_________   SWAT MAGAZINE ISSUE THIRTY FIVE NOVEMBER  __________
  /         \___________________________________________/          \
 /      A Guide To Anonymous Publishing, Distributed Networks,      \
 |                 Peer to Peer, And All That Jazz.                  |
/                        By =The-Doh-Boy=                            \
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Well here I am again, writing articles for my beloved SWAT readers. This time
around I'm taking a look at the various ways an anarchist/hacker/all round
malcontent can publish documents and other things on the internet with
complete freedom from censorship and anonymity.
You may have been following the whole Napster.com debate with Metallica (bunch
of sellout corporate rock whores) and how the highlight has been that
Napster.com has a central server, which can be shut down. Thus it is a medium
that suffers from censorship. Gnutella is the other big name on the mp3/file
sharing scene, and it benefits from being impossible to censor. This is
because it is a peer-peer (p2p) system which means that users are
communicating eith users, and sharing each others information in a
de-centralised fashion. So, short of shutting down every single Gnutella
client, it becomes impossible to censor what goes round the system.
However, the fun isn't limited to music and file sharing there are network
protocols designed in a similar vein which allow decentralised storage of
information. The most noteworthy of these is the Freenet protocol, developed
as a doctoral thesis by a Scottish student. It's aim is to create a network
that has redundancy and will run without servers. Every user runs a node on
his system, and the information is stored (encrypted) on at least one node on
the network. The information is copied to the nodes close to the requesting
nodes, so bandwidth is saved, and popular information is replicated. This
means that DOS attacks on Freenet have the REVERSE effect than on the Web,
i.e. it makes the info on the network MORE available. Freenet can be quite
difficult to set up and retrieve information, so it is not for the faint
hearted.
A similar (in spirit) system is one developed in the halls of academe,
called Publius. It is a proxy based system that is very transparent to your
average web user. It is a system of inter-connected servers that hold parts of
seemingly random encrypted documents on their servers. A user puts Publius'
proxy info in his web browser and browses as normal. Each document on Publius
is given a unique idetifying URL that is linked cryptographically with the
document. This URL looks very much like gibberish, but can be put in any web
page and any user with the Publius proxy can click on it and retrieve the
document.
Another major p2p system is for anonymous web surfing. It is called Crowds and
is developed by AT+T, and is basically a system whereby your HTTP requests are
re-directed through another memeber of your "crowd" thereby not leaving your
own IP details on the server. You run a proxy program on your machine, as does
everyone else, and this provides very good anonymity.
If you want to check any of these out, a list of URLs follows:
Freenet Project: freenet.sourceforge.net
Crowds: www.research.att.com/projects/crowds/
Publius: www.cs.nyu.edu/~waldman/publius/publius.html