Governments blocking Maidsafe

Well, thank you for saying so. I’ve actually always been here just not posting, I check for new topics every week or so. However the part of each year leading up to May is exceptionally busy for me, so from January to end of March I was up till 4am each night working on the next release of Boost.AFIO after pulling a work day for Maidsafe and spending time with the family. In April I took an extended vacation to recharge the batteries, and then got to work on my C++ Now presentation and accompanying Handbook of Best Practices in C++ 11/14 libraries, again after Maidsafe and family hours, until I presented two weeks ago in Colorado. The next big deadline for me is end of July when Boost.AFIO comes up for peer review, so plenty of after hours work to do between now and then to prepare for that!

Anyway, if you look back on all my posts here, they have always been factual corrections or factually driven. On more than one occasion I have refused to present my non-factual personal opinions on topics, and the above earlier discussion is a good example. It simply isn’t professional in a contractual situation to discuss politics/religion/beliefs, unless your contracted role is to do so.

Niall

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One thing to consider…

If anyone has got access beyond an aggressive firewall, they can then save that to their vault inside the firewall.

Maybe these uber firewalls attempt to filter peer to peer too, but wish mesh nets in the mix, it would only take one leak for it to be out on the wild locally.

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U.N. report: Encryption is important to human rights — and backdoors undermine it

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Its going to be an arms race and SAFE is the spirit of a new network that can win the race. There will be apps built on top of SAFE, but SAFE will also develop down through a SAFE OS into a network made up of end user owned and controlled hardware. That hardware will be optimized to run SAFE and make use of tech like SDR mesh and LiFi. If SAFE coin is successful and can incentivise the build out of these pieces, they will deploy very quickly. The bitcoin specialized hardware build out set a precedent.

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[quote=“ned14, post:41, topic:1851”]
So as I mentioned, I’m definitely the wrong person to ask. I can say there is a pluggable transport facility in there, and before my contract ends I may try adding rust-utp as a second available transport to TCP. Past that I don’t know what the plan[/quote]

Thanks very much for that Niall. It would be very interesting if someone dealing with the details of the protocol obfuscation system could weigh in sometime. As in Tor/OpenVPN-UDP examples linked above, protocol obfuscation is a make or break issue for maintaining a SAFE Network connection from many countries.

:wink: Yip, crust is multi protocol, randomised port networking. With added encryption then it’s pretty obfuscated. Later on data flows will also get attention making deep packet inspection harder. Measures such as counting entropy and flow rates can be overcome as well. So beyond existing mechanisms.

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Thanks David went off to read more on Crust. Defiantly interested in the Crust API for adding new pluggable transports and although it is early days yet, looking forward to seeing how new transports/timings etc are to be added/updated and shared between nodes etc. Since it is a whack a mole game I guess it will mostly be being constantly updated and refined by us users most affected by censorship. Simply looking like https/443 works very well in some places while Tor PTs such as obs/dust2 in others. Encrypted packets on random ports are being blocked by the Great Firewall of China (GFC) and other countries for some time now and it seems to take less time to be detected and blocked each year. Best results if you look like some other “approved” protocol and can change between them as then they have to separate from the herd which takes much more detective work.
The Chinese are one of the biggest adopters of Bitcoin and I am sure the privacy and security of SafeCoin will be a big draw card there. It would be a shame if Safe Network cannot not get through the GFC reliably, but maybe very damaging if it got through long enough for widespread adoption only for the GFC to suddenly cut off a large amount of users, and Crust pluggable transports is not nimble enough to gracefully recover using a different transport.

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Law makers are adding another vote for the protocol obfuscation system, i.e. ability to disguise encrypted traffic using skype, game, VOIP, … headers and packet signatures.

From /. (emphasis mine):
Europe’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Could Allow Throttling of Torrents and VPNs
TorrentFreak reports that the European Parliament is approaching a vote on new telecom regulations that aim to implement net neutrality throughout EU member states. Unfortunately, the legislation hinges on a few key amendments, and experts are warning about the consequences should those amendments fail to pass. “These amendments will ensure that specific types of traffic aren’t throttled around the clock, for example. The current language would allow ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic permanently if that would optimize overall ‘transmission quality.’ This is not a far-fetched argument, since torrent traffic can be quite demanding on a network.” That’s not the only concern: “Besides file-sharing traffic the proposed legislation also allows Internet providers to interfere with encrypted traffic, including VPN connections. Since encrypted traffic can’t be classified though deep packet inspection, ISPs may choose to de-prioritize it altogether.

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I am surprised that this is surprising to anyone.

Just on this forum, anyone can see the enormous amount of spilled keystrokes that Net Neutrality fanboys spent on trying to persuade free market supporters that Net Neutrality is going to be great for everyone. Just leave it to the State and everything will be sorted out.

Absolutely hilarious! :smile:

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Probably not worth rehashing the almighty free market vs net neutrality rules debate here - it has been done to death elsewhere on this forum.

What is important/relevant to this thread is that a “protocol obfuscation system, i.e. ability to disguise encrypted traffic using skype, game, VOIP, … headers and packet signatures” is on the table - AFAIK it is not currently(?). This news just highlights that relying on encryption alone will not be good enough - we need to be able to actively disguise the encrypted traffic as any kind of “approved” protocol, preferably in a dynamic modular fashion that does not require upgrading clients.

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It is currently in places like China and now thanks to the new level of protection it may be in store for the EU.

This too has been discussed on this forum and it was mentioned that Tor has a partial solution.

Yes. I brought that up. I am just posting that news to help make the case to the developers/designers that protocol obfuscation is worthwhile. AFAIK it is not currently part of the Crust design.

Ah, okay. Maybe what Tor did can be reused, although DHT traffic patterns may be more easily discernible from regular browsing.

This has been mentioned by the dev team as an essential part of SAFE. I am just not sure which methods they are going to use

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Note that when @dirvine says “obfuscated” in this context he is not talking about protocol obfuscation as in disguising the traffic as another protocol. As I read it David is just saying that by encrypting (and randomised ports), traffic is “pretty obfuscated”. From above post:

So AFAIK true protocol obfuscation like the Tor references above are not currently part of the Crust design. If the EU passes that legislation then it could become a must-have.

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He talks about it elsewhere and its more than just obfuscation by encryption. Just not sure if its going to be in the initial test versions.

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your title is misleading, when i saw your title, i just thought maid has been banned by govs

If a government like China wanted to bog down the network, couldn’t it just use a billion dollars and upload a bunch of data to fill up all the hard drives? Everytime more hard drives become available, they just fill them up again? How could such an attack be mitigated?

Yah, but that billion dollars would flow back into the pockets of SAFE and drive folks to buy more hard drives.

Of course those are mostly made from rare earths from China so…

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Remember that as the network “fills up” so does the cost (in coin) of storing dramatically rise. So when only 20% of free space remains the price will noticeably rise and from there rises more quickly as space is used up.

With a billion dollars I would estimate that the first 1/4 billion reduces free space below 20% with farmers increasing because the rewards are rising and the next 3/4 billion only gets free down to 5-10%. Even if they pumped another billion would reduce free space only a little. Not until enough free space exists will the price reduce.

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