I remember hearing about China usurping 15% of western internet traffic for 18 minutes. This was accomplished by having nodes report as being the next closest hop in the network path to the packet destination. In a decentralized darknet project, I imagine such an issue being much more widespread. In fact, I would imagine a darknet project would actually play in to the hands of the government. It would be perfectly plausible to infest the darknet with millions of your own nodes reporting as the next best hops thus inserting themselves in the middle of all darknet traffic able to analyze data as it flows through the system. Obviously, a darknet would utilize encryption for traffic but all bets are off when you potentially have a constant man in the middle and no centralized authority on trusts. What's worse, and more to the point of playing into the hands of the government is that a darknet would give them (the government) a concentrated focus area. If I were to categorize the percentage of traffic that was "interesting" for regular internet traffic vs. the percentage of "interesting" traffic of all darknet traffic then I would imagine the darknet having a much higher ratio of noteworthy to junk traffic. If I had a limited amount of resources to invest in analyzing and decoding secure traffic I would obviously point my tools at the most richly dense data source.
"The US State Department seems to view decentralized darknets as an important area of research for empowering free expression <i>abroad</i>."<p>(my emphasis). Depressing!
I can't help but think that projects to overlay a darknet on our existing Internet infrastructure are several orders of magnitude more likely to succeed.
After reading the article and skimming some posts on their subreddit, I think the idea generally concerns the capabilities of consumer electronics to 'replicate' the Internet in a completely decentralized fashion. By doing so, there's no central authority managing your packets, and if you want to visit a particular node (i.e., to visit a web site), the problem becomes analogous to the stochastic shortest path problem, which is NP-complete. So, wouldn't this system require P = NP for it to have any viability at all when factoring in the effects of latency and downtime?
Looks interesting, but it seems to be just a talking shop at the moment, without any actual goods to show yet.<p><i>it's hard to imagine that TDP will ever move beyond the conceptual stage. The group behind the effort is big on ideas but short on technical solutions for rolling out a practical implementation</i><p>I like the idea of using WiFi as hardware, since it's a technology that's almost everywhere now.
This is interesting. I've been toying with a darknet idea, but it's not going to mirror the internet. "My" version is limited to plain text and packets no larger than 1kb, if even that. It'll show up on TechCrunch eventually, but I want to talk with some people first.
I'd like to note that "the Internet" is a vast, broadly-scoped amalgamation of routers and different network topologies. They don't use one kind of hardware or software to manage it all. Any successor or parallel alternative network should be as (if not more) flexible to achieve it's goals.<p>I'd also like to suggest that the network be powered purely by standard Internet client machines and off-the-shelf hardware. Custom software would be necessary, but it's better to rely on a random guy with a quick installer on a USB key than custom hardware mesh routers deployed by professional installers.
They should do some kickstarter projects around this. I bet they could find a load of libertarians going all nuts over the idea. Wouldn't mind throwing some money at it myself.
It would be pretty interesting if Republic Wireless allowed their phones to connect to the Darknet. There'd be no technical reason why they wouldn't, except perhaps they'd need to beef up their cheap Android phones with mesh protocols to form their own nodes.<p>(Referenced HN thread that also happens to be on the front page: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208563" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208563</a>)
Here is a comprehensive list of open mesh/protocol links <a href="http://openmesh.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/a-list-of-open-source-ad-hoc-network-and-routing-protocolsplatforms/" rel="nofollow">http://openmesh.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/a-list-of-open-sour...</a>