The last few days actually years we have seen the need for a new distributed information network solution as a backup source for sites like DailyKos, etc. The erosion of the political will to protect our civil liberties in the public and private sphere have made it critical that we investigate and start to develop a distributed Friend to Friend network of information that can be used by sites such as Kos or alternative sites should the government crack down on information sharing or freedom of speech out of an excessive desire to make us safe.
This week’s takedown of ohm net made me nervous that Kos could be here one day and gone the next at the flip of the switch from a telecom etc. What I would like to do is get some C# developers and IT professionals who could develop what is traditionally called a Darknet client. This client would be a installation that would be like a P2P network on a person’s machine who it was willingly installed. Basically what this would be is like a gnutilla of information or Napster of information that would not be about piracy etc. Rather it would be about information sharing about the issues that we care about (progressive politics) and if need be non violent resistance.
Here is a great article about Darknet
From Wikipedia
"The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution, a 2002 article by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman, four employees of Microsoft who described the concept as follows:
The idea of the darknet is based upon three assumptions:
- Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying.
- Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
- Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels.
The darknet is the distribution network that emerges from the injection of objects according to assumption 1 and the distribution of those objects according to assumptions 2 and 3."
I would like to find likeminded individuals with the background in P2P distributed networks and programming to brainstorm and help develop a progressive net roots client that would allow us to distribute via the client (wherever installed) data such as political commentary.
We can also look to investigating the use of other darknets such as
Allpeers
anoNet
Freenet version 0.7
GNUnet with its "F2F topology" option
I2P - Invisible Internet Project
Tor - The Onion Router
Turtle F2F
WASTE
Use of this software or existing software would cut development time and would allow for a rapid response to any crackdown on information in our "Freedom loving" country. However I think a development of our own software would be better in the long run in order to limit the types of files that could be freely distributed.. Such as video, music or other content that would harm business interests. We do not want enemies here.. We only want political speech... this is why I feel it’s important that only one binary exe, msi etc.. be allowed to be traded.. our Kosnet client. The rest, PDF, XLS, txt on and on could be traded to those with the client installed and shared to other web based blogs such as Kos, MyDD, Huffington Post, etc.. This way our info is distributed and no one site could be taken down or halted..
We could even make a thumb drive version on a vmware instance that could be taken to public libraries and used to transfer and receive info without installing anything on the hosts machine.. Virtual application technology as well as Virtual OS technology could be key to this..
Once the client (open source of course) is created and distributed friend to friend or trusted site to trusted site we would have the advantage over the government data collection in that while they could monitor the speech they could not act against it. This is the key to the survivability of freedom of speech when our rights seem so easily given away by those who supposedly represent us. With our privacy no more guaranteed nor safe.. neither is the content of our speech as even documents like this could be seen as treason or an adversarial act against the system of control that is being established.
So I am asking that concerned citizens with P2P development backgrounds or people that can put me in contact with individuals of like mind who would start to develop this labor of love to protect our speech by making it impossible to censure or control by ISPs.
This system would in theory:
Not be searchable via Google etc.., Information would not be stored in a single location, It would be freely distributed and even though able to be read by the government and collected.. Authorship would be anonymous and no IP data or DNS data obtained per content objects.
Well anyone already working on something like this need help? If not let’s get together on the phone and or in person.. We could open a site for development donations etc...
UPDATE: Please email me at my contact info if your of sufficiant skill or have a background in development or other darknet clients. Also please rec so we can get more people to read this and sign up to help..
UPDATEX2: I have been sugested Freenet to try.. if anyone installs the client make me your friend Hangingchad.. this will allow us to transfere data freely.. I will diary each day to test and copy my blog post to the nodes..