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> I don't promote or demote filesharing per se: it's just the cutting edge where the future trends will show years before they land elsewhere and that's what it makes it so interesting.

One interesting thing I've noticed that the people behind the best filesharing networks tend to have tremendous success with their later projects.

Napster is the obvious one. After Napster went down, Shawn Fanning co-founded Rupture and Path, and Sean Parker went on to become the first president of Facebook, key investor in Spotify, and managing partner at the Founders Fund.

Kazaa is another great example. After their legal walloping, the founders and development team behind Kazaa regrouped to form Skype.

And then there's The Pirate Bay, which is still rolling merrily along, court rulings notwithstanding. Its team hasn't created any billion-dollar companies yet (we'll see what happens with Flattr), but they created a political party that's won elections in multiple countries, as well as the webhosting company PRQ, which was Wikileaks' home in its early days.

I don't think all of these later successes are a coincidence. Filesharing involves hard technical problems, hard logistical problems, and intense competition. If you were an investor, a blind strategy of giving money to the best pirates you can find seems like it might be surprisingly sound.

they created a political party that's won elections in multiple countries

"won elections" is a bit of a stretch. In countries with multi-seat constituancies and proportional representation, there are often minority/niche candidates.

They haven't won many heads-up elections, but they have won a few.[1] They're also pulling significant percentages in Germany, and close to a full percent in a few other countries. They're active in 40 at the moment. They're hardly a major party, but doing pretty well for one that's only six years old.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party#National_Pirate_Pa...

I would say reaching the parliament, and hence being represented, is kind of a win.

The Pirate Bay people didn't create the Pirate Party. There isn't a lot of overlap between the (publicly known admins of) the Pirate Bay, the (no longer existing) Pirate Bureau that gave rise to it and the Pirate Party. This is true both in terms of people, and also frankly terms of politics, beyond the basic realisation that the status quo is untenable.

I found your comment very interesting. Could I perhaps ask you to take a look on what I've build? It's a student project in a very related field. If so, I'd be delighted to hear from you. lkaslkaslkaslkaslkaslkaslkas@aol.com

> there will be a major "bazaar" going on underground

I thought most people here had heard of The Silk Road onion service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_%28marketplace%29

> An online bank could very well operate in the anonymous network because the traffic is already cryptographically signed, and users can enjoy strong authentication if they wish to or remain a pair of anonymous public/private keys.

Or you can use bitcoins to accomplish the same and you don't even need banks.

As William Gibson said, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed".

The Silk Road will be a tiny tiny spot of activity if every startup is forced to the alternative network. If the "open" internet is based on who can pay the most to get a competitive quality of service, anything competing with existing products will be pushed out of that market.

Bitcoin and the silk road are not the future, but prototypes of it. It will be interesting to see if they become more than that, but they are showing the way forward if society continues to go down the directions currently being perused.

Or you can use bitcoins to accomplish the same and you don't even need banks.

The longer this fiction persists, the less chance a fundamentally decentralized crypto currency will take hold. Trusted 3rd parties will always be necessary, and that's not a de facto bad thing.

Why is this a "fiction" and why do you need banks? Why do you dismiss Bitcoin? Please explain.

He's not dismissing Bitcoin, but the idea that through Bitcoin you can "remain a pair of anonymous public/private keys". This is explained here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity (and yes, I know that the technology can theoretically support this, it just doesn't in its current incarnation).

You can be anonymous if you use Tor with Bitcoin. The problem is that you need to buy bitcoins first, what usually isn't anonymous, but you might be able to buy them anonymously over the counter.

I'm not dismissing that either. I love Bitcoin, and I believe in its abilities. That's why it's really annoying when those with certain philosophies try to ascribe them to Bitcoin.

BTC can work without trusted 3rd parties, and transactions can be performed in a completely anonymous way. Not every transaction requires or even benefits from these qualities, however. For Joe User's grandma to use BTC, there are going to need to be trusted 3rd parties (e.g. banks) to manage the minutia of transacting. These 3rd parties will make things simple for grandma, and ensure that she doesn't get screwed.

