Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing Is Booming 308
PatPending writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend. In other words, it's a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders. RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there's been a surge in downloads. 'The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,' he said."
What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Clamp down on torrents, clamp down on file sharing sites, what do you expect? People to meekly give up sharing files?
It only takes one person to write a darknet program like this and the game is back on.
It sounds a lot like a program I'd considered writing before and if done right it's basically impossible to shut down, or compromise effectively, without severely screwing up the internet. Which is probably the next step.
Re:What a surprise (Score:1, Insightful)
And thing about private nets is that one cannot facebook them - convert them yet to another advertising media.
Darknet is the opposite of the main commercial function of Internet - advertisement. The main reason why we are getting so much freebies on any media nowadays, it's because the media is advertisement media.
Darknets is the end of internet. I am surprised ADB and NoScript survived for so long.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
One possible strength is also an obvious weakness: everything hinges on trusted friends - i.e. if you do not have any trusted friends that use this RetroShare then you can not join the network, unless you are willing to join through a non-trusted friend. A side effect is that the amount of content available on this network is highly limited.
This works until critical mass is reached, which very well may just have happened. Enough people in the network that most of the rest of the world has a friend that is connected already, and increased word-of-mouth advertising, and more content which in turn attracts more users. Closure of megaupload and some other legal wins against torrent sites will surely have helped them too. But without critical mass it's still not a viable option for many bittorrent/megaupload refugees.
Re:What a surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
...it's basically impossible to shut down, or compromise effectively, without severely screwing up the internet. Which is probably the next step.
"You have transferred more than 100kB of encrypted data. Your internet connection will be suspended until the end of the month."
Re:disadvange. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the first time I've ever seen any attempt at copyright protection that didn't resulted in worse outcome for their customers! For example...
. Funny sectors on floppy disks. Legitimate users can't make backup copies, pirates (with the copy protection removed) can make all the copies they want.
. "Find the nth word in the nth paragraph on the nth page of the manual". Legitimate users have to dig up the manual every time they want to play a game, while pirates (with the copy protection removed) can play any time they want without such annoyances
. Parallel port dongles. Legitimate users have to muck around with parallel port dongles that interfere with their printer. Pirates don't.
. Funny sectors on CDROM's. As per floppy disks, but it turns out that some CDROM drives couldn't play the games at all (RA2? or was it C&C2?). Pirates have no such problems
. Phone home via internet every time you want to play?... you see where this is going
It seems like every time the software industry introduces a new copy protection scheme, it really only annoys their paying customers. It doesn't hinder the pirates one little bit.
But it is still way faster than going to a real store, buying it and playing it. Especially if you are on a budget.
But on the other hand now it seems that the software industry has put enough pressure on the illegal file sharers that doing it that way is harder, or at least slower than it was. If the software industry allowed you to download the game direct from them for a reasonable price, they might be in with a chance. We all know they'll still continue to screw it up though.
Not the answer (Score:3, Insightful)
'Breaking into the scene' of private darknets is diffcult for anyone who doesn't have pre-existing, probably real-world contacts (much like having ready access to good drugs, it might be easy for kids in a college environment, not so much for your average person). And at the end of the day, if you are going to limit your file sharing activities with a few people you know, you might as well just use email.
For a true culture of free information exchange, we need to look to systems that anyone with a connection and the right software can access and preferably search. This is far more technically challenging, and due to the measures taken to preserve anonymity, usually less convenient than what we are currently used to. But this will improve in due course. Tor, Freenet, I2P and others like them are the future, not walled gardens.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Most of my traffic is HTTPS these days - mail, search, twitter, work, the list goes on. Any ISP trying to bar encrypted traffic will lose customers quicker than they can ban them.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Retroshare still requires a central server (Score:4, Insightful)
Retroshare itself may not require any centralized resource at all, but... how do you find like-minded friends in the first place and establish a web of trust? You're going to need a centralized forum/chatroom, aren't you, where you can meet people and identify those with common interests and focus? Retroshare simply shifts the focus of the centralized resource from the actual sharing of data to the social aspect of creating and maintaining that web of trust.
And apparently all it would take, as hinted by someone else here, is one traitorous bastard in your web of trust to lay the whole thing out bare for the exploitation by others with selfish motives.
Re:What a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I will presume you don't mean that as a troll, and simply don't remember the internet back before "marketing" turned into a four-letter word.
The internet arose and thrived before the corporate world learned how to make money with it. Primarily universities, but also a steadily growing number of people who realized they couldn't live without it after graduation from uni, paid for a network connection so they could participate in this wonderful global sharing of ideas. And before that, people paid for access to very very crude (by comparison) dialup BBSs that gave them just the smallest taste of what an online global network had to offer.
The problem we have with the internet today, and I would say broadcast-vs-cable TV has the same problem - Companies simply got greedy. Once, they sold us cable as a great new way to get static-free TV with no ads. Now people pay over a hundred bucks a month for the same thing they used to get over the air (admittedly with more channels), and have to pay even more for premium channels that really don't have ads - Except, even those have started pushing the definition of "no ads". The internet did just fine back when it functioned as nothing but a pipe to your door, and everyone could attach whatever services to their end of the pipe they wanted.
