On 10/27/2013 3:24 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
On 10/27/2013 01:26 PM, Bill Cox 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.
The real solution is to improve hidden services so they can be an
alternative
to insecure internet services. Exit nodes are like off-ramps, and
nobody likes
having one next to their house. But relay-only nodes are like
by-passes, and
encryption essentially lets relay operators build them without ever
letting any
of the creeps cruise around in their neighborhood.
It drives me crazy that we take simple activities that should naturally
be secure P2P based, and route them through insecure servers. A
FreedomBox is an excellent solution for things like end-to-end encrypted
email that is unlikely to get hacked by the NSA. My thinking is that a
Tor-like P2P social network might encourage more participation, and
there's no reason Tor's awesome ability to offer hidden services could
not work. We'd just do a better job at keeping the creeps out while
offering those hidden services.
might still be "bad data", but at least for me that's a much weaker
argument.
For example, I don't know anyone who refuses to use the tools granted to
them in the justice system because they are so often used to defend
drug dealers, murders, and thieves. I also don't know anyone who
doesn't believe in maintaining city, state, and interstate
infrastructure, _even_
when just the act of driving carries a rather large risk of death when
compared to other forms of transportation.
-Jonathan
Certainly Tor is used often used for good purposes, specifically
promoting various freedoms. A little free speech probably outweighs a
lot of illegal file sharing. However, my experience with Tor to date is:
- My Tor node was being used mostly to watch videos.
- A online chat meeting of mostly blind users was attacked by a Tor
griefer who kept posting known crash words that would cause most blind
listeners' text-to-speech engines to crash.
- A web site of mine was hacked from a Tor node.
Unfortunately, the world has lots of people who enjoy making life
miserable for everyone else. Can we support good anonymous behavior,
while discouraging guys like the griefer who trashed the online meeting
of blind people? One idea is to hold people accountable for their
actions by having those actions impact their online reputation of their
secret identities. This idea needs work. It might be an enhancement to
Tor, or maybe a new system.
Thanks for the feedback,
Bill
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