Your anonymity is compromised if/when you use "trusted 3rd parties (e.g. banks)." In order to not get shut down by governments, they must comply with applicable laws, which include identifying your identity in some way. (At least as far as I know).

Ah, my bad. You were calling something a fiction and I assumed it was the "you can use bitcoins to accomplish this [in the context, performing transactions while remaining an anonymous pair of encryption keys, which you can't right now]", when you probably were referring to the "you don't even need banks" part.

Just as a thought experiment, what do you think of an alternative reality in which even more of reality is transparent - including the operations of commercial, political, and other entities? Preferably collated and maintained by the community rather than centralized entities, crucially; somewhat akin to a shared wikipedia.

The thing that worries me about this push towards encryption and anonymity is that it does afford nefarious elements a lot of safe harbor. I imagine it's fairly possible to identify individuals given a few message traces, even in an encrypted anonymous environment, and layfolks simply aren't going to have the skills to cover all their digital tracks - can even expert cypherpunks? Meanwhile, a few malevolent elements in unison could easily co-ordinate and harvest details, with enough cover to be hard to track down (and even harder to prosecute).

An alternative is a world of transparency and openness - with a huge loss of privacy, but also a loss of privacy for those who would push their own causes of power and control, and/or commit crimes.

I honestly don't know what the long-term best path would be - or if there is even a genuine dichotomy between anonymity/privacy at all. I value my privacy, but I also value the opportunity to identify the sources of problems and use the structures of society to deal with them.

I don't think the transparent reality would work. For thousands of years people are known to gather in the back of the woods to hatch plans that must be kept secret before the execution. That's just how people want to deal with a part of the things in their lives.

The secret might be a terrorist plan, a plan to open a new business, a plan to rob a neighbouring village or a plan to arrange a surprise birthday party. You never know, but people like their privacy. Even before the internet and telephone people could talk to other people to arrange things to come, while in the outside it just looked like the folks are walking around the town.

A transparent government and officials would be nice but I think that would never happen either. There are always matters that must be processed with confidentiality in the first stages, or the system just wouldn't work. Consider the old-fashioned hard-boiled journalism: people will talk if they can remain anonymous and confidential, and by talking they can prevent something worse from happening.

Limiting the secrecy of government/public sector affairs to a certain, absolute period of time might work, though. Things should be public as soon as they're finished.

I think that equal anonymity and confidentiality is better than the current world where most people are not anonymous and the powers to be can snoop on the rest and yet retain their own confidentiality in their actions.

Thanks for the reply! Would I be mis-representing things to say that you feel that the need for privacy/hidden communication is predicated by the fact that it has beneficial purposes as well?

The world might certainly be a very dull place if nothing was private - no more surprise birthday parties as you mention, for example - but perhaps there would be equal and opposite benefits to shared knowledge/information?

The situation regarding whistle-blowing itself requires that there is something worth reporting, which wouldn't be the case if the knowledge was already available (unless, perhaps, the knowledge was available but simply not highlighted well enough for people to spot any malicious behaviour).

Totally agree with your final point - it's a very strange dichotomy that as average people are finding less and less privacy, those with privilege or power are the ones who are afforded it.

I would prefer a reality/society where everything is public and transparent, however, we cannot do that yet. We would need much more evenly distributed social power and means of production. Maybe robots can enable that in a few decades?

See http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

At the turn of the 20th century, this optimism was widespread: science and industrialization would, according to popular thought, bring about a golden age where disease, famine, and war would all be forgotten. Some people, like H. G. Wells, had different ideas; rather than bringing about an age of peace, new technology would be used as a tool of war. H. G. Wells thought that radioactivity (which was cutting edge at the time) would be used to make bombs so powerful that whole cities could be destroyed and that airplanes would be key to military tactics (he was a bit off the mark on some things: he thought submarines would not work, that airplanes would not be invented until the 1950s, and that nuclear bombs would explode continuously for an entire day -- nobody said he had a crystal ball).

