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Creating a Backboneless Internet?
Posted by
Cliff
on Fri Feb 17, 2006 08:40 PM
from the tricky-part-is-finding-the-right-medium dept.
from the tricky-part-is-finding-the-right-medium dept.
Peter Trepan asks: "The Internet is the best thing to happen to the free exchange of ideas since... well... maybe ever. But it can also be used as a tool for media control and universal surveillance, perhaps turning that benefit into a liability. Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States. In the age of ubiquitous e-mail and filtering software, budding McCarthys are able and willing to do so. I Am Not A Network Professional, but it seems like all this potential for abuse depends upon bottlenecks at the level of ISPs and backbone providers. Is it possible to create an internet that relies instead on peer-to-peer connectivity? How would the hardware work? How would the information be passed? What would be the incentive for average people to buy into it if it meant they'd have to host someone else's packets on their hard drive? In short, what would have to be done to ensure that at least one internet remains completely free, anonymous, and democratized?"
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You're on it baby.. (Score:5, Informative)
You're describing the original design of the internet, which we're still running with essentially.
In practice though, it would be insane to let everyone with a DSL line to two different locations update routing table through the entire internet. The mechanisms to allow this exist (bgp, ospf) but major ISPs that don't want their network to fall apart prevent it because their service would quickly turn to crap. ISPs with missing filters have actually caused internet wide splits, when the entire internet tried to route through someone's T1's connected to two different ISP. BGP with a little better cost system could help that, but anyone could still cause a split anytime they liked. Think of an entire internet that acts more like IRC.
The core of the internet is still just a bunch of peers, but if you want things to stay up, they've got to be a select group that really know what they're doing. You're still free to peer directly with anyone you want, just don't expect everyone else to use your internet connection to get there too. Most people don't want to have to buy two internet connections for marginal gains anyway.
Perhaps a software solution like TOR or Freenet could help you sleep better at night?
Internets!!! (Score:2, Funny)
Tier 1s? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for, you know, the Tier 1 ISPs, on whose networks practically all our traffic passes at some point.
Control them, and you control the net.
Parent
Re:Tier 1s? (Score:5, Interesting)
His question was, "Is there a way". The answer is yes, but you don't want it, so people stopped doing it. Anyone can peer with anyone else, but the copper/fiber cost to take the core out of the picture prevents anyone from wanting to do it. If you're worried about big brother, encrypt.
If he really wants what he's asking for, he can start finding peers on the other side of the net, and he can keep *his* traffic off the backbones once he has enough peers (and he's built some enormous route tables as well).
Parent
Re:Tier 1s? (Score:3, Informative)
Then what do you make of the Seattle Internet Exchange [seattleix.net]?
Re:Tier 1s? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that, but there's the problem of growing routing tables. Every host on the Internet needs to know what direction to send packets destined for every other host. IPv6 is designed to alleviate some of the problems of big routing tables, but that's just because it makes it easier to map a hierarchical network topology into a hierarchical address space (thus reducing
Re:Tier 1s? (Score:4, Interesting)
Porn (particularly highly illegal types) would also be a strong demand driver. Anything else that a substantial amount of people want and is sufficiently prosecuted or sufficiently taboo will drive demand.
These tools aren't answers in and of themselves though, as they themselves can be banned and filtered out, even if the contents cannot be looked at. Also, monkey-in-the-middle attacks can work if enough nodes are controlled, which major ISPs/government agencies can do.
Tor + a decentralized network would be far more resiliant to attempts to flat out ban Tor.
Parent
Lord of the ... Tiers? (Score:5, Funny)
One Tier to Rule Them All. One Tier to Find Them. One Tier to Bring Them All and In The Darkness Bind Them.
Yeah I know, redundant, I couldn't resist though.
Parent
Re:Lord of the ... Tiers? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, it was necessary.
I just can't believe you passed up the opportunity to end with "..and in the darkness, BIND them."
Parent
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't know much about TOR but I just thought I'd clarify about Freenet. It is indeed a software solution to what you are asking about in which the sites are accessed in an entirely peer to peer manner. Instead of having static routing tables located at specific points each computer in the network maintains its own routing information. If a computer doesn't know how to get to a certain site it guesses by asking a neighbor if it has the desired data. Data is cached throughout the network so that sites are stored as distributed files, meaning at any one time if your computer is a part of Freenet it could have information related to a number of sites.
