try reading the article first…

I saw a recent propoganda piece where the cartels associate file sharing, aka ‘piracy’ and terrorism. I would like to counterpoint this stupidity immediately, prior to the sheeple asking ‘really?’, etal.. There are certain lines that I have never seen crossed in my time, cp and national security are big no nos, the DOD has a proxy sniffer than than reach 5 hops deep and find you. the nsa has a cadre of fucked hackers at their beck and call. there are things you just don’t do anymore. long ago you could hack, not so easy today. and never in my travels have I even found someone making a profit on anything shared. terrorists have JUST figured out cell phones, cmon, wake up … darknets ?!?!?!

84%, eighty four fucking percent of ‘piracy’ happens in China, and they get 1 million cartel backed songs for free as thanks, instead of lawsuits.

thanks Mitch, Cara, Dan…. cheers.

‘if your not outraged, you’re not paying attention’

stw

Could you email me, please? p2pnet @ shaw dot ca.

Cheers! And thanks …

For sometime now, I’ve been considering a setup with a wifi antenna to basically reach out and pull in selected connections from other wifis. It’s not my idea to try and do war driving in this manner but rather to share with a very few selected individuals through this means that totally limits outside monitoring. Other than the sneaker net, properly configured, it just strikes me that it would be hard to beat that type of setup as far as internet spying modes go. It’s like an end run around the head hunters that is hard to detect or prove.

I’m not thinking of a block full of neighbors sharing, just at most a handful. The more I think of it, the better it sounds.

These might interest you (from 2005) –

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/6360

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/6491

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/6514

I also had an email asking what Onion Routing is – http://www.onion-router.net/

Cheers!

The problem the RIAA will really have to fight is when people form a new “internet”, not based on ISPs, but rather based on interlinked nodes. With newer technology, I could imagine modems that are able to transmit 10x as much data as current modems. I could imagine neighborhoods or even cities that setup LANs with cheap consumer electronics like switches or routers. Neigborhoods connect to each other with 100mb switches, and setup a router in one person’s house at the edge of the neighborhood to connect to the next neighborhood, and so forth.

Such a system is obviously not practical right now. Most people don’t live in a city technically inclined enough to try this approach. But what if? A given person might forseeably have access to *two* networks: the internet, for browsing and simple forums, and a non-controlled private network of similar size where the RIAA has no control. Projects like freenet seem to be a glimmer of this concept, to me, but there is definitely room for improvement.

I see two fundamental roadblocks to this approach, however, that need to be addressed before it can happen. I mean technological roadblocks. Social roadblocks (ignorance of the general populous and laws forbidding such a network to be constructed for example) are plentiful, and they’re a separate issue alltogether — the proper motivation by the RIAA will get past those. But technologically, such a network can’t scale well with current technology.

Problem 1: too many nodes. Ethernet is a star-topology network. That means that, in general, everyone attaches to a central “hub” that passes information along. We’ve turned it into a web by using routers — but the overall structure of the network, and all low-level structures, are still based on this. As a result, there must be very large pipes as you go up the chain. The largest pipes owned by the ISPs at present are completely inaccessible to most people’s income. A huge number of smaller nodes — such as a city-wide LAN constructed from $40 routers — would have severe bandwidth limitations. The number of hops a given packet would have to traverse to get to another destination would be simply enormous, and the network wouldn’t have the bandwidth to handle it. Latency would be another result of this — but latency is rarely an issue for file sharing, of course.

Problem 2: software isn’t designed to operate under these conditions. The condition I mentioned above — that is, too many nodes, too many hops, high latency, and low bandwidth — are very difficult situations to work with using current software. Algorithms exist that can — and do — work better than this. Freenet uses many of them. Onion routing, or at least its ability to traverse many more hops than a traditional TCP packet, could be used to overcome some of these problems. Tweaking network settings in the operating system, web browser, downloader, etc. could also help. A second problem on the software side of things is the decentralized basis of the network. Addressing on the internet is accomplished smoothly because ISPs purchase a range of IPs and give each customer an IP address from that range — thus, every computer at any time has a unique IP address. Local networks, then, use NAT to subdivide it, so every local network has a set of addresses in the 192.0.0.0/24 subnet (if you use a wireless router, you do this, even if you don’t realize it). However, that method applied to 10 routers in a row means having a separate subnet for each upward route, and each lower route as you approach the destination. In a completely decentralized and unmanaged network, how do you assign IP addresses or something similar to identify any given machine uniquely? This is a fundamental requirement of a network of this size, and cannot be avoided. We need to find a better algorithm. Last, but not least, is what you do about the total or near-total lack of servers on the network. DNS servers, web servers, and even simpler ones like instant messaging servers wouldn’t exist. Most machines on the network would probably shut down on a daily basis and couldn’t act as a server in this way. Some projects — like freenet — are working to overcome some of these issues. But we have a long way to go before it becomes practical to setup a completely decentralized network in this manner.

I think that the solutions to these problems have already been conceived, but not yet put to code (probably because no such decentralized network presently exists). But could this vision — a completely independent, consumer-run network unmanaged by the ISPs and RIAA — be the future of the web? Interesting thought. I’m not sure whether I’m fantasizing or prophesying, but it’s a very tantalizing idea.

absolutely, you hit the topic squarely. After the demise of Napster, leeching rose to an all time high, and darknet/private p2p servers just started eliminating the assholes and all that remained were die-hard enthusiasts that were more determined than ever to share everything/anything that could be digitized. There are organized darknet rings now that customize content for less redundance. Imagine a ring of 6 servers, one hosts music, one movies, one desktop publishing, one games, one fonts, one for video editing/creation, etc, etc, etc.. Its not just random guys setting up a free server for anyone anymore. The evolution has created something of a ‘codebook’ of behaviour within the private sector of file-sharing. We leave the leechers to get stuff from bittorrent, or other avenues far downstream. This organization has improved the quality of digital content to ever higher levels. Once we scrambled to be the first ‘cammer’, now we just get shit directly from the industry via insiders, its faster and better quality, besides, nobody likes a ‘cam’ anyway…

stw

I’ve known places that no longer exist back in the mid to late 80’s or so, things like ftp file servers that you had to know the address and password to enter. Once you got in the site, there were hidden folders that didn’t show. You had to know the name of them and that they existed to access them. Once you got in one of those folders, all the latest and greatest of best quality were there to be had. That’s not really dark net but it was certainly insider fed with very often material not yet out to the theater available many times months ahead of the actual release date.

What has really helped the spread of file sharing is the insane greed of those same moguls. The idea that they have to attempt to control every distribution means of a model long broken has raised the ire of very file sharing person that has ever downloaded a file. Those that understand sharing is spreading the wealth all have their own ideas of what constitutes a method to share.

Ever since the RIAA made the mistake of going after Napster instead of licensing it, the genie leaped out of the bottle and became whack-a-mole. Now there are so many different ways to find a method of sharing that for those that seek, it can be found in a many splendored fountain of opportunity that in some way you must return material so that all have access.

With the sue’em came serious problems with leechers in all forums of sharing. Now there are those that don’t want to be bothered with the return side and only want to take. Most reputable sharing sites have some method to deal with them. Because they don’t understand or don’t care about the return side for others, they are the unwanted and the shunned of file sharing communities in however those communities are formed.

Thank you for the write up on this.

you probably are linked to a darknet and don’t even realize it. It’s not like we hang out a sign..

stw