Jailbreaking the Internet For Freedom's Sake 270
snydeq writes "With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'"
Re:Achilles Heel (Score:4, Informative)
As a geek, allow me to say "Bwahahahahahahahahaha!!"
"Even an idiot can see that it absurd
That is nowhere near as deep or as true as you think it is.
You have wrapped yourself in geek arrogance, which may or may not be deserved, and believe that it elevates your opinion to fact. It does not. There are a number of geeks on
Climb down.
Been commenting on this for 13+ years. Thoughts: (Score:5, Informative)
Darkneting won't save us. They can deep packet inspect, or block service to TOR nodes, or simply disconnect anyone who tries. They can - will- turn the internet very quickly into an old fashioned telephone system, with your real name required and full tracking on at all times. Bandwidth throttling, for instance, while ostensibly to stop "hogs" and kill Netflix, is very useful to discourage people from running TOR nodes. Hard to run encrypted virtual pipes when they constrict at will.
They can pass any law they like and criminalize any trick we can come up with. The spooks behind this are not uninformed, and read the same boards we do.
Young people, 30 and below in age, are not concerned. They have never, if you think about it, lived in a free world. They laid face-down on the hallway floors in high school while giant thugs let dogs sniff their crotches, looking for drugs like aspirin and Dayquil. They have been fingerprinted, watched, recorded, and monitored to the point where their school-issued laptops were taking pictures of them in their underwear for years. They have never lived in a world where such things are insane; this is everyday life to them. As they grew up, they have to give pee tests, saliva tests, stop for random searches by cops, swear to moral turpitude, sign up to homeowner and condo associations that pretty much are prison systems with nicer plumbing, and submit every movement on the internet and in person to GPS/IP-registerd locations. They don't understand why privacy is important; they are indoctrinated by the sheer banality of the evil. People who live by sewage filtration plants don't smell the shit, and young people don't smell the loss of their liberties.
Solutions have to be hardware based combined with newer communication tech. Simple WiFi with encryption won't work; they'll make it illegal.
Ideas: go to LEDs in a tube to transmit optical signals over short distances, home to home, building to building. Infrared lasers to act as backbones to a TOR-like network that does-not-interface with the old internet. The old internet is dead, people; they commercialized it, gave to the corporations and the police states of the world.
Wild ideas: finally solve the problem of radio interference- it is a hardware/software limitation, not a real one. Thousands can transmit and receive over a single frequency if we solve this riddle, and then bandwidth is effectively infinite enough that TOR-like radio mesh networks could actually work with low latency and high throughput, with encryption.
3-D printing of custom network nodes that do not conform to the government's ideas of MAC addresses and complete surveillance. We'll need our own custom 3-D printers as well; they will easily require mass-produced printers to ID themselves in the products.
Well out there ideas: Quantum entanglement as a communications method. Don't laugh too hard; think about it. A transmission system that doesn't actually transmit through the air, but instead transmits at a distance without any detectable means. It can be done; I'm not the genius to do it. Believe it that the military will do it if it can be done. We all can do it too.