Jailbreaking the Internet For Freedom's Sake

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.'"

it's not about connectivity, it's about accessibil

[mapkinase]

it's not about connectivity, it's about accessibility: presence in the search results, being properly indexed.

There could be million free pages under any super-free Internet. What's the point of it if nothing could be found?

Main battle is going to be around google search results and there have been several front pages on that: content providers are already fighting with google.

If a movie is getting NC-17 rating, forget about profit (in this case most rightfully so, that's Islam speaking).

If a website is accessible only via Tor, forget about business.

Imagine isntead of banning megaupload website were still accessible through Tor or some other kind of superfreeandsecretnet. Do you really think Dotcom would be leaving in 22M mansion?

Why cross-platform?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are people so dumb now they can't pick from three or four installers the one appropriate to their system?!

If they are so dumb, doesn't this give us a chance to turn the clock back to August of '93 by leaving them behind?

(Tongue-in-cheek, of course, my love of freedom exceeds my loathing of noobs who refuse to educate themselves, and the more people using such a tool, the less feasible prosecuting everyone caught becomes.)

Alternative

[DaMattster]

I can see this tightening of regulation creating an all new internet that is build amongst non-profit communities and connected together in fashions so that no one owns the transmission means. Unlike today's internet which is essentially owned by oligarchy consisting of AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon (i.e. Big Telecom) communities may end up either laying their own transmission lines or use multipoint wireless. This might just be the tipping point at which the pricing and collusion of Big Telecom leads to their ultimate demise and irrelevance.

So yeah...

[Lundse]

...that is what Moglen et al have been saying all along: don't trust the lawmakers and people in power to make you free. Guarantee your freedoms one by one, by building them - free speech, anonymity, etc. can be engineered!

YES!

[The End Of Days]

Awesome, because nothing is more important than ensuring our supply of free entertainment continues.

Oh, I'm sorry, I mean dissident thought. Yeah, totally. Not first-run movies and PS3 game images at all. This is about freedom.

Re:Achilles Heel

[Anonymous Coward]

There are technologies like ssh and ssl where the end user has zero clue what the session key is.

Pointless if there's no content

[randizzle3000]

The other problem is that people might stop creating these great sites/services because you can't "just browse" to them or venture capitalists won't fund the startup. Anonymity and an underground internet is useless if all the cool stuff is just taken down (as opposed to blocked) or even worse, never created in the first place. For example, can we secretly get to megaupload now? What about it's competitors that have disabled file sharing?

Re:Vidalia bundle

[hughbar]

Yes agree, tor + freenet + GPG etc. are the basis for something useful. However 'they' own the pipes and country to country gateways, for example. So the new, new thing will really be from the bottom up and may be quite retro to start with. I've been looking backwards at fidonet, packet radio and gopher, for example. Also been thinking about biomimetic systems where the keys, for example are transmitted on one medium and the 'doors' on another, via something that spectrum hops.

This sounds very tinfoil hat stuff but I've been around servers since Prestel, Minitel in France, BBS systems with modems and the current outlook just seems pretty bad. That is intuition rather than science, but really doesn't feel good at all. Even if we 'keep' the internet, it becomes something worse than television.

Mod Parent up!

[BitterOak]

I was just about to make the very same point myself. It's called Perfect Forward Secrecy [wikipedia.org]. Use protocols in which the users do not have the ability to decrypt content after the session ends. Courts can't require you to do the impossible.

Re:it's not about connectivity, it's about accessi

[GameboyRMH]

As a darknet I2P is clearly superior to Tor, both in speed and security - Tor still relies on trusted directory servers while I2P is fully distributed and requires no trusted servers of any kind. Tor is better as an anonymizing proxy.