Info pirates seek an alternative internet

[wtmusic]

"After dumping thousands of secret US diplomatic cables in the public domain last week, WikiLeaks ended up losing its web hosting company – twice – and its wikileaks.org web domain to boot as providers got cold feet about its content. But a plan being hatched by fellow travellers in the file-sharing community may shield the controversial data dumper from such takedowns in future.

It all started with a tweet on 28 November: 'Hello all ISPs of the world. We're going to add a new competing root-server since we're tired of ICANN. Please contact me to help.'

This missive, complaining about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was from Peter Sunde, an anti-copyright activist based in Sweden and one of the founders of The Pirate Bay website, which tracks the locations of copyrighted movie and music BitTorrent files. It instantly lit a flame among file-sharers. "That small tweet turned into a lot of interest," Sunde blogged two days later. 'We haven't organised yet, but are trying to… we want the internet to be uncensored. Having a centralised system that controls our information flow is not acceptable.'"

For many reasons - security, freedom of speech, awareness - alternative internet's time has come. But what format does it take? Does the death of intellectual property come along with it?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19816-info-pirates-seek-an-alternative-internet.html

[Ian David]

1. This is why I want to put an internet server and data haven on the moon. n/t

[wtmusic]

2. IMO organizing reliable transmission would be is the biggest hitch

Lack of organization has always been the bane of rebellions.

[originalpckelly]

3. These are some of the most clever people on Earth.

If anyone can figure it out, they can.

This is going to be a worldwide revolution. You just wait and see. Someone lit a fire under their asses, and now they see what's wrong. They're not just pirates anymore, they're revolutionaries. Smart revolutionaries. :P

Big brother didn't count on little brother hiring someone to kick big brother's ass.

[Ian David]

4. Line-of-sight laser beams, like the ones we use to measure the distance to the lunar retroflector.nt

[hootinholler]

5. This could get interesting

The notion of an alternative root is interesting. If they could distribute it in that there is a non-locus for the root, it would be unstoppable. The problem will be in how one connects to the net and would that connection allow for a altroot or would it force the ICANN root.

:popcorn:

-Hoot

[wtmusic]

6. There would be hardware requirements to just get on an altnet

which internet providers offer now. That means brick-and-mortar, physical addresses, big companies...and back to square one?

It no doubt will get interesting. I want to know if the Second Amendment guarantees my right to bear denial-of-service software to protect my access during Info War I...

[hootinholler]

10. I don't think it would actually require B&M infrastructure

I think an altRoot could thrive in the cloud. It will probably require a kernel with patched networking software, the problem is to find the new root. On second thought, you might not need even that, just a VPN module. The rest of it all is already implemented in the SSL protocols It could just be a huge VPN and doing that *all* traffic would be encrypted. It (the traffic) could still be monitored as having been transported host to host, but that metadata wouldn't be that useful if you set up an array of bots tranmitting noise to random places.

Actually that would be tremendous, a huge VPN. I would consider donating some bandwidth to that.

-Hoot

[wtmusic]

12. But individuals would get to the cloud...how?

Wouldn't you still need ISPs to provide service to homes/businesses? :shrug:

[hootinholler]

13. The internet *is* the cloud

Yes of course you still need an ISP the same way they get there now. All that is needed is knowing where one endpoint of the VPN is located and credentials to connect to then you simply tunnel everything through the existing connection. Businesses (and others) do it everyday around the world, it's simply configuration and activation. All it would take is a daily email that tells you today's endpoint, or a service on the open network that returns a connection point uri. With one of those, you could use a geocoded lookup to find the closest connection service.

-Hoot

[bemildred]

11. Very. A real potential to gum up the works.

DNS is not secret, you can make your own copy and hack as you please with a text editor. It's all cooperative, there are no cops, yet anyway. With a bit of replication, a daily download of the root table of the day, you could have a sort of ghost internet running parallel to the "official" one.

[Taverner]

7. Anyone else suspicious with the timing of this and Net Neutrality debates?

And by "this" I mean the attack on Wikileaks, which was sharing much more damning evidence earlier than the cables...

[wtmusic]

8. If so, it's a risky ploy that may backfire. nt

[Taverner]

9. It seems to be doing that already

At first, when all the GOP pres hopefuls came out swinging, saying they should have the CIA take out Assange and all - Comcast started experimenting with speeding up certain accounts, and flat out blacklisting sites they didn't like.

That seems to be rolled back as of late