Darknet - Alternatives for a free inernet away from Facebook
Darknet | 09.03.2012 13:50 | Analysis | Technology
Social networking sites such as Facebook pose an inherent risk to activists, hackers, campaigners, etc. due to the fact that Facebook demands and stores large quantities of your own personal data which is freely available to the government, the police and anyone else who might have an interest in tracking activists online.
With Facebook's clamp down on fake profiles, their demands for phone numbers during registration, and so on, the time has come for activists to look further afield and use more clandestine means of communication for their publishing and planning activities.
With Facebook's clamp down on fake profiles, their demands for phone numbers during registration, and so on, the time has come for activists to look further afield and use more clandestine means of communication for their publishing and planning activities.
The "Darknet" is essentially a term for the "hidden" layers of the internet. Normally, this refers to the "peer to peer" features of the world wide web.
The Darknet is not a single network and it is not accessible by conventional means. It consists of various mediums, mostly peer-to-peer, which are accessible using only "unconventional" means such as specialised software. This gives them many advantages over conventional social networking sites:
A) They are often highly anonymous and do not require you to give up personal information.
B) They are almost impossible to take down, disrupt or censor.
C) They often offer built-in encryption.
D) It is very easy to spread and publish things to them.
E) They are virtually 100% free, unregulated and open.
WHY IS THIS SUDDENLY SO IMPORTANT?
Because, quite frankly, the march towards a state controlled, state monitored internet is well under way.
We are expecting, within the very near future, for the state to advance plans for widespread internet spying. This includes activity on social networks, email communications, web habits and pretty much everything that you might already be doing on the internet.
This has enormous implications for any kind of political activist, hackers and in general, regular ordinary people who would like to keep their data private. It would mean that everything you did would be reported and read by the state, the police and the security services.
No matter where you live, then there is a huge risk of this.
With the USA, we have already seen the likes of SOPA and PIPA
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/intellectual-property/2011/11/21/sopa-piracy-bill-allows-provision-for-ip-blocking-40094463/
These are NOT past threats. SOPA and PIPA are very, very likely to be reintroduced.
There is also a current threat from SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith's HR1981 Bill.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/301371/20120220/hr-1981-sopa-lamar-smith-internet-surveillance.htm
In the UK then there is very similar legislation being put forwards.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-threats/2012/02/20/isps-kept-in-dark-about-uks-plans-to-intercept-twitter-40095083/
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/how-the-uk-plans-anti-terror-phone-email-monitoring/3127
Ireland recently passed their own equivalent of SOPA into law:
http://rt.com/news/irish-sopa-made-law-597/
On the continent then there already has been widespread discontent around the ACTA trade agreement.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/how-acta-would-affect-you-faq/2773
All of the above points to an international crackdown on internet freedom. Most of it the result of collaboration between corrupt corporations and corrupt politicians looking to protect their own power and profits.
There must be resistance. The first step in this is to actively explore communication mediums and social networking platforms that are more immune to potential state and corporate snooping operations.
This is the Darknet.
HOW TO GET STARTED:
The first thing you need to start accessing areas of darknet is familiarise yourself with the various networking software that is freely available on the internet. Much of if it open-source, compatible with both linux and windows and often will work alongside your favourite browser.
FREENET
Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect.
Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are routed through other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.
Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Files are automatically kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files are encrypted, so generally the user cannot easily discover what is in his datastore, and hopefully can't be held accountable for it. Chat forums, websites, and search functionality, are all built on top of this distributed data store.
http://freenetproject.org/
DIASPORA
Recommend social networking platform.
Diaspora is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service. Installations of the software form nodes (termed "pods") which make up the distributed, decentralised Diaspora social network.
Diaspora is intended to address privacy concerns related to centralized social networks by allowing users set up their own server (or "pod") to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs, and other social data. It allows its users to host their data with a traditional web host, a cloud-based host, an ISP, or a friend. The framework, which is being built on Ruby on Rails, is free software and can be experimented with by external developers.
A key part of the Diaspora software design concept is that is should act as a "social aggregator", allowing posts to be easily imported into Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. As Village Voice writer Nick Pinto explained, "the idea is that this lowers the barriers to joining the network, and as more of your friends join, you no longer need to bounce communications through Facebook. Instead, you can communicate directly, securely, and without running exchanges past the prying eyes of Zuckerberg and his business associates."
https://joindiaspora.com - The main pod.
https://poddery.com/ - Another pod.
https://www.redblack.me - A dedicated pod for anarchists!
TOR
Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.
Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.
Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recommend Tor as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication. Which locations have employees working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting websites? Which research divisions are communicating with the company's patent lawyers?
A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.
The variety of people who use Tor is actually part of what makes it so secure. Tor hides you among the other users on the network, so the more populous and diverse the user base for Tor is, the more your anonymity will be protected.
https://www.torproject.org/
I2P
I2P is an anonymizing network, offering a simple layer that identity-sensitive applications can use to securely communicate. All data is wrapped with several layers of encryption, and the network is both distributed and dynamic. Many applications are available that interface with I2P, including mail, peer-peer, IRC chat, and others.
The I2P project was formed in 2003 to support the efforts of those trying to build a more free society by offering them an uncensorable, anonymous, and secure communication system. I2P is a development effort producing a low latency, fully distributed, autonomous, scalable, anonymous, resilient, and secure network. The goal is to operate successfully in hostile environments - even when an organization with substantial financial or political resources attacks it. All aspects of the network are open source and available without cost, as this should both assure the people using it that the software does what it claims, as well as enable others to contribute and improve upon it to defeat aggressive attempts to stifle free speech.
Anonymity is not a boolean - we are not trying to make something "perfectly anonymous", but instead are working at making attacks more and more expensive to mount. I2P is a low latