaks and civil rights videos via exits, then cut and seed similarly.

Using both projects in tandem can finally realize the vision of FreeHaven. You are the best at firewall circumvention, performance and accessing the web, Freenet supplies users with censorship resistant publishing and p2p services. There is a HotPETs 16 paper co-authored by George Danezis on renewing interest in anonymous storage networks:

http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Isaakidis/p/isaakidis-p2pstorageservices-ho...

I agree that linking the various overlays, features, services, and users together is generally a good thing. I tend to argue IPv6 for that since so many of todays apps and users speak that. However there's certainly other shims, proxies, and addressing stacks people can dream and code up, particularly for asynchronous / non-real-time messaging and file like storage services. Users also need to research and think clearly about any security and privacy impact using such links may have on them.