Looks like with SOPA coming to town, people are starting to find ways to get around it. One of the biggest plans right now by Reddit users is an entirely new underground internet called Darknet, or more prominently, MESHnet. Forbes article here has more:
Users of the social news and community site Reddit don’t like the way the government seems to be muscling in on the Internet. So they plan to build a new one.
Redditors have flocked over the last week to a new subgroup on Reddit.com they’re calling the Darknet Plan–or sometimes Meshnet, as the name seems to still be in flux–with the aim of building a mesh-based version of the Internet that wouldn’t be subject to the control of any corporation or government, with a focus on anonymity, peer-to-peer architecture and strong resistance to censorship.
In the last few days, about 10,000 users have joined the group, and about 200,000 have visited, according to Chris Bresee, the 17-year old Vermonter who founded the project and goes by the name “Wolfeater” on the site. Bresee, a high school senior, created the Darknet Plan more than a year ago, but he attributes the sudden spike in interest to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the awareness of the possibilities of government censorship that the bill has created: If passed in its current form, SOPA would use Domain Name System filtering to effectively disappear infringing sites from the Internet. “I would say the Darknet Plan is driven almost in its entirety by fear of censorship coming out of Congress,” says Bresee, whose Vermont senator Patrick Leahy introduced the precursor to SOPA known as Protect-IP.”That’s what’s driven me, and I think that’s what’s driven the other ten thousand users to join.”
Mesh networks are designed to allow users to connect to one another directly instead of to a centralized Internet service provider. Universities like Johns Hopkins and Purdue have experimented with building mesh network technologies, and the State Department and the One Laptop Per Child program have both developed their own versions of mesh networks to either circumvent censorship in foreign regimes or, in OLPC’s case, connect users who don’t have access to Internet service providers.
That kind of peer-to-peer networking sounds plausible in a dense urban setting, but becomes vastly harder or impossible when users are miles apart. So Bresee says Meshnet would start by aiming to create local clusters of users and connect them with the traditional Internet. “We would piggyback on the current infrastructure to connect these islands of meshes,” he says. “But as the mesh networks grow, less and less dependence on the ISPs would be needed.”
To get a sense of Meshnetters’ distribution, one user created this map that allows participants to register where they’re located.
Reddit’s leaderless, crowdsourced approach lacks the organization of any university or government group, and for now is hardly more than an abstract cyber-libertarian dream. So far, it’s consisted mostly of engineers within the group passing around technical papers and arguing about what sort of architecture the network will use. But Bresee says Meshnet’s lack of organization is partly the point: to build a fundamentally grassroots system without any government interference or dependence on a university. ”The problem with government projects is that there’s a mistrust of the government,” he says. “We want to connect all these communities, create one network, build it into something that would be more owned by the people than any corporations or government. We want to create an Internet that’s not dependent on the whims of any one group at all.”
You can check out the Darknet Plan’s progress here.
S.L.Acker wrote:This sounds like yet another plausible sounding idea that will go exactly nowhere.
You never know. And it does illustrate the reason why SOPA, and every other similar law that's come before it, is not going to do anything to eliminate or even really reduce lost revenue from pirated music, films and software. The big entertainment companies build a ten-foot fence, the pirates will build an eleven-foot ladder, and the growing number of people and companies who've found ways to use the new paradigm to their advantage (or just maintained a sense of proportion about the whole thing) will eventually force the old guard to either adapt or cash out.
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Replace "ginger" with "n*gger," and suddenly it become a lot less funny, doesn't it?
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S.L.Acker wrote:This sounds like yet another plausible sounding idea that will go exactly nowhere.
When people can't even do business because of SOPA PIPA ruining everything, when people can't access Facebook and Twitter and all those other sites, when people are forced to do illegal things just to keep their way of life, then you might as well decree that everyone must walk on their hands.
The corporations and their puppets will only have themselves to blame for the inevitable backlash. It's Prohibition 2.0, where bread has to be sold on the black market because that's the only way it will be profitable.
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"I see you do not understand objectivity," said Tom Carder, a fundie fucknut to Darth Wong
I only skimmed the quote in the OP but isn't this the exact same wireless mesh network scheme that has been around forever? I hear you can get a pretty good connection in Berlin, but supposedly it's not all that widespread in the rest of the world. And while it might be nice in case of a revolution (something tells me sending strong radio signals from your home might identify you as a rebel) - this completely misses the point of SOPA. If access to websites like PirateBay is blocked in a non-moronic way, it doesn't really matter whether you try to connect to them through an ISP or through 7 wireless access points and an ISP.