Robots distributing social power? I think it will be the exact opposite. Robots will be used to maintain social power, to prevent people from every gaining it. Your robot will be like an iPhone: you will be locked out of the software, forbidden to make modifications, forbidden to hack. Your robot will produce only as much as you need to survive; you will not receive enough to gain any more power than you already had. Your robot will also spy on you, so that if you start organizing a group of people to rebel against those with power, you will be thwarted by some means (perhaps your food will be drugged to reduce your cognitive abilities, or maybe for simplicity you will just stop receiving food). The people with power will never have to worry about being unseated, because they will have total control over the means of production. The only threat to the powerful at the point will be their own incompetence; only when they are not able to make the right decisions about managing society will society have a chance to rebel.

Here is a microcosm of what a world where robots run everything would be like:

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/news/2006/08/71554

"The thing that worries me about this push towards encryption and anonymity is that it does afford nefarious elements a lot of safe harbor"

I have yet to see any evidence that this is true; all I see are anecdotes from law enforcement agencies who are pushing for less crypto, and even those anecdotes only tenuously describe "nefarious" elements. You cannot encrypt a blood stain or a fingerprint, nor can you use an anonymity system to hide the fact that a known terrorist group is increasing the volume of data it sends and receives.

So what nefarious elements do you think are going to avoid prosecution by using crypto? A few years ago, there was a case of a group of child molesters using PGP and anonymous remailers (and possibly other privacy technologies) to communicate and exchange photos of themselves abusing children over Usenet. They were caught, arrested, and prosecuted following a well-coordinated investigation -- otherwise known as "good police work." Only a handful managed to avoid identification or prosecution, and it is worth noting that this was the case with investigations of criminal organizations long before good encryption was widely available. It should hardly be surprising that such a group was ultimately caught: they were sending each other photographic evidence of their own crimes.

It is also worth pointing out that anonymity systems are used by the police to catch criminals. In the case described above, the police used the very anonymity system that the child abusers were using, and were thus able to observe their messages while maintaining the secrecy of their investigation. Similar scenarios have played out with Tor. Criminals who use the Internet will eventually figure out which IP addresses belong to the police; it will be critical for the police to use anonymity systems to mask their IP addresses (this, in fact, is closely related to the reason the Navy created Tor in the first place). It is not so much that society's nefarious elements are more empowered now; it is more that the nature of the game has changed, that new tactics and strategies will be developed by both criminals and the police to utilize and cope with these systems.

I would argue that crypto and anonymity systems have benefited society more than they have harmed it. The same crypto and anonymity technologies used by the group I mentioned above have been used by political dissidents and activists to protect themselves from abusive governments; human rights activists have used such systems to protect the people they work with. Whistleblowers have used such systems in the past, and will have to do so in the future. For people who do not have an army at their command, these sorts of systems are necessary for their protection. If you were going to report Mafia activity to the police, would you rather use Tor/remailers/etc. or would you walk into the police station in person?

There is no such thing as a world of transparency and openness, because crime is part of human nature and because political ambition is part of human nature, and both of these behaviors exploit openness and transparency. I am all for an open government, but even I acknowledge that the government will need to keep some things secret -- military plans, investigations of dangerous criminal enterprises, the locations of witnesses to crimes, and many other things must be kept secret for society's benefit. Open and transparent government does not mean "secret free," it means "secrecy when it is absolutely necessary;" it is the responsibility of citizens to ensure that their representatives in the government are not declaring too many things to be secret, and it is the job of journalists to report to the citizens what is being kept secret from them. The sooner society realizes that, the better.

Thanks for the detailed response - first of all, I don't see all uses of crypto as problematic by any means - and I'm very glad that good police work and investigation can, and does, track down malicious behaviour even when enabled by the latest technology. Ultimately all these things are about human networks at the end of the day, and we're all fallible, and I generally trust that there's more sunlight than darkness.

