GNUnet 0.11.5 | Hacker News Reader

GNUnet 0.11.5

gnunet.org

158 pointskgwxd26 comments

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Previous discussions include 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961018

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194553

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845435

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515519

What exactly is GNUnet? It says it is supposed to replace the old internet stack, but that it also runs on top of it? It looks like it is some kind of research project, so do I just not have enough background information to understand what they are saying?

Can anyone ELI5 what GNUnet is and why I should care about it?

Here's a few things GNUnet replaces and why it's better:

Bittorrent is replaced by GNUnet "filesharing", it's trackerless, it provides a search function, users can adjust their level of anonymity for publishing, downloading, and searching.

DNS is replaced by "GNS", it covers the "decentralized" and "secure" points in Zooko's triangle, it a pet name system.

VPN is replaced by GNUnet VPN, which is just VPN over GNUnet so it can take advantage of the p2p network.

TCP/UDP/SPDY/QUIC is replaced by "cadet", takes advantage of the p2p network.

There's also a DHT.

And there's lots of other stuff that's in-progress.

We should maybe include a "GNUnet in 5 minutes or less" on the website. The old LEGO analogy is nice, and lynX did a great comparison here: https://secushare.org/img/stack-comparison.png We don't really need the ISO OSI model here, but even this can be added, as we've already used it throughout the years to compare to the GNUnet stack.

I think somewhere we mentioned before that gnunet does not require ISPs and IXPs, but using them today is the de-facto default state.

May I draw your attention to my old comment here, as well as (more importantly), the entire thread of even older comments /it/ links to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959687

Which I shall also link to directly, but the above also has some relevance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808

See especially here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867532

And here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867467

Please give me a summary of what you intend to express here. I just don't have the time to cherry-pick the information here.

I found this 6-minute video from Oct 2018[0] which gives a great overview of GNUnet and compares it to the existing internet layers. It's pretty cool.

I wish they'd write a tutorial or something so that I know how to get started playing around with it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CdHfySAPas

Tutorials:

Install: https://gnunet.org/en/install.html

In a Nutshell usage (wip): https://gnunet.org/en/use.html

If you're interested in contributing: https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html

Worth noting GNUnet has been around in at least name since 2001, back in the heady days when peer-to-peer was the new hotness. Was it the next Napster? Competition for JXTA? An evolution of Freenet? The reality is it wasn't very much of anything back then. I've got no idea how the project of today relates to the project of the same name 18 years ago.

Would this help? https://docs.gnunet.org/#Introduction

If anything could be made more clear, let us know as feedback.

I was a student in Google Summer of Code for the GNUnet project. I just want to say that Christian Grothoff (one of GNUNet leader) is a wonderful mentor. I own so much to him for many aspects of my technical and academic life. I highly recommend to anyone who have an interest in distributed systems/security to participate in this project.

I like GNUnet. Very great project. However trying to figure out how to use it was a utter pain and no 'kiler app' for it exists. Its very researchy. But I really like everything they are doing.

> Be aware that this project is still in an early alpha stage when it comes to software – its not an easy task to rewrite the whole Internet!

Anything that uses GNUnet ?

Can you use it by its self like i2p etc ?

There is the command-line interface `gnunet-publish`, `gnunet-search` and `gnunet-download`.

There is nim chat application: https://git.gnunet.org/gnunet-nim.git/

There is also an unmaintained guile bulletin board: https://git.gnunet.org/gnunet-guile2.git/

Looks like voice communications are also possible.

https://docs.gnunet.org/#First-steps-_002d-Using-GNUnet-Conv...

Now that makes it interesting; imagine a few micro routers such as the TpLink TL-MR3020 or any other similar device that once turned on boot their OpenWRT with GNUnet extensions then connect together allowing the users to talk each other no matter where they are located. That would be a killer application (probably along with codec2 over LoRa) for deployment in certain sensitive areas, provided the users can mask its traffic nature from sniffers.

That is GNU Jami?

Jami is a completely separate project, their only relation is both being GNU-affiliated.

I have no idea if they use the same protocols and network, but a brief read at Jami features seems to indicate there is some sort of decentralization. My experience with it when it still was called Ring wasn't exactly positive though, I hope it got better in the meantime.

The don't use the same network, and never have. Jami uses OpenDHT (https://jami.net/ces-2019/), GNUnet uses its own DHT (see for example https://grothoff.org/christian/nss2011.pdf, or the rather hacky (and not complete) bib page: https://bib.gnunet.org/#DHT)

There has been some past talk[0] at least on the side of GNUnet to eventually look into integration between the projects. Currently they are completely distinct p2p implementations while sharing some ostensible similarities.

[0] - https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/ring/2017-09/msg00011.htm...

Yep, exactly. LoRa would be a perfect fit, because GNUnet nodes could be become independent from commercial infrastructure for whole towns! The transport layer of GNUnet will be rewritten. The former so called plugins will be called communicators in the new architecture. Anybody who likes to write a LoRa communicator for GNUnet?

It's sort of like an arbitrary mesh with lots of layers of plugins providing primitives like private key-based identities, a decentralized DNS alternative, block storage, tunnels, etc, and these combine to build more complex tools like filesharing, chat, etc.

It doesn't do onion/garlic routing, although that's planned to be added in the future. It is possible to make a service available over GNUnet like you can with i2p, and with the name system you can give it a convenient name and add it to your address book like in i2p. That being said, this service in particular offers no real anonymity at the moment, and is currently buggy. Filesharing is its most mature application in my opinion, it doesn't have any severe bugs I'm aware of and it is optionally anonymous (although the network only has a few hundred peers at the moment so its anonymity isn't as strong as it will be when more people use it).

A short addition: (1) various forms of onion routing are in active research. (1.1) see for example the "big data, little data, no such data" presentation of Christian Grothoff from 2017

(2) what we are still trying to solve here, mainly, is making it harder to know the path of communication. Today, if User Lora with Node A talks to User Charly on Node B, the data goes through N nodes. The N nodes between A and B are aware of (parts of) the path, but the communication remains encrypted (in very short terms explained).

(edit: no markup here)

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