I.e. we have to work on higher layers. And there is solutions for that, like TOR, I2P, Frost, Freenet, private DNS servers, and many more. Seriously, by now you just need to get the hash value of a torrent from any 'central' tracker to download it p2p. And there are even ways to transfer money anonymously. SOPA would be a massive threat to the way the web works currently - especially for the free exchange of information - but it's not a fundamental threat to the internet.
Having said that, I want to seize the opportunity to put forth an old idea of mine: why not just let bluetooth and wireless devices run a little app that is constantly looking for other such devices to make an ad-hoc connection... and then exchange what files the owners have and/or want. If you copy a few things from bittorrent, this could be extremely effective.
This is pre-WWII. You can sort of tell from the sketch style, from thee way it refers to Japan (Japan in the 1950s was still rebuilding from WWII), the spelling of Tokyo, lots of details. Nothing obvious... except that the upper right hand corner of the page reads "November 1931." --- Simon_Jester
S.L.Acker wrote:This sounds like yet another plausible sounding idea that will go exactly nowhere.
If some outrageously oppressive, intrusive or destructive Internet law is passed, then you can expect to see various "plausible ideas that went nowhere" suddenly start going somewhere, simply because people have a reason to try them. If such a law isn't passed, then yes it'll probably go nowhere because most people won't have enough of an impetus to learn some whole new system when the old one still works fine.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
S.L.Acker wrote:This sounds like yet another plausible sounding idea that will go exactly nowhere.
If some outrageously oppressive, intrusive or destructive Internet law is passed, then you can expect to see various "plausible ideas that went nowhere" suddenly start going somewhere, simply because people have a reason to try them. If such a law isn't passed, then yes it'll probably go nowhere because most people won't have enough of an impetus to learn some whole new system when the old one still works fine.
I don't personally think either of SOPA or PIPA will pass, and even if they do there are so many people preparing for the absolute worst case implementation of the law that I'm not certain that things will be as bad as people think. While I'm sure some smaller sites will get shut down and forced to move, and many big sites will play more cautious, I really do think the bill would mainly be used for what people think it will be used for. Hence my thinking that the Darknet/Meshnet idea won't go anywhere.
Of course if internet doomsday happens I fully expect workarounds to become mainstream.
The realistic threat here is mostly from the chilling effect: this bill gives everyone who runs a website something to fear, if a corporation decides that the site is violating their copyright. We already have problems with that, especially since it's possible to get content removed with a frivolous copyright claim, if the person holding the material isn't prepared for a legal battle.
So the practical effect of this law (i.e., not the one it will have in the minds of the black helicopter crowd) is to force the big websites to come up with some elaborate way of censoring material or fear being shut down- because lawfully that could happen even though realistically it won't; copyright lawyers are not stupid enough to shut down Facebook and piss off hundreds of millions of people.
Which effectively means that the content-owners are trying to shuffle the burden of policing violations and enforcing the existing laws onto the 'defendant' in a given copyright lawsuit, rather than onto the police or the 'plaintiff.'
This is bad not because it "shuts down the Internet," but because it makes the legal regime of copyright law into something much like a police state. One of the keys of the police state is the idea that every citizen must constantly watch their behavior for fear of becoming "suspicious" and getting hammered by law enforcement; the most powerful policemen in an authoritarian society are the ones inside your head.
If SOPA does pass, I'm expecting that the likes of anonymous will quickly make frivolous claims against as many websites as possible. Partly to cause massive backlash against SOPA, partly to piss off as many people as they can. Maybe they will avoid websites of people who are against SOPA, but I doubt they will be that selective in their targets.
It sounds like 'Prohibition 2.0' with all the associated problems. I imagine this is just one of many workarounds that will manifest if/when SOPA passes.
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I do not know about Anonymous, but I can expect hardcore fundamentalists and anyone with any corporate power.
The most prime people I can imagine using SOPA as a personal vendetta canon are people like Scientologists. They already use copyright claims to attack people that show what is actually within their books (which of course are copyrighted).
I wouldn't be surprised if Wong's anti-creationsim site (among many other skeptic sites) would have such attack by opponents that don't dare or don't wish to stand up to actual debate.
The first thing that I can see as a logical consequence is that a lot of sites are going to be more closed: their contents are going to be encrypted and less publicly accessible.
The same thing can be said about anyone who has the resources to reach for lawyers if they prefer to silence their opponents with underhanded means.