I also completely agree that pretty much every technological innovation throughout history - weapons, communication mediums, etc - are used by both 'police and thieves', or whichever actors fit in the white/black boxes in the given situation.

The problem in my mind is more general - it's that crypto and concealment are just an evolution of the status quo - the arms race continues, with more 'secrets whispered in the woods', yet average people are already losing their day-to-day privacy, in vast numbers, and crimes still occur of course.

Opening everything is clearly radical and/or impossible, and it's a long-term idea/concept rather than anything feasible in the near future. Despite my ramblings, I'm a realist, and I've worked on migrating many, many legacy systems, so I'm familiar with the challenges, but this is the only process I've reasoned about so far regarding disruption of the arms race itself, as opposed to just evolution of arms, so I'm hunting for counter-arguments and these are good ones.

Enabling dissidence is a very good point, and I think it highlights the problems with hierarchy/power itself and information disparity. If neither party was able to operate without the knowledge of the other, then dissidence could take place openly without fear of hidden/unknown retribution. Trusting that the system is really 'open' and that you can see all the communications is definitely a challenge though (unsolvable?)

Regarding your final point, I'd say that although crime is part of a darker aspect of human nature (which can be encouraged, manipulated or instilled), we have been controlling our own education and evolution for generations through society and religion and choice of partners - so why can't we see this as an optimization problem, and try to guide ourselves towards a less criminal and violent nature?

(PS: the final point is a bit rhetorical - I think we have been for a long time already - cannibalism isn't hugely popular for example)

> When the masses go for it, the capacity and availability of invisible darknets will raise in orders of magnitude.

this is predicated on the assumption that providers are not strangled by their balls by the authorities (who is in turn strangled by the balls by lobbiests/companies/vested interests).

If you could run your own routes with private equipment (such as a mesh like wireless network?), instead of having to sign up to an isp, then i see this as more viable a future.

Will ISPs be forced to disallow all encrypted traffic? That would be disastrous.

It's already possible to connect to a website over https (with a self-signed cert you've obtained through a second channel) and be pretty much certain no one is snooping. The target you're connecting to doesn't have to be obvious either.

ISPs can be forced to disallow all encrypted traffic, but ISPs can't be forced to disallow all steganographic traffic, e.g. sending pictures of cats via Facebook.

ISPs cannot truly be forced to disallow encrypted traffic, because encryption is necessary for secure online commerce, DRM systems, the security of corporate secrets, etc., etc., etc. However, it is possible that a government might try to impose licensing for encryption, similar to how licensing for radio works -- perhaps a licensing system that requires one end of an encrypted connection to have a special registration that only businesses can afford / obtain (likewise with WDE). Thus the "little people" will be unable to legally use encryption to protect their privacy, and hackers will be charged with yet another "crime."

Most governments care about business these days. Do you think any government would say "no crypto" when Coca Cola says they need to protect the secrecy of their formula, or when HBO says they need to prevent people from copying movies?

That would be impossible. How do you define and detect encrypted traffic? Sure it's possible to block a known encryption protocol such as https. But we would get creative if that happened.

If you want to become the next evil overlord, it's quite simple really. Whitelist known traffic.

That's not going to meet anyone's definition of "internet service". Not even folks who think it's just "the web" and email.

You maybe right. But if _everyone_ does it, the customer doesn't really have a choice now does he?

I found your comment more insightful than the article.

It's not an article. It's a call to action, and also an advertisement.

"article" also means "item, object, thing". By that definition almost everything is an article, including the linked piece.

By that definition, the comment is an article. So what were you talking about?

" ... invisible darknets ..."

Not invisible to governments and corporations, just to your fellow citizen.

The corporate-state "owns" the infrastructure. Get your TCP/pigeons (or whatever network you can throw together) working and we can meaningfully discuss "invisible darknets".

Meh. Assuming you have some good way to avoid the Warden problem (like, say, sneakernet) you could probably get build some sort of stegosystem for this. It would be very high latency, but then again, so was the original Internet.