Tox.im

Sat Jul 5 14:35:18 PDT 2014

I apologize for the wording in the following post. I feel entirely
unmotivated to do anything but write down what I think of in a
fairly-hack-and-slash-and-mash manner and I am sort of fatigued and sort of
boosted on caffeine (which helps remedy sleepiness and increases focus but
does nothing for the intellectual fatigue I'm experiencing after a good 8
hours of mind-bending geometric programming***, tips welcome).

2014-07-05 20:13 GMT+02:00 Cathal Garvey <cathalgarvey at cathalgarvey.me>:

> * P2P
> * Encrypted
>

Tor/network layer ish stuff

>  * Voice/Video/Chat/Files
>

Application layer stuff

>  * GPL'd
>

You could give me a steaming pile of NSA honeytrap codepies, as long as
it's GPL I'll trust it with my life and love it feverishly. (joke)

If anyone ever steals this idea I'll point to this e-mail and claim it was
originally mine and it stuck in your head until you thought it was yours**:

Just write the communications layer. Expose it through a socket on the
local machine. Let's say the port will be 33742 (actually a good port
number) (say "eel for tee too") and one can talk
modern-JSON-over-an-HTTP-subset with it.

Platform dependent high-performance stuff like COM objects, maybe some RPC,
etc.  are optional.

This little daemon/server maintains the connection to whatever P2P network
is currently thought to be neat. It may or may not also do DNS-ish stuff
and (if that's the popular P2P thing) it can have a keyring with trusted
peers (aka "friends").

Once you have that you can communicate in an abstracted form. You can send
messages that will pop out on the other side to registered listeners
(method of registration is pretty much irrelevant, but let's say it's
either directly by subscribing to 33742 or by some other sockety means).

The service rendered is "you give me a destination (as per my spec) and a
message and I will make sure it gets there without anyone really knowing if
it was us". So it's like TOR, but a little more explicit and less
proxy-like.

You might wonder, why not proxy like? I like it because I never know
whether something is going through the proxy or not. I'd prefer the
application saying "Golly, where is 33742?" than going "You know, I swear
we had this proxy arrangement.... Oh well".

33742 will also* do trickle connections and arbitrarily decide that a
certain application is getting snailservice today. A few (~5?) trickle
connections will always be kept cheerfully active, ticking away a few kbps
of random data, and the occasional fully crypted packet that looks just
like random data. Add some sort of meshing thingy on top of it, and the
requirement that snailservice packets should be snailserviced with at least
an 80% chance and voila every frikkin packet has plausible deniability ("I
got it over trickles/snailservice!").

Then, to make it attractive to actually use it, you write *SEVERAL
DIFFERENT APPLICATIONS WITH SPECIFIC PURPOSES*, because you want to do *one
thing, and do it right*. One of these things should be an IMAP server,
because letter-secret is very nice indeed.

Why?
 * Performance
 * Simplicity
 * Stability
 * Security
 * Modularity
 * Ease of extension
 * Separation of concerns

The best part? The longer you think of it, the better the idea becomes.

* if it's good 337.
** or the idea spread from someone that had this or a variation going on.
The point is that I claim this idea. It's not very original because really
it's just Tor++ with some reasonable processing, but that's what we usually
call an original idea so I'll just claim it anyway. (Antartica is mine too
btw, really)
*** If you do enough geometric programming you start to notice that perhaps
"space", geometry and coordinates and things like that, are probably not at
all as natural as they seem to be. Graphics programming gives a similar
sense. Collisions just aren't .. ¿ natural? Crypto really makes
mathematical sense, but geometry, man!
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