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Comment by dcc1 | Hacker News Reader

Us hackers need to make a new "web" a web where censorship is not possible and everything is encrypted, a "web" with no single points of failure, a "web" where domains cant snatched or censored, a "web" like the web used to be :(

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I think cjdns[1] is a step in this direction. You should check it out if you're interested in an encrypted and truly distributed web.

[1] http://cjdns.info/

It's already there, developed by the US military no less. It's called Tor. If the installing and usability was improved it might catch on for normal people concerned about their privacy.

Installing Tor on Windows is a breeze, it even comes with a modified Firefox browser that enables your tor session when you open it.

For what it's worth, it's actually as easy on Linux and Mac as well. There is a prevailing myth that Tor has this enormous learning curve and is only for neckbearded hacker masterminds, and it could not be any more wrong. This is by design - The Tor Project wants anonymity to be for everyone who desires it.

the problem with Tor is that it's slooooooooooow.

Running a relay to help could be a good start. It's pretty simple[0][1]. The risks associated with being a Tor exit node do not apply to all relay types and the network can be helped greatly by running a standard relay too (standard relays only pass encrypted traffic from A to B).

[0] https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en

[1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en

If I were to run an exit node or a relay node, how would I mitigate the rare-but-potentially-life-destroying risk that my machine is identified as trafficking in illegal bits, due to relaying/exiting traffic of that nature from the anonymized network? I would be happy to donate bandwidth, but that risk is something which I don't feel is acceptable.

That isn't a risk for relay nodes, because you would be relaying encrypted traffic. It would just be noise.

For exit nodes, the issue of legal liability for routing other's traffic is less clear. You'd basically run the same risks as providing an open wireless network: https://openwireless.org/myths-legal

A normal, non-exit relay node will not be identified as "trafficking in illegal bits" by any sane police force. A normal relay will trade from A to B in only encrypted traffic and will not touch websites on the behalf of users, only other relays.

It is rare that an exit node is raided but there has been no known occurrence in which a normal relay was raided.. nor would it make any sense for there to be. Many people run non-exit relays as they are uncomfortable with the risk of exiting for the Tor network, perhaps you should be one of them.

You can run exit nodes anonymously. Prepaid, anonymous credit cards are available everywhere now.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(file_sharing)

I'll throw in another anonymity network (I2P). Its design is similar to Tor, created in 2003 and is mostly interesting due to some of its properties (tunnel based/garlic routing, everybody-is-a-router, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P

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