Of course, like with all efforts to stop piracy, this will do precisely jack and shit. If anything, it will encourage it out of sheer spite. Pirate sites are used to being targeted and just pop back up.
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Zixinus wrote:I do not know about Anonymous, but I can expect hardcore fundamentalists and anyone with any corporate power.
Those with corporate power will be smart enough to know that, if they piss too many people off, there would be enough angry voters to get SOPA repealed. So I don't see them taking down major sites like Facebook or Youtube, though they will threaten them. Fundies I'm not so sure about.
However Anonymous likes pissing people off.
The first thing that I can see as a logical consequence is that a lot of sites are going to be more closed: their contents are going to be encrypted and less publicly accessible.
My understanding is that SOPA, like the DMCA, only needs someone to claim that there is copyrighted content on a website illegally to take it down. Proof of infringement is not required, so I can't see encryption helping when someone wants to take down a website they just don't like.
Destructionator XIII wrote:Actually, SOPA, like the DMCA, places the burden of proof on the plantiff, and the takedown orders are sent under penalty of perjury as well as civil liabilities.
If the alleged infringer tells them to fuck off, the content is required by law to be put back where it was unless the alleger actually fights in court, where he has to prove his case.
The only real problem with this is defendants are often unwilling or unable to defend themselves in court.
Hooray for a system that would let the guys with more money threaten people that aren't doing anything wrong simply because they have lawyers on retainer and the other guys is a youtube entertainer. Sounds like something that the world needs more of!
Destructionator XIII wrote:The problem with the money thing is that the trials aren't fair, not that the trials nor the laws exist.
The Law as written is also broad enough to criminalize, or at least shove into darkly shaded grey area, a ton of things that really shouldn't be there. Thus ensuring that the shitty system in place to deal with these crimes gets to be unjust to a greater number of people. It also means that the US gets to add another waste of money beside the middle east debacle, and the war on drugs.
Destructionator XIII wrote:Actually, SOPA, like the DMCA, places the burden of proof on the plantiff, and the takedown orders are sent under penalty of perjury as well as civil liabilities.
If the alleged infringer tells them to fuck off, the content is required by law to be put back where it was unless the alleger actually fights in court, where he has to prove his case.
The only real problem with this is defendants are often unwilling or unable to defend themselves in court.
Shit, cause of DMCA thousands of my fave youtube videos & artists are gone, most I haven't been able to find elsewhere, only about a dozen have i located.
but to the above poster who advocated it... bittorrent is worthless shit.
took me 2 weeks to download a hindenburg graphic novel at a tepid 2 kb/sec on torrent, but 5 minutes two download larger files on rapidshit & other file sites.
even drag n' drop is faster.
but if sopa passes, i'm breaking out the guy fawkes mask & the low orbit ion cannons.
Destructionator XIII wrote:Actually, SOPA, like the DMCA, places the burden of proof on the plantiff, and the takedown orders are sent under penalty of perjury as well as civil liabilities.
If the alleged infringer tells them to fuck off, the content is required by law to be put back where it was unless the alleger actually fights in court, where he has to prove his case.
The only real problem with this is defendants are often unwilling or unable to defend themselves in court.
How many people have actually faced a penalty for a false DMCA claim ?
ComradeClaus wrote:
but to the above poster who advocated it... bittorrent is worthless shit.
took me 2 weeks to download a hindenburg graphic novel at a tepid 2 kb/sec on torrent, but 5 minutes two download larger files on rapidshit & other file sites.
even drag n' drop is faster.
Becaue the Hindenburg graphic novel is so representative... And what are you going to do when rs et.al. get hit by SOPA?
This is pre-WWII. You can sort of tell from the sketch style, from thee way it refers to Japan (Japan in the 1950s was still rebuilding from WWII), the spelling of Tokyo, lots of details. Nothing obvious... except that the upper right hand corner of the page reads "November 1931." --- Simon_Jester
ComradeClaus wrote:
but to the above poster who advocated it... bittorrent is worthless shit.
took me 2 weeks to download a hindenburg graphic novel at a tepid 2 kb/sec on torrent, but 5 minutes two download larger files on rapidshit & other file sites.
even drag n' drop is faster.
Because the Hindenburg graphic novel is so representative... And what are you going to do when rs et.al. get hit by SOPA?
be shit outta luck, of course!
If I can't get torrent to work now, I sure as Hell can't get it to work after sopa makes the internet a more desolate place. I can't squeeze blood out of a stone.
And what are you going to do when rs et.al. get hit by SOPA?