Tor, the pentagon's cyberweapon

[Karl]

On 10/14/20, Stefan Claas <sac at 300baud.de> wrote:
> jim bell wrote:
>
>
> [...]
>
>> Last year, I tried to start a discussion to implement a new anonymity
>> router network, perhaps using the Raspberry Pi
>> computers.   I got a quote for 500 Raspberry Pi's, at $70 each.  I
>> included a few ideas, some old, some new:
>>
>> 1.    Routers could be anywhere, but would include homes and small
>> businesses.  Anyone who has an Internet service with an
>> adequately-large data cap. (Recently, I saw that CenturyLink had removed
>> the data cap from some of its internet services.
>> especially fiber.
>> https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/which-internet-service-providers-have-data-caps#:~:text=CenturyLink%20has%20a%201%20TB,you'll%20enjoy%20unlimited%20data.
>>
>>  And their data caps, where they still exist, are 1 terabyte/month, which
>> I think would be plenty for an anonymity network.
>>
>>
>> 2.    Extensive chaff.   (which, of course, is an old idea, strangely it's
>> not yet implemented in TOR)
>>
>> 3.    "Output nodes" would output only in encrypted form, so that people
>> generally could not get in trouble for acting as an
>> output node:  Their output could be monitored, but not understood as to
>> its content, since it would look like random data.
>>
>> 4.    I also thought of an idea that such a network should implement
>> multiple algorithms for networking, simultaneously,
>> limited only by people's imaginations:   People  frequently talk about new
>> ideas for anonymity networks, but how might they
>> try them out in practice?   If an anonymity network is fated to have ONLY
>> ONE routing method, then all new such methods
>> cannot be easily developed:  You'd have to physically build a new network,
>> along with all such associated costs, for each new
>> routing method.  That's completely illogical.
>>
>>    Should there be any limit to the number of kinds of routing done?  It's
>> all software.   One advantage of this feature is
>> that all these different routing algorithms are mixed together, such it
>> should be harder to
>>
>> TOR is doubted for many good reasons, but if it is generally agreed that
>> some form of anonymizing network is needed, then
>> people should be willing to work to provide an alternative.
>>
>>                Jim Bell
>
> Thanks for your reply!

Myself, I'm not quite sure where to think here next.  It seems like
you guys are moving the thoughts forward.

My conceptual contribution is that forking an existing project is
easier than starting a new one.

If Jim is hardware-only, he might be unaware how easy it is to pull
out and replace conceptual parts of something that already exists, in
software.  The tor project, for example, has a lot of followers, so I
bet if you added chaff you could spread news of your fork and lots of
people would use it and help it grow.

>
> Using a Raspberry Pi is always a good idea, because it is affordable for
> most of us.
>
> And did you received good feedback for your proposal?

I wouldn't wait for this myself.

>
> Other Networks, besides Mix-Networks and which are censor resistant and
> offer
> anonymity too are Bitmessage, which could be seen as alternative to email

re bitmessage, which appears a great reliable message delivery system,
it's pretty clear there isn't any real anonymity if you look at the
protocol, but it's easy to add a layer of it with something else.

> and
> Usenet and ZeroNet, which could act as additional WWW services. Both are

y'know i'm a little new to usenet.  i flipped through the wikipedia
article and its properties of universal broadcast and storage sound a
little similar to those of a blockchain; i bet it would be intuitive
to add the fault tolerance of a blockchain.

> easy
> to use and one only needs to install the clients. Can be coupled with Tor
> too.
>
> i2p so it seems has not so much users (anymore) if I am not mistaken.
>
> https://wiki.bitmessage.org//
> https://zeronet.io/
>
> Regards
> Stefan
>
> --
> NaClbox: cc5c5f846c661343745772156a7751a5eb34d3e83d84b7d6884e507e105fd675
>   The computer helps us to solve problems, we did not have without him.
>