Samizdat – Platform for self-hosted, P2P, encrypted communication (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Samizdat – Platform for self-hosted, P2P, encrypted communication (2014)

samizdat.childrenofmay.org

93 pointsashitlerferad11 comments

Vladimir Bukovsky summarized it as follows: "Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

(note: above quote is related to historical term, not to subject link)

Sorry if I appear dense, but is this an operating system, or a program which runs on linux, or something else entirely?

Also, presumably it needs to know where it originally came from. Can an installation of Samizdat create an installation disk for another user?

I'm just a bit confused as to what it's for, despite having read the article.

This sounds very promising but it hasn't been worked on since 2014.

Also there's no info about how you could install it.

I like the "Code is law" motto though. It realy is a law and it is a self enforcing law.

Interesting.

But how do they differentiate themselves from ipfs, maidsafe/SAFE Network, tor, i2p, freenet, etc. ?

Reminds me more of Retroshare than data-agnostic anonymity networks like you named. Both Samizdat and Retroshare solve the public key encryption distribution problems then provide p2p services with a single client.

I'm especially interested in the "self-authenticated DNS". I think a lack of accessible p2p name system is the biggest hangups for a P2P web. People are overly dependent proprietary namespaces (Facebook, ICANN, Google, etc.) for making connection.

For example, there are many applications I could see myself using locally, in human presence, over LAN. e.g. music studio MIDI/control sharing, real-time document collaboration and drawing, audio mixing, games...

Serving such applications might be as easy installing them on a local copy of sandstorm.io, or even double clicking an app or installing a .deb package.

But the hard part is finding stable, humane ways to make connection between the machines without relying on an external network.

It really perplexes me that after all these years, ordinary LAN file sharing is still one of the most unreliable things to do with computers/phones.

Isn't this a problem that people solve using overlay networks[1]?

Most P2P systems use things like DHTs to relate IP addresses to the overlay network's addressing protocol so encrypted routing can be done over the internet.

It shouldn't be too hard to self host a service but the caveat is that you'd have to access it through whatever P2P network you choose. As an example, it'd be easy to host your own services through a Tor hidden site or I2P. I don't know much about how sandstorm works but things like a git server should be easy to host over P2P. The bandwidth over Tor and others can be really slow but some P2P protocols have high bandwidth[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_network [2] https://code.google.com/archive/p/phantom/

[edit: Ignore this. The "self replicating" bit probably addresses below.]

Doesn't appear to address the multiple devices issue. With this we're back to conflating addressable device/NIC/application[1] with addressable individuals.

[1]: your email address

Eventually a p2p agency platform will get the technology, the timing, and the ux right, and it will be massive, a Facebook killer and more. Until then, these things are like Balkan states.

So this is what Ethereum would look like without blockchain tech.

Last edit in the wiki was: 10:56:16 03/20/14.

Let's implement http://news.mit.edu/2016/stay-anonymous-online-0711 (http://people.csail.mit.edu/devadas/pubs/riffle.pdf) instead.

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