[Freedombox-discuss] Dumb idea: Alternative to Tor that promotes good behavior

[Bill Cox]

On 10/27/2013 3:31 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>
>
> On 27 October 2013 18:26, Bill Cox <waywardgeek at gmail.com 
> <mailto:waywardgeek at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I would love feedback on an idea for promoting more internet freedom.
>
>     Here's the problem: Tor has little public support, because most Tor
>     traffic is wasted on supporting bad behavior.  When I ran a Tor
>     node, it
>     became clear that most of my bandwidth was being wasted on video
>     downloads.  People want to promote free speech, not child pornography.
>
>     Here's my solution: Build a Tor-like network for routing anonymous
>     data,
>     but track behavior of all users' secret identities, and make their
>     Internet history public.  Allow node operators to choose categories of
>     public identities they which to support.
>
>     For example, I would choose to promote all forms of non-violent free
>     speech.  I should be able to contribute my bandwidth to this purpose.
>     If a dissident in China goes by the public ID of ChinaCat, and has a
>     high reputation for promoting freedom, they are welcome to use my
>     bandwidth.  If someone just wants access to redtube.com
>     <http://redtube.com>, they can get
>     that access from someone else.
>
>     There are various technical aspects to this idea.  For example, would
>     prefer that the social graph between secret identities be public so I
>     can use a simple network flow algorithm over trust edges between
>     identities to determine how much I trust someone.  The entire social
>     network should be P2P, like Tor, and it should route a lot of dummy
>     traffic to help hide the real traffic.  With the considerably lower
>     bandwidth that is needed to promote freedom rather than free porn,
>     this
>     should be no problem.
>
>     What do you guys think?
>
>
> I like it a lot.  But who is going to volunteer to do this work, when 
> people are already busy (not least in coding up things like freedombox)

I am willing to write it myself.  P2P algorithms is something I enjoy 
coding, and this is one of those applications that may be able to do 
some real good for the world.

> I think you would need an economy to incentivize people to do the 
> categorization etc.
>
> Maybe in return for someone helping you route your traffic, you could 
> keep an encrypted backup of their data or contribute a code patch to 
> their project etc.

We're thinking along the same lines.  I would like to add a Ripple based 
economy to the public social network, based on trust relationships 
between peers as in the original Ripple algorithm. With secret 
identities in the social network, it is less important to keep 
transactions and the trust network secret, which was a problem in the 
original Ripple algorithm.  I imagine transactions being done in tiny 
fractions of a cent, for services like helping download files faster in 
a torrent or providing encrypted storage.

Bill
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