With the advent of SOPA and PIPA and ACTA and all their legislative siblings, the western world is now starting to join China and Iran in looking for ways to circumvent government-based censorship. Cue things like Tor, i2p and Freenet.

For the uninitiated, Tor (The Onion Router) is a proxy "meshnet" which anonymizes activity fairly reliably by routing each request through circuits of 3 or more relays, all but one of which knowing nothing about the request or reply's content, solely "where to" and "where from". The only IP that servers see is the exit node, and it's very hard to externally trace traffic back to an IP. Furthermore, Tor supports "hidden services" which allow completely internal browsing and absolute anonymity. See http://torproject.org/

i2p (The Invisible Internet Project / The Garlic Router) is another anonymous network, with a heavier focus on the internal browsing of "eepsites" and internal file sharing. Browsing of external sites is still possible, however. i2p works at a lower level than Tor, which only supports HTTP traffic and the TCP protocol. See http://i2p2.de/

Freenet (Free..net..) is yet another network, solely for the purpose of internal browsing, but in a significantly different sense to the other two, and significantly more anonymous and secure. Freenet is entirely decentralised both in maintenance and in hosting of services; all data on freenet is distributed across all nodes, removing any possibility of censorship or a "single point of failure".

Despite the static nature of the system, dynamic pages, wikis, social networks, forums and more are all possible and implemented. So far I believe the biggest and only significant downside to this network is speed, which can be solved by raising popularity, although for those in China etc. speed is the least of their worries. See http://freenetproject.org

tl;dr: Three potential new "internets" to stop rising censorship in the west and help allow free speech in the east.

I'm partially here to raise awareness, partially curious on how many of you have tried each of these / what your opinions are on each or the topic in general. Over to you

I'm an idealist. So instead of looking for ways to circumvent government restrictions, I continue to advocate the abolishment of all governments.

frony0 Wrote:and it's very hard to externally trace traffic back to an IP. Furthermore, Tor supports "hidden services" which allow completely internal browsing and absolute anonymity. See http://torproject.org/

I've searched about the topic before (wanted to enter the deep net (warning: save yourselves the headache and don't read about it) because I wanted (and still do) to check what I can find of forbidden books there), though I didn't find reliable sources for this, I read on several different forums that there's no complete anonymity and any IP can be tracked down if the FBI really wants to, although that's still difficult and they can't go around tracking everybody except for child pornography producers and users and drug dealers.

And thanks for the rest, good to know that other methods exist to obtain anonymity, I will indeed check them out some time later.

shadysaint Wrote:I'm an idealist. So instead of looking for ways to circumvent government restrictions, I continue to advocate the abolishment of all governments.

That's very unlikely to happen in our lifetime because, eventually, after abolishing all governments and leaving everything "free", on people's hands, some group, which now could come from anywhere in the world, would seize the opportunity and soon there would be a government again everywhere, because the idea is already on the collective's mind and there's much to be gained by being the government — even if you need to do it by force, which would probably be easier without the military, currently controlled by the governments. Or the military would become the government, as it has happened before in some countries. Or huge corporations would become the government. Or a smaller but stronger group would do it and force their way down on people's throats just like the governments we now have do. So, maybe the best we can have is a government that isn't so meddlesome.

undead_saif Wrote:I read on several different forums that there's no complete anonymity and any IP can be tracked down if the FBI really wants to, although that's still difficult and they can't go around tracking everybody except for child pornography producers and users and drug dealers.

This isn't really true. Take, for example, (h/cr)ackers. The truly skilled ones never get caught.

There's also a bunch of countries that won't cooperate with US investigations. So even if the FBI wanted to check the logs for some random computer from China, the Chinese government wouldn't give up the logs.

Of course, I'm sure there are people that (maybe correctly) think that the US would counter-hack into Chinese ISP's in order to get IP addresses and logs. I guess anything is possible. I wonder how deep that stuff goes...

Edit: Also, from my personal experience, the government can be pretty slow and inept. It's almost surprising that anything ever gets done when the government is involved.

The way people using TOR get caught by the FBI is not through weaknesses in TOR. It's because the FBI use profiling techniques combined with surveillance to track people down. One example I read about involved a hacker who spent a lot of time on certain IRC channels. The FBI were unable to trace him because he used TOR correctly, so they sat silently in the channels and read everything he posted. Over about 6 months he mentioned in passing a few key facts, in particular he talked about how irritated he was with a particular event taking place, blocking all the roads around him (giving them his city). Even without him letting that slip, they had narrowed it down to a list of a couple of cities using timezone and weather that he mentioned.

They also analysed his speech patterns to get a profile of his age, race, educational background, and a bunch of other stuff. Over time they narrowed the search area down to about a three-block radius, and then they started local surveillance on the few properties in that area where people matching his profile lived. They monitored the internet connections of those properties to see when people connected and disconnected to/from TOR, and correlated those with the times the hacker in the IRC channel connected. That left them with one person.

So the moral of the story is - if you want to be a criminal, TOR isn't enough to keep you safe. If you want to talk or browse in private, it is.

partner55083777 Wrote:This isn't really true. Take, for example, (h/cr)ackers. The truly skilled ones never get caught.

There's also a bunch of countries that won't cooperate with US investigations. So even if the FBI wanted to check the logs for some random computer from China, the Chinese government wouldn't give up the logs.

Of course, I'm sure there are people that (maybe correctly) think that the US would counter-hack into Chinese ISP's in order to get IP addresses and logs. I guess anything is possible. I wonder how deep that stuff goes...

Edit: Also, from my personal experience, the government can be pretty slow and inept. It's almost surprising that anything ever gets done when the government is involved.

Makes sense. I also agree about them being slow.
I think for us normal users we can consider ourselves hidden, but I'm still not sure we are totally anonymous, will do more research.

undead_saif Wrote:I've searched about the topic before (wanted to enter the deep net (warning: save yourselves the headache and don't read about it) because I wanted (and still do) to check what I can find of forbidden books there), though I didn't find reliable sources for this, I read on several different forums that there's no complete anonymity and any IP can be tracked down if the FBI really wants to, although that's still difficult and they can't go around tracking everybody except for child pornography producers and users and drug dealers.

And thanks for the rest, good to know that other methods exist to obtain anonymity, I will indeed check them out some time later.

As the others said, it is theoretically very possible to have complete anonymity, though in practice each one of these networks has their own technical vulnerabilities. Tor in timing attacks (Seeing packets from A to B, then B to C, implies A is connected to C) and of course just watching the data transferred. i2p in possibly the same way, I'm not to familiar with it.

Freenet (my favourite, though fairly limited until it reaches critical mass) is the strongest of the three, though apparently still has an attack vector that threatens it's unique plausible deniability known as the "pitch black attack" yet to be completely fixed. And as Richard said, all three are vulnerable to social engineering and/or behavioural analysis if you're sloppy.

As far as encryption goes, none of these are entirely secure, they're just strong enough to make it very impractical even for governments to try and crack them without using quantum computing. The only encryption method proved to be completely uncrackable is the one time pad, which is for obvious reasons not really implementable for such networks...

Interesting replies. You guys made me a little more interested in this anonymity thing. I've read about one time pad now, and that story is interesting, it makes me wonder about what the hacker was doing that made the FBI track him for 6 months.