Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You

Don´t know if this is the right forum...

On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.

The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”

Almost anyone could have one of these tiny servers, which are now produced for limited purposes but could be adapted to a full range of Internet applications, he said.

“They will get very cheap, very quick,” Mr. Moglen said. “They’re $99; they will go to $69. Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29.”

The missing ingredients are software packages, which are available at no cost but have to be made easy to use. “You would have a whole system with privacy and security built in for the civil world we are living in,” he said. “It stores everything you care about.”

Mr. Moglen said that if he could raise “slightly north of $500,000,” Freedom Box 1.0 would be ready in one year.

“We should make this far better for the people trying to make change than for the people trying to make oppression,” Mr. Moglen said. “Being connected works.”

Full Story: www.nytimes.com...

Once the details of a plan become public you can bet that the government will have their paws all over it either with direct regulation to "protect" you or via the NSA or DHS. So now we have to stay away from these little plug in servers too.

this product, network, and thread already exist.

and they do cost $30.

Can someone direct me to a product page or something? I cannot find this anywhere with any certainty.

Ideally this is a way to create an intermesh (vs. internet) which allows all users to have multiple routes and multiple automatic DNS alternatives / caches. Hard to shut down the internet when it exists as a decentralized "cloud".

Just what the internet needs, more poorly managed internet hardware for the hackers to play with. The hackers have been having a hey day with cloud computing…. Now this….

It is hard enough to live with the managed internet servers that hackers turn into zombies to rage living hell on the internet community. It takes too long as it is for people to do something about an out of control server that has been taken over and used to attack other computers across the world. And that is at a place that keep staff on hand 24/7 to take care of such situations.

On the home computer side and all the botnets that are swarming around the internet attacking people on a day to day basis…… I don’t even want to go there.

Think of what a hacker could do with a bunch of mini servers that don’t have a direct interface or any other way to keep an eye on the code that it is running, or to notice strange thing happening when the code is running.

Put those servers in the hands of people that won’t even be checking on them if they did have a direct interface to use.

And throw that on top of the fact that they will be home servers with no easy way for outsiders to contact the owner to correct problems.

If a bunch of hackers did find a vulnerability that allowed them to put code on it with out affecting the normal intended operation that the owner is using it for. Then all heck will break loose. It’s a bad idea, plain and simple, a bad idea.

Originally posted by Mr Tranny
Just what the internet needs, more poorly managed internet hardware for the hackers to play with. The hackers have been having a hey day with cloud computing…. Now this….

It is hard enough to live with the managed internet servers that hackers turn into zombies to rage living hell on the internet community. It takes too long as it is for people to do something about an out of control server that has been taken over and used to attack other computers across the world. And that is at a place that keep staff on hand 24/7 to take care of such situations.

On the home computer side and all the botnets that are swarming around the internet attacking people on a day to day basis…… I don’t even want to go there.

Think of what a hacker could do with a bunch of mini servers that don’t have a direct interface or any other way to keep an eye on the code that it is running, or to notice strange thing happening when the code is running.

Put those servers in the hands of people that won’t even be checking on them if they did have a direct interface to use.

And throw that on top of the fact that they will be home servers with no easy way for outsiders to contact the owner to correct problems.

If a bunch of hackers did find a vulnerability that allowed them to put code on it with out affecting the normal intended operation that the owner is using it for. Then all heck will break loose. It’s a bad idea, plain and simple, a bad idea.

You have a point there.
But you are missing the point, (pardon the pun). This isn't an alternative to an "overly-hacked internet", it's an alternative to "government-regulated" internet... Heck, it's an alternative to "regulated" internet, if that makes any sense (now that i think of, as long as you have a protocol you have regulations, well..)
Hackers/crackers will ALWAYS be here as long as computers and networks exist. But that's not the problem this concept is trying to solve.

Originally posted by RelentlessLurker
this product, network, and thread already exist.

and they do cost $30.

How about some links?

reply to post by drakus


from what I understand, when IPV6 comes out, its going to make hacking about 100% harder without getting caught.

And if everyones going to be buying a couple of these Servers, we will certainly need to move to IPV6 much quicker.

reply to post by VonDoomen


And/or the ISPs will have to get more aggressive in blocking accounts that have traffic patterns matching an infected bot.

Sometime is will be easy to distinguish bot activity. Other times, it will be a lot harder to distinguish from P2P activity.

If a web site has a confirmed DOS attack that is coming from botnets. Just look at the type of traffic making up the attack. Look at who on your network is sending similar traffic to the site in question. Automatically block all those people until they can demonstrate that they have cleaned the problem from their computers.

If it is a member of a botnet that is just rattling doors and probing ports on other home computers, to find more computers to turn into more bots, then I will be a lot harder to discern it from a P2P program, or just a normal person that is exploring the network that makes up the internet (like I have done)