Personally, I think the big shift really happened when ISPs started to ban "servers", basically reducing the network back to nothing more than one more way to reach consumers. As long as everyone and their brother could host whatever the hell they wanted, advertisers really had to bust their balls to reach more than a handful of people online; once people started accepting the internet as a set of places you go to get content, rather than a (albeit "Wild-West"-like) community in which you participate, the internet became nothing more than another 50k TV channels, complete with ads.
So I, for one, welcome the growth of darknets. It means We The People, rather than our corporate overlords, can once again decide what we allow on our network. If Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and even the government, doesn't like that - No problem, they can consider themselves not invited to my party.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The spammers will be all over this in due time: install a trojan onto people's computers that looks for darknets and start automatically sharing malware and/or adding the spammer's account to the list of trusted friends. If the spammers can do it, the government/big business can do it.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
"Fatter" does not mean "healthier".
Even a decade ago, I could find just about anything I wanted online - Key word there, "wanted". Source code snippets? Porn? Music? Movies (albeit of lower quality due to bandwidth constraints)? Slashdot? Magazine scans? How-Tos on anything from home repair to bomb making? Game guides and reviews by players rather than publisher shills? Check, check, checkitty-check.
Today, I can find terabytes worth of narcissists finding ever more bandwidth-hungry ways to tell me about their awesomeness. I can find all the Major Media talking heads doing the exact same thing that led a generation to completely ignore them in the first place, back when they did their thing for free over-the-air. I can find a million people who want to either sell me something, or just plain sell me. And the stuff I actually want? Well, technically still there, but the signal-to-noise ratio goes down with every passing year.
So yes, call me disingenuous if you must, but the internet today does not strike me as "thriving", despite its girth; quite the opposite, we have to constantly fight both corporations and governments to keep it in a form at least vaguely useful to us and prevent it from degenerating into just one more old-school push-media advertising/propaganda vehicle. The internet has degenerated into a 300Lbs middle-aged white guy huffing and puffing after climbing a flight of stairs.
But hey, I could always start a vlog to complain about it, right?
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
we have to constantly fight both corporations and governments to keep it in a form at least vaguely useful to us and prevent it from degenerating into just one more old-school push-media advertising/propaganda vehicle.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and the venue is irrelevant.
Re:What a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Because I think the internet kind of sucked a decade ago. Sites were slow. You couldn't find good maps. (Ha! I used to have a city map.) I still had a phone book. Yahoo was one of the best sites available. iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora didn't exist. Podcasts didn't exist. Neither did most blogs. I don't recall whether or not you could even leave comments a decade ago, but probably not. Wikipedia was launched only 11 years ago (I'm sure it was crappy with virtually no articles only a year after startup).
Your whole post looks like a knee-jerk attempt to prove your original assertion about the internet going downhill thanks to business.
Re:Not very anonymous (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem is, there are a thousand and one different schemes like these, from freenet to gnunet to oneswarm to - whatever this thing was called. And you need to know a good deal about cryptography to figure out which ones are safe, and a good deal about social dynamics on the net to know which one is actually going to get used for anything you're interested in. And you need friends who use it (in most cases).
The fragmentation is killing these efforts. The "connect only to friends"-model is hard enough to get to work in practice, without umpteen different incompatible implementations trying it.
Re:Whackamole! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
I've worked for two ISPs.
No. This isn't about raw bandwidth. This is also about the supporting infrastructure.
It makes no sense to try to support edge use cases. It also makes no sense to let a handful of users take down service because some person wanted to run a torrent tracker.
Yes there's an oversell, but no, it's not as bad as you think.
That is completely irrelevant. Selling a service you know you won't provide is fraud. I live in a country with strong customer protection laws, the first ISP to try to pull the "secret limits" shit that providers do elsewhere would likely get slapped down. Published limits are the norm on mobile connections, and practically do not exist on household broadband.
ISPs have extremely good data about bandwidth usage distribution among customers, and can predict with a high degree of precision what kind of usage a particular service will see. If you, as an ISP, can't provide your customers with the bandwidth you promise, don't sell it. Put a non-secret limit on a cheap connection, and sell a premium service which supports 500GB/month or whatever. Or accept that a percentage of your customers will use far more than average, and provide for it (that's what they do here). What you don't do here is advertise "unlimited" service and start whining if a few people use it, as you perfectly well knew they would.
Saying that the poor ISPs HAVE to punish a percentage of "offenders" among the customers that buy their service is BS. ISPs who pull that stunt are ripping off some of their customers, and they know fully well that they do. Supporting edge cases makes no sense? WT flying F? It makes perfect sense businesswise to tinker with the meters on your gas pumps in order to pump less gas for the same price if you run a gas station, it's also fraud. Sorry, but these policies and their apologists just tick me off.