http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
Upsides: Much more secure than Tor, (since it doesn't try to be a low-latency mixing router) not funded by USG.
Downsides: Real slow. Real slow. SLOW. Think effective throughput in the tens of kilobytes/s, latency measured in minutes.
Phantom also seems to have great design, but it was discontinued quite early in its implementation. No idea if it's because it was unworkable or for other reasons. Maybe someone with experience in such networks can take a look at it:
However Tor has a big advantage in practice right now: lots of users, of every kind, to hide among.
When GCHQ talked about "staining" in this context (as in the REMATION conference docs), by the way, they generally mean either a timing-based fingerprint (as here) or cookie-based fingerprint (unfortunately it seems to be used in at least two entirely different contexts, oh well).
Big security downside is that in the purely opennet configuration, your peer nodes are both untrusted strangers AND your own traffic is visible to them. There is NO "onion" effect going on, just reliance on the possibility that any traffic a peer node observes from your node is not necessarily YOUR traffic as all nodes are also routing requests for other nodes.
Most academic computer science is funded by the American government. Does that mean that all academic computer science is backdoored by the military?
To put it more specifically, most compilers researchers I know have at some point been on a DARPA grant, because DARPA has money and academics want money. I'm sure plenty of LLVM contributors have been paid from DARPA grants. Is LLVM backdoored?
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On an entirely different point, how is Freenet even comparable to Tor? They address totally different use cases (Tor is an anonymizing TCP overlay; Freenet is a distributed censorship-resistant store), and have very different threat models.
Further, it seems very unlikely that Tor (which is a piece of very well-maintained software with some of the foremost privacy researchers working on it) would have fewer bugs than Freenet, which is a sprawling Java program maintained by one man. Further, the security of Freenet in abstract hugely depends on having a functional small-world network, which requires Freenet to have been widely adopted to start with.
The comment parent's request was vague, but you simply cannot replace Tor with Freenet because they do totally different things. It is nonsensical to compare them because they address different threat models and accomplish different goals.
For example, people use both Tor and Freenet to enable anonymized private messaging. On Tor, this is achieved by connecting to a hidden-service forum and posting. On Freenet, this is achieved through an app that uses Shared Subspace Keying to basically have two people watch one-another's RSS feeds for updates. Either way, people get to send anonymous messages and have other anonymous people see them.
I always like to remind people that Tor is funded by the USG (currently, actively). I think it's very important that people understand that and adjust their threat models based on that.
However, it's not all bad news ... in fact, I think there's a very significant upside to the USG funding of Tor:
It provides a very compelling defense in the event that simply participating in Tor begins to be prosecuted.
There is very often a worry put forth that simply participating in Tor (as a client or by running a relay, etc.) can in itself be considered an illegal act. I think that as long as the USG is funding the development, people in the US can rest easy that they can't be prosecuted in any way for simply participating on the Tor network.
"If the USG is funding it and the state department is encouraging people to use it (think arab spring) then how could my use of it be illegal ?"
IANAL.
Also, the Tor Project periodically sends out folks to remind the FBI and friends that tor has many legitimate uses, and is routinely used by law enforcement agencies as part of their day-to-day business. [1]
[0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/0...
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trip-report-october-fbi-con...
If you were some one who believed that your liberty or even life depended on it, then yes, you would have to assume that. Obviously day to day, it really doesn't matter. When it actually does matter, you have to assume the worst.
Here's my blog key if you want to try:
USK@1ORdIvjL2H1bZblJcP8hu2LjjKtVB-rVzp8mLty~5N4,8hL85otZBbq0geDsSKkBK4sKESL2SrNVecFZz9NxGVQ,AQACAAE/bluishcoder/3/
USK@2LK9z-pdZ9kWQfw~GfF-CXKC7yWQxeKvNf9kAXOumU4,1eA8o~L~-mIo9Hk7ZK9B53UKY5Vuki6p4I4lqMQPxyw,AQACAAE/pitcairnisland/0/Instead your node is no more statistically likely to have any portion of the objects you've uploaded than any other objects throughout Freenet. When an upload is complete your node doesn't have a full copy, all the chunks are spread out amongst the nodes within a few hops of you instead.
When it's developed entirely in the open I'm not sure I see the concern here. If you have reason to believe they are somehow compromised or backdooring Tor please do share it, otherwise this is just FUD.
Seems like a lot of security products demand trust from their users (even gnunet). This implicit bossing is no less pretentious than a gas pump that says "Thankyou".