Re: POLITICS: RIAA & Law trumps Freedom of Speech

From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Fri Apr 27 2001 - 03:20:34 MDT


Brian Atkins wrote:

> violations to knowingly take place on their network. The only possible
> solution is going to be hiding the traffic somehow, maybe cloaking the
> traffic as normal-looking encrypted HTTP/SSL traffic would work. I hope
> Freenet is designing for this.

First to Gnutella: it has not been designed to cloak the identities of
their participants. You just join the network, ask for a few appropriately
named files, obtain from which IP addresses they come from, do a DNS
lookup, document it all and delegate the rest to the legal department.
No packet sniffing whatsoever necessary.

Pulling this stunt is much harder with traffic remixer type of anonymous
publishing systems, such as Freenet and MojoNation, which can be also
protected by above steganographic means from real packet sniffing at
the ISP, though they would have still to designed to resist statistic
traffic analysis. You can still smoke out the IPs of the parties you're
directly connected to, though, so you would typically want to make
legal links which go over legal boundaries, so thus each act of ripping
a node from the grid will have to see maximum amount of administrative
friction. As usually, it helps not being stupid, and anticipate the
next moves of your adversaries.

Another way of going civilly disobedient is to become your own ISP
(see Consume Net and similiar efforts), creating user-owned networks
using commodity IEEE 802.11b wireless networking, and forthcoming
successors (next generation is ramping up to 55 MBps already;
I'm looking forward to digital pulse radio, which is right now
stalled at FCC due to bitching & moaning from the side of GPS folks, who
rightfully suspect it would put them out of business in a double whammy:
by degrading their quality, simultaneously offering better positioning
services _and_ wireless networking).



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