Governments blocking Maidsafe

Dear All, will governments be able to somehow block the Maidsafe network, like for instance the Chinese government is doing?

Thanks for your help!
Andre

That question was asked several times before, please use the Search feature to find previous discussions

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It should not be possible, the techrunch article about Maidsafe covers this part too I believe. You can find it at the press section on maidsafe.net

If you wait a little longer one of the devs might give you a personal answer

Edit: article: The Server Needs To Die To Save The Internet – TechCrunch

Various versions question have ben answered by project members multiple times on this site, e.g.

This is still a very good question that is scary to think about but may become the core driver of the evolution of the system in the near future, with supporting elements baked in.

  1. That old neocon saw about the rational state’s only rational objective being the increase of its own power applies solidly- ProjectSAFE is at odds with ego gratifying exercise of concentrating power.

  2. The corporatocracy has most of the wealth and power its just unfocused but is apt to get laser like focus when the threat of a trans state trans corporate world appears through DAO and systems like ProjectSAFE.

So when it comes time to weight the risk against the cost of the consequence it becomes very clear that an end user owned and controlled network consisting of hardware and software and electrical power that is end user owned and controlled is absolutely vital. Bring on the G-Shock solar powered open source hardware soft radio mesh phones running SAFE OS and ProjectSAFE with a SAFE Browser and SAFE Search.

Mikhail Gorbachev is warning of a new cold war pending, in large part due to US triumphalism. In the US this might mean: you can’t use MaidSAFE because you might be helping the Reds. Have to get this up and running before its too late and they can run that kind of Red Scare BS again in half the world.

Hi Melvin, this was exactly what I was looking for, thanks a bunch!
Andre

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Surely it’s impossible to block a p2p decentralised network. What protocol does the maidsafe network use? If it were it’s own networking protocol then yeah (I don’t think maidsafe has invented it’s own protocol - or has it?), at the isp level. But using TCP then it would be very difficult to block. Hello. I’m new to maidsafe by the way.

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Hi blade,

From the docs

RUDP (Reliable UDP) implements psuedo-connections using UDP to achieve many of the benefits of a connection-based protocol like TCP, but crucially allows NAT traversal where TCP cannot. Furthermore, all data is encrypted between both endpoints using a secure, verifiable RSA public key exchange mechanism. This forms part of the PKI which is provided by the SAFE Network.

Thanks chrisfostertv. And heres me thinking UDP (Unreliable!) couldn’t be used for this kind of transmission. I was not even aware of RUDP. Is this something maidsafe has come up with by themselves?

EDIT - OK, Just reading about this on wiki…

They might not be able to stop the actual network but they can censor people from talking about it.

But not ON the network. :smiley:

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True but if we’re trying to get the word out about the network and get people onto it it’ll be rather tricky if every post about maidsafe is blocked and censored.

Similar to stopping people from talking about Tor or BitTorrent tech–good luck to them.

Believe me, when the network is up and actually working, people will talk, share and use.

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Of course they can. Any network traffic can be blocked. Indeed your ISP is highly likely to throttle and shape any unrecognised traffic e.g. my “unlimited” home connection provides 70Mbit for HTTP and HTTPS, everything else throttled to 1Mbit.

Simply encrypting (obfuscating) everything isn’t the answer - a government or especially ISP could block all unrecognisable packets or add 500ms latency to all of them. The way we’re going to work around this in RUDP v2 is to make the bottom layer wire level transport switchable, so RUDP v2 could use UDP, UDT or even TCP as its bottom layer transport while all upper layers don’t need to care. That way individual users get to choose according to their local network topology and ISP quirks.

Niall

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So it could utilize pluggable transports, like tor does.

Could this open the market up for maidsafe’s own brand of router hardware? (I’m a CCNP engineer, so maybe a bit cisco brainwashed). Am I thinking along the right lines here?

That would be the hope, yes, though I would actually say it is more like how a SSL connection negotiates which protocol to use rather than true pluggable transports. Certainly in the next six months our sole goal is to make a substitutable RUDP v2 with the correct wire format changes that we won’t make future SAFE networks wire incompatible with near future ones.

It might sound easy to simply clone a library, but it is not. MaidSafe is allocating very significant resources for a company of its size to the RUDP v2 effort, indeed pretty much all the remote workers we just hired were intended for the RUDP project. The hardest problem is writing new code which doesn’t break all the other code hanging on it, and RUDP has pretty much all of the rest of MaidSafe code hanging on it as a dependency, so getting the design right will take some weeks of nothing but prototyping and brainstorming.

Niall

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Software defined networking is coming anyway, so you can take some vendor hardware and program it to route any protocol you like.

That’s a long way away for MaidSafe though. Right now getting something good enough working for existing networking standards is hard enough!

Niall

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Hi Niall, I know I am reviving a fairly old thread here but have been reading up on RUDP v2.0 and your post was the closest discussion to a question I have regarding robustness Vs ISP blocking and country level “traffic shaping” censorship that the Maidsafe network will inevitably face.

[quote=“ned14, post:14, topic:1851”]
Of course they can. Any network traffic can be blocked. Indeed your ISP is highly likely to throttle and shape any unrecognised traffic… Simply encrypting (obfuscating) everything isn’t the answer - a government or especially ISP could block all unrecognisable packets or add 500ms latency to all of them. The way we’re going to work around this in RUDP v2 is to make the bottom layer wire level transport switchable, so RUDP v2 could use UDP, UDT or even TCP as its bottom layer transport while all upper layers don’t need to care. That way individual users get to choose according to their local network topology and ISP quirks.[/quote]

Has any discussion been given to the idea of being able to disguise RUDP packets as other protocols? For example: Disguising Tor Traffic as Skype Video Calls.

I guess that any such a “chameleon” ability would best if it was very flexible. MaidSafe instances being able to semi-autonomously negotiate, change and update protocol “skins” rapidly and not just be limited to one hard coded type of protocol like skype video calls in the above example. Some protocols are very reluctantly messed with at the ISP level and quickly draw large negative community reactions if they are perceived to be messed with (I am thinking of the multi billion dollar gaming industry and vocal gamers here).

Only works so long as it is doesn’t become popular.

In any provider of any size, TCP and UDP packets are broken down on entry into internal wire protocols, and reassembled on exit to simulate as if the disassembly/reassembly hadn’t happened. This is done so the provider can provide very strong traffic guarantees internally to their network so they can manage load as TCP and UDP don’t provide traffic guarantees. This is how DDoS attacks can be “null routed” so quickly.

It goes without saying that during such packet processing that deep packet inspection happens as a matter of course, and rules to transform or otherwise fiddle with packets are very straightforward. Indeed on my home network here I have pfSense rewrite and modify all TCP and UDP packets entering and exiting my home network. Right now it is tracking 183 states out of 47000 maximum, and that’s on a VM with 512Mb of RAM (of which just 128Mb is actually being used). A commercial network switch scales many orders of magnitude higher, but costs correspondingly more.

Gamers are often very unaware of what happens to IP traffic between them and servers. Several packet conversions often happen as packets enter and exit networks. So long as latency variance remains low and packet loss minimal, no one need care how the actual wire transport is achieved.

Niall

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