The good thing about Freenet is that site accesses are entirely anonymous. There is no way to be traced AFAIK. One of the bad things is that it takes a computer a long time to build up enough routing information to access any websites at all. You have to run the Freenet program for a few days before you are able to access anything and even though its painfully slow. The other problem that people have is that you have to store any content that goes through your computer. Freenet is plagued with child porn sites because the anonyminity that it provides. This means that if you are running the freenet program you are likely to have child pornography data stored on your computer even if you have never visited those sites. While the legality of this is questionable, the ethical issues are obvious.
Still it is a very interesting concept and definitely has its applications (China anyone?).
Parent
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, if you're a common carrier you can't make any decisions about blocking (allegedly) illegal content at all, because it would be too easily abused.
Parent
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:2)
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:3, Insightful)
For the moment... (Score:3, Interesting)
True; but if various [slashdot.org] corporate [slashdot.org] proposals [slashdot.org] go through, your encrypted traffic might travel cross country at sub 56kbps rates with multi-second latency. Which does bad things to a torrent.
Mind you, this still won't stop file sharing. As an example of the alternatives: someone in my apartment complex has a non-internet wireles
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially what the submitter is interested in is a meshed network, which to my knowledge is the only network topology yet created which does not use hubs, centers, or buses to carry conglomerated traffic. Remember that things like bittorrent, bgp (less so), and other similar protocols are really creating "virtual" meshes, not real ones - all of your traffic (and that of every other person in your segment) is still travelling to your ISP, and that to their backbone. So anyone who sits at those hubs or backbones would be able to see all your torrent traffic, and who it is going to/from - it is only the separation of the ISPs and the RIAA/MPAA/FBI that keeps them from knowing your every move on the Internet! (Encryption and proxies help, but it aren't a foolproof solution, btw.)
Also, TCP is designed to be fault-tolerant, but also semi-optimizing, taking the shortest perceived route to its destination. So unless a backbone is down, most (if not all) traffic from you to a host between which the backbone sits will travel on that backbone, very predictably. TCP is not privacy-sensitive.
The short answer is that in a wired world, there is no feasible way to create a mesh. The strength of the mesh is algorithmically tied to the number of other nodes each node is connected to. So unless you're going to dig up the yard between you and, say, three of your neighbors, and they and two more of theirs, and so on, across the entire country, you will end up with a topology which looks more like what you've already got, with a smaller number of larger rings and stars, each funneling through a central location.
In a wireless environment, the possibilities are much better. Some police precincts in the U.S. have been experimenting with mesh-networked radios, where each radio is a repeater as well as a transceiver. Thus a linear configuration of radios could extend the range from perhaps a 30-mile radius to a 60-mile-per-radio diameter for as long as the chain is unbroken. This isn't the optimum configuration, however, since it is presumed that one would want redundancy, so you would be forced to configure the mesh in such a way that you could talk to at least three other nodes at any given time. This requires a very high density of nodes, so it would work much better in a more densely-populated area than one nodes are scarce.
I hope that answers the question.
Parent
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:4, Informative)
We seem to be scaling rather nicely.
http://anonetnfo.brinkster.net/ [brinkster.net]
Parent
You Are Not A Network Professional (Score:3, Interesting)
Secondly, network geeks in general do not grok the economics of the internet on a national or global scale. Without statistical multiplexing and large economies of scale created by the "backbone providers" vilified in the original post, your internet access fees would not be as affordabl
With one or two minor changes, yes. (Score:3, Informative)
First, to be effective, all network connections would need to be fairly fat. A tiered Internet is designed along the same sort of design philosophy as a "fat tree" - low bandwidth at the work-node level, massive bandwidth in the middle. A tierless Internet, particularly one that supported enough multiple paths to be useful for robust
Re:You're on it baby.. (Score:3, Informative)
Nope.
Are you familiar with Trusted Network Connect? [trustedcom...ggroup.org]
It is a new specification from the Trusted Computing Group to control and restrict network connections, and to control and restrict the networked computer.
"The TNC architecture enables network operators to enforce policies regarding endpoint integrity at or after network connection."
Of cource the Trusted Computing Group is advertizing it as a good thing, and is advertizing
Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Peer to Peer internet would be horrible. Not only would it be unreliable, but at time slow.
Sure some agencies can access our information because it's centralized, but if we don't want them to see something, it's not hard to encrypt it. Hell I'm even working on an encryption application.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:2)
Indeed, if anyone has deep dark secrets he/she wishes to share with someone, just encrypt with something like PGP. Your secret will be safe unless someone wants it bad enough to torture either you or the recipients for the password. If someone wants to force a secret out of you, they'll get it, unless you, like many young muslims are willing to die for it.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
The main problem with a P2P internet would be bandwidth, at least at this point. There just aren't the resources available - hardware or software - for people to be running /. out of their mom's basement. Even a good amount of small businesses wouldn't be covered by a fairly decent dedicated server, but they can't afford to set up a cluster to run things like a hosting company can, let alone hire someone to set the thing up (or b
Not exactly practical (Score:5, Informative)
One of the major problems right now in the commercial ISP backbone environment is what happens if there's an outage; what's called route flapping, where routes dissapear and reappear, and all the routers affected have to recalculate how to get to various endpoints, can already saturate the router CPU logic for big, industrial grade room-full-of-racksize-router backbone facilities. Going to a more diffuse network at high bandwidth requirements exponentially makes this worse.
P2P across a city? Not ridiculous.
P2P across the world? Baaad idea.
Circa 1982 (Score:5, Interesting)
> instead on peer-to-peer connectivity?
You have just describe the net (later the Net, still later the Internet) circa 1982. You can search Usenet to read about the excitement level when USR 2400 baud modems were released: doubling of connection speed to transmit netnews!
Of course, you can also read about what happened when news (alone) was distributed on a meshed basis.
sPh
Yes, but not really. (Score:3, Insightful)
That is the "backbone" and where the "bottleneck" is.
Get on Freenet ? (Score:2)
More people use it, more helpful it could be.
Re:Get on Freenet ? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not to say freenet not an interesting experiment. That's not to say anonymity isn't desireable. but please
All mail was read in WWII (Score:5, Informative)
Before and during WWII all mail crossing an international border in or out of the US was steamed open and read. This included all mail, all packages, all telegrams, and all telephone calls. In addition to all mail being steamed open and read, it was censored [lexisnexis.com] if the Army deemed it to be necessary to support the goals of the Army. Letters would arrive with portions cut out by scissors. They also censored all international media -- radio, newspapers, and magazines both incoming and outgoing.
It's quite easy to imagine as it's already been done.
Re:All mail was read in WWII (Score:3, Insightful)
The capacity to read everything did not exist.
This was during all out war not some informal war with no timetable.
This data was not kept indefinitely.
Lastly the computing power did not exist for a politician to do an SQL query on your life history to determine if you are "desirable".
Dangerous and misleading analogy.
The Solution Is Crypto (Score:4, Insightful)
The government can still do some traffic analysis (they sniff headers rather than read the contents of the messages) and they can learn a lot from that, but such is life.
Re:The Solution Is Crypto (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Solution Is Crypto (Score:3, Insightful)
If people want to read all the little love letters I send my wife all day... or the email to my Dad about the cool car I saw on the way in to school this morning.... then go right ahead...
What I'm wondering is why people feel the need to hide their e-mail activities. The only situations I can think of are when you need to send sensitive information quickly (the secretary for my advisor asked for my Full Name, SSN, Address and Telephone number
Re:The Solution Is Crypto (Score:4, Insightful)
Oddly enough, I'd say that a significant part of it is the chicken-and-egg problem: it's only really useful for cryptography if a lot of people have PGP (note that signing your emails using PGP shows that they're really from you, but does not actually encrypt them; for that, you need to encrypt using the public key of the recipient, and this would require most recipients to have public keys in the first place). For Joe User who hasn't heard of an IP address let alone public key encryption, you'd need some way to automatically set up PGP for him, since he certainly can't do it. and there's no economic motivation for companies to create automatic PGP stuff, since it's not really useful until more people adopt it (as I said earlier), though this is precisely why more people don't adopt it.
On a related note, if you have a PGP key and then buy a new computer, you have to either know what you're doing in order to get your private key onto the new computer, which Joe User also can't do (And if there is a way to automate this process, anyone could write a virus that would use the automated version to steal your private key), or remove your original key and create a new one, which would confuse Joe's friends when their PGP systems suddenly don't trust Joe's email any more.
Sadly, the only way that PGP will become popular is to educate the general populace so that they know as much about computers as we, the computer nerds, do. and although I don't want to admit it, this is never going to happen.
Parent
Democratized? (Score:2)
Maybe Possible and Makes Sense (Score:2)
I read "Nexus" not too long ago. It talks about the study of networks and its results in various different fields. It wasn't as deep or detailed as I had hope but it mentioned a study where it was found that the Internet is really not a decentralized network but a hub and spoke network. It can survive numerous attacks in general but if even a small number of central hubs are taken down, connectivity suffers. Obviously that means it's even e
Hmm, well... (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that the centralised system of today lends itself to easy censoring etc. is unfortunate, but if you really want it to change, you have to understand why it came to be.
Pure Wireless Mesh (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not leverage nearly ubiquitous wireless access points (and possibly ad hoc wireless card settings) to create a completely wireless mesh that doesn't even connect to the Internet at all? This would parallel the development of the original 'net, where it starts as a bunch of island networks that get interconnected over time.
Think about it-no phone lines, no centrality, no existing infrastructure. Nothing to "tap", very hard to track. Even better, no infrastructure so it could be built from scratch. IPv6, anonymizing, encrypted.
Imagine a set of open source tools that take the best features of mesh networks and peer-to-peer, running exclusively over home wireless technology. One package could include a complete set of apps to get "on the mesh" including the routing intelligence, a "secure sandbox" for shared files/web pages, a browser, and caching. Run the package, and maybe at first you only connect to another geeky neighbor-but you don't know which. Check out his home-brew page in the browser, poke around the files he put up. As more people come on line, what you can access increases, sometimes dramatically as networks are interconnected.
(Maybe initially the system could tunnel through the internet to connect disparate networks and gain critical mass. At some point this will always be necessary to get across oceans or challenging geographies.)
Chicken and egg problem? You bet. Realistically, the three p's would drive it, as they do many new technologies: porn, piracy and privacy. But the opportunity is there for so much more.
Speed would suck, sure, due to routing inefficiencies. But consider that the average bandwidth would be at 802.11 speeds: minimum 10Mbps, more likely 54Mbps. If I get 3Mbps on my cable line I'm thrilled. Latency might be high, but no one would be running Quake 3 on this. And wireless tech is only getting faster, while mesh routing and caching technologies are only getting smarter.
I really think that if a truly independent, hacker-run next-gen internet will ever exist, it's going to be over home wireless. The entrenched media companies are too aware of the money making opportunities to let the "free ride" on their infrastructure continue forever (even though it's not a free ride, but don't tell them that). Unregulated spectrum is about the only Free space left.
Use it to create a network that's truly decentralized, owned by the people, and anonymous from the ground up and you can change the world.
Oh, how I pitty them (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States. In the age of ubiquitous e-mail and filtering software, budding McCarthys are abel and willing to do so.
As an administrator of a few reasonably small domains, my first thought was oh, the fools!
You don't want to read every piece of e-mail that comes into even one site, let alone the whole internet. You don't even want to try to write programs to do it.
You would be better off trying to understand the inner thoughts of a lava lamp then trying to figure out why anyone thinks anyone would buy "farmasuiticals (the 1 U've been lOOking 4!)", let alone ingest them! Or invest in "s+0cks" that are about to "+ake 0ff" based on the say so of a stranger named "Brandice Hornyslut." Or the pointlessly malformed sludge, the server errors from misconfigured machines...if anyone really wanted to hide something they'd be about as well off e-mailing it as flushing it down the toilet--and trying to find it would be about as pleasant.
--MarkusQ
Good God man, you've discovered USENET! (Score:5, Informative)
been there, done that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Useless and pointless... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) The algorithm gets shot down in about fifteen minutes by several people who really know their stuff,
2) Someone posts, "Oh, this is exactly the same thing as that zippity-zing-zang algorithm that Chuck Dumbo 'invented' some years back. It's completely bogus."
3) Someone posts a follow-up question, and based on the reply given by the OP you suddenly realize that he has no clue whatsoever about crypto design.
It really is not that hard to research some basic, layer-1 information about networking and deduce some fundamental operating principles (as someone already pointed out, one of which is physical cabling). Cisco has plenty of introductory material that even my wife the musician can understand. Do your homework first, and then come back.
Centralization almost unavoidable (Score:3, Informative)
The end result of this unequal distribution of resources is that centralization is the most efficient use of them. For the vast majority of Internet users, efficiency and performance are paramount. I hear far more complaint that Bittorrent is slow than that it's centralized or not anonymous. Even if you're willing to discount performance, the price of implementing a peering based system is greater, since it costs to maintain each link. People have tried using wifi to create mesh networks that operate sans "backbone" but this doesn't scale well either. Nor is it anonymous or difficult to tap.
Why Not. (Score:4, Informative)
-BGP AS space. Due to what i can only assume was poor foresight, the AS# used to identify BGP "Autonomous Systems" (Corporations, and entities that use BGP to exchange routing information with the backbone providers) is a 16 bit value. So there are only ~65K numbers that can actually be given out.
-Complexity of configuring these routing protocols. It's rocket science, plain and simple. A misconfigured BGP router will not work, and may even disrupt traffic over the rest of the internet. If anyone was allowed to broadcast any BGP route without the consent of all their peers and a pile of red tape, i could advertise a route to 24.0.0.0 and half the internet would disappear for a good number of cable-broadband users.
-Required bandwidth, and latency problems. The current top-level backbone providers have many millions of dollars worth of equipment and high-speed point to point connections to keep the number of hops for each packet to a minimum. They have the capacity to push more traffic than you'll use in a week down their wan links every second. This is a vast improvement over a pile of 56, 1024 and 3068 kilobit connections that would be meshed together in a distributed model.
most IGNORANT Slashdot story ever (Score:3, Informative)
The internet is composed of 'autonomous systems' - each autonomous system or 'AS' has one or more netblocks of a
telnet route-views.oregon-ix.net
follow your nose through the login procedure, then type 'show ip bgp [your IP address]' and see what it says. Oh, if your IP address is 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, or 172.16-31.x.x and you put that in please step away from the computer now and ask someone with a clue for help.
I mean really - *this* is a frontpage story? I swear I'm going to auction my low Slashdot ID number on Ebay one of these days and alias this site to memepool in my hosts file.
OK, take these steps (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe I'm getting grouchy in my old age - see parent for details. This is how real men connect to the internet:
There are three ISPs in the world - Sprint, UUNet, and [other]. Get on the phone and order a T1 from one of the two real ones. They'll get your payment information and then someone will ask how many IP addresses you need. Tell 'em you want a
Go to ARIN.net's site. Figure out how to get yourself an autonomous system number. Call up the other ISP you didn't originally order from and get a circuit from them. No IP addresses required, we'll just use the block from ISP 1.
Assuming you're using a Cisco box do the following:
router bgp [your AS number]
network [your shiny new
! UUNet
neighbor yadda yadda AS 701
! Sprint
neighbor yadda yadda AS 1239
And *poof*! Your little
Take this little story and abstract it a bit - there is no 'backbone' to be found on the internet, just a web of large carriers with all sorts of peering agreements with each other. This won't happen at the home DSL router monkey level, but the diverse internet the asker speculated about already exists and happens to be pretty resistant to fools trying to monitor it.
Parent
Anybody remember FidoNet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, I think it's a moot point. Who cares about the topology of the internet when you can just encrypt everything? Backbones are great. Best thing is to use the fastest and most robust network topology, and let security be handled at the application level.
Re:How did this make it to the front page? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone is a networking guru (I know I'm not). I'm sure many people without much networking background have wondered the same thing as the article poster at some point or another, quite likely while reading all the "government/telcos/corporations/Godzilla are going to eat our Internet" stories here on Slashdot. The comments in this story are the perfect place to give these people a better understanding of how the internet works.
This isn't a question that's easy to Google if you don't already know what to look for (in which case you don't need to), and the poster shouldn't have to take a networking course just to get an answer. I would say it's a perfect question for Ask Slashdot - if you don't like the user's ignorance, you could take the time to educate him and the many other Slashdot readers like him with a more informative post.
Parent
Re:one way it could be done is (Score:3, Funny)
Absolutely. Encryption, or self-deception. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, I sure the hell wouldn't
(OT) Re:ignorance is so painful (Score:3, Insightful)
But that doesn't justify taking the lives and families of Japanese Citizens of the US and throwing them in concentration camps. That does not justify locking my grandparents up like criminals for years, kept away from their kids.
McCarthy didn't just go after traitors. He went after communists, people with alternativ