On Sunday 22 June 2008 03:56, Hierophant wrote:
> I've recently implemented a Freenet opennet node via XeroBank 2.0 
<http://xerobank.com> and would appreciate comments, especially regarding 
performance and security.? XeroBank 2.0 is a commercial broadband descendant 
of Tor.? XeroBank is apparently incorporated in Panama.? Although XeroBank's 
website has short bios on its key staff, I have not found any information 
regarding its owners.
> 
> XeroBank access costs $35 per month for 75 Gb at ca. 1.5 Mb/sec download and 
ca. 0.5 Mb/sec upload.? Clients are assigned both access and deposit account 
numbers, and only deposit-account-to-access-account transactions are 
supposedly possible.? Also, payments to XeroBank are anonymized via Dalpay in 
Iceland, and so even deposit accounts are supposedly anonymous.? Multiple 
machines can access XeroBank simultaneously, and each machine (real and/or 
virtual) has a separate encrypted VPN channel to its network.? There are 
currently exit nodes in Canada and the Netherlands.? The IP of an exit node 
persists until the originating VPN channel terminates.
> 
> I've corresponded with Steve Topletz, one of XeroBank's technical 
consultants, and he's assured me that running a Freenet doesn't violate its 
terms of service unless doing so generates upstream complaints.? For those 
who don't know of Steve Topletz, he's a veteran of Cult of the Dead Cow and 
Hacktivismo, and was active in Tor development.? There are interviews with 
him on darkREADING <http://tinyurl.com/6y6eju>, NowPublic 
<http://tinyurl.com/5donxb> and the American Chronicle 
<http://tinyurl.com/558ngj>.
> 
> As I understand XeroBank, only entities capable of global correlation 
attacks can trace traffic between its entry and exit nodes.? Being a private 
network, XeroBank doesn't share Tor's key vulnerability to evil exit nodes.? 
According to XeroBank's Privacy Policy 
<http://xerobank.com/privacy_policy.php>, it does not log IPs or activity 
unless there is evidence of malicious activity which violates its terms of 
service and/or human rights, or unless it's been compelled by "court orders 
of all applicable jurisdictions for all specific servers" (which are in 
multiple countries).
> 
> Lack of IP anonymity is the key vulnerability of Freenet in insecure mode, 
and even for darknets if they're compromised.? By running this node via 
XeroBank, none of my opennet peers knows my true IP.? And given that each 
machine connects via a separate VPN and has a distinct exit IP, I can run a 
second node that connects only to my opennet node, and use only that node for 
accessing Freenet.? As I understand Freenet, the activities of that draknet 
node would not be visible to any of my opennet peers.
> 
> I'm currently running my main node using Freenet 0.7 Build #1152 r20268 in a 
virtual Win XP SP2 machine on a PGP-encrypted partition, using Java Version 
1.6.0_06 and JVM Version 10.0-b22.? There's now a XeroBank 2.0 version of xB 
Machine, and I'll switch to that shortly.? The Win XP machine has one CPU, 1 
Gb memory and a 30 Gb hard disk.? The node has one CPU, 512 Mb memory, a 20 
Gb datastore and bandwidth limits of 50 Kbps output and 100 Kbps input.? The 
node has been up for over two days, and has generally had ca. 5-10 peers.? 
Output and input rates have generally been ca. 25-50 Kbps.
> 
> Freenet provides many other statistics, but I'm not going to dump them all 
here.? However, given that I do want help optimizing this node's performance, 
I'll be happy to provide whatever non-compromising information that's 
requested.
> 
> Hierophant
> hierophant at hell.com

Cool. However I would point out that there is an entire industry dedicated to 
reversing money anonymisation schemes.
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