[freenet-chat] Practical darknet - or where are the chinese?

[Matthew Toseland]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 01:52:21PM +0200, Lean Fuglsang wrote:
> Hi,
> I was wondering what the plan is for practial darknet in china. In the
> west it looks like a practial IP based darknet i possible where a lot of
> legal communication is encrypted and ISP's are not that government
> friendly.

A lot of legal traffic is encrypted in China too. They use SSL for
exactly the same reason that we do; mostly to protect credit card
numbers. And in the west many ISPs are very anxious to prevent
litigation at almost all costs.

> The laws that have been passed have been in the style of ban the
> application, or prosecute the little people. But for now it seems that ISP
> are independent enough that a IP darknet is possible.
> 
> But what is the reality in china? What kind of link management is done, I
> don't believe that darknet would be possible using IP, since it is
> possible to see that a node is using it. It is just too easy to see that a
> host have many encrypted udp connection.

That sort of traffic flow analysis is expensive. ISPs don't have one
computer behind each incoming connection, they have a big router behind
hundreds of them. Freenet 0.7 traffic as it is is detectable only by
trying to profile packet sizes, timing etc, or by the fact that it isn't
anything else. Either way it's not that easy to detect, and if you
detect it by it not being anything else you effectively force
registration of protocols with the government. This is not the case in
China now AFAIK and I doubt it will be the case in the near future.
> 
> So how is it imagened that freenet should work? Should the steganography
> go through skype, or other messaging services? If it is phone or video,
> how can you connect to multiple host? You first call one, and then you
> call another? Can the network cope with this type of connections?

VoIP (preferably including video) is a promising avenue for future
research into stego. We can use it parasitically, by for example sending
data on the video stream and keeping the voice stream as it is (so the
traffic is only what would have happened anyway but it doesn't include
video), or we can try to fake timings (which is hard!).

> What about instant messaging? Here you can talk to a lot of people, but it
> looks weird if you do it 24/7.

Indeed. You can pass files through IM too...

The network is not *at present* able to deal with very high latency
transports, but I expect that in future we will add such features; I
hope to move in that direction, at least. Long term requests, passive
requests, publish/subscribe, queueing a fetch of a page which isn't
currently available, and so on.

> What about mobile phones, usb keys and the like?

I doubt it's possible with mobile phones. Passing boxes of disks around
is feasible but requires more user involvement than most users will want
to do. One suggestion was to use PDAs with wifi, which automatically
exchange with friends when they come nearby. Of course wifi is another
option; either fixed or transient wifi links.

> What kind of application is it possible to run on each type of network? I
> would think it could be some type of textmessages, without too much info.

This is all far future stuff. Right now freenet 0.7 works in china, if
you can get darknet connections; freenet 0.5 doesn't.
> 
> So is there any chinese out there, that can post to this list and tell us
> how the reality look in china (in english ;)?
> 
> Are there any frost forums which have chinese activity?

One thing which is important in the nearer future is localisation; even
in europe we will get more users if they can use freenet with the GUI in
their local language. We have translators lined up for many languages;
the bottleneck is implementing translation hooks; if somebody wants to
work on this that would be nice, otherwise I will get around to it some
time in the beta period...
-- 
Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org
Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/
ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so.
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