Happy US Independence day! Independence day to me, as an observer, stands
for freedom. Freedom and a set of ideals. I recently came across an old
project of mine called daemonium.com. It was to be a start-up ISP, but it
wasn't meant to be. However I'd like to strike parallels to back then and
now. Here is a screenshot from the wayback machine (archive.org).
Feel free to browse in the archive (without pictures) by following
this link. Big on the front page of daemonium.com was the four statements:
Cooperation, Innovation, Privacy, Trust. Daemonium's concept was very simple
really. It was to be a DSL ISP but had a twist. It would use wifi to give
people access to their neighbours and route around bad links. If you look
a few articles down from this article you'll find how I think a neighbourhood
should look like. This concept is very similar, but different in the way that
I'd not use wireless today but rather optical links such as improved upon
RONJA. Daemonium's vision to grow into a campus was perhaps wrong but the
rest is right on. Privacy is big in that project. I saw the dangers that
we face today, only Google was not so popular back then, it was Yahoo and
doubleclick instead. Also I foresaw that government would try to mass surveil
people, hence the wifi links with IPSEC that were to give privacy from snoops.
I could go deeper into this but I'd just like to leave the archive to you and
make up your own mind. And I'd like to point out that the biggest change is
a societal one, not that this is big technology. People have to take their
freedom into their own hands and route around dangers that lurk in society,
such as mass surveilance by secret services, police and people in position of
power. I don't see it happening, I see empty handed people, victims of a
digital divide. Perhaps my observance is wrong, and I hope we can get back
to freedom the way it is meant to be. As for me, I'll keep dreaming.
Germany has a lack of engineers? Or are the good engineers not being heard?
We should put engineering principles on the table to create an Internet that
is safe from spying even if spying is outlawed. We cannot afford to be
mass surveilled by a higher class of people. Internet
should be fair for everyone. I don't blame the NSA as much as I blame BND.
For them to say "OK we'll stop" is not good enough. We must re-engineer the
entire fabric of the Internet in Germany, to secure everyones privacy.
Out my Office window there is a spectacular cloud. Only it has jet trails
going in on one end and coming out another. What happened in the cloud?
What I said to myself was "oh that's weird!"... after 5 minutes or so the
jet on the right did not come out of the cloud, and the wind wiped the
jet trails. Suspicous!
When I speak to people about how the Internet should be like I liken it to
a spider web.
The spider doesn't create one link but several, as means of redundancy and
stability. So when humans build an Internet usually in its first phases it
looks like this:
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-----(BR)----
In this ASCII drawing you have a trunk and end-users (drawn as "o"). There is
a (BR) (bad router) that the government spies sit at and listen to everyone.
We have to admit it's like this because it is. We are being spied upon and
are making it very easy. But it doesn't have to be like that. We can make
changes...we can work out a spider web between neighbouring houses (end-users).
It would look like this:
As you can see everyone has 2 or more gateways that they use. This is what's
called a "mesh" (and the purple links are its links). The model is just a
small neighbourhood but it should be linked with an entire city like this. The
light blue is gateways to the Internet. The Internet past these gateways should
look like 1 house in this picture as well. The trick is to send packets in
any random direction and the packet will seek its destination any random way.
This requires new routing protocols that make this possible. It requires
investments by neighbours to create the links, and government approval. It
makes spying on the communications of any single person very difficult and
that is its intent. Just we gotta realise this some day and do it.
We should encrypt our private conversations, how do we do that? I believe
quantum encrypted laser links to polar orbiting satellites in low earth orbit
are a good thing. These then communicate to higher geostationary satellites
and vice versa. Whenever the geostationary satellites talk back to the
polar satellites they wait until the beam is at tangent with the curvature
of the earth so that the beam would never hit earth. The transmission
payload would be only AES or similar crypto keys which are then used
symmetrically without assymetric key exchange. I think this is worthwhile
for states such as Germany and german embassies world wide. A VPN to your
embassy would be cool too if you're abroad somewhere in order to make use
of this crypto. This is all a response to the TAT-14 spying.
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