8/11/2011

08-11-11 - Free Internet

I mean "free" in a liberty sense, not a monetary sense.

Recent Seattle Weekly article got me thinking about trying to encrypt and anonymize all my internet access. The whole torrent model is just like fish in a barrel for copyright trolls. You can just hop on the net and get a list of infringers any time you want.

So whatever reason, say you want to be able to work on the net and do as you please without your actions being monitored.

Apparently the major US-based services like FindNot and Anonymizer are not to be trusted (they provide logs to the US government and to subpoenas by the RIAA etc).

Really what you want is something like Tor that takes all your traffic and bounces it around a bunch of other machines and then puts out portions of requests from all over. Currently none of those services seem to be quite ready for prime time; Tor for example kicks you out if you try to do high-bandwidth things like torrents.

Some links :

Web-based DNS Randomness Test DNS-OARC
Tor Project Anonymity Online
SwissVPN - Surf the safer way!
Public IP Swiss VPN - Page 2 - Wilders Security Forums
OneSwarm - Private P2P Data Sharing
I2P - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
How To Not Get Sued for File Sharing Electronic Frontier Foundation
Free Anonymous BitTorrent Becomes Reality With BitBlinder TorrentFreak
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
Anonymous P2P - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In general I'm not sure if dark-nets like Tor can survive. I don't trust the internet providers or the US government to allow you to have that freedom. I suspect that if they ever caught on en masse they would be blocked by the standard extra-judicial mechanisms that they used to shut down online poker and funding WikiLeaks (where the government nicely asks the service provider to block that traffic and the provider complies, even though it's not clear the law is on their side).

The only way to get past that (and into places like china) is to hide encrypted packets inside benign packets. That may be fine for little text messages, but you can never get high bandwidth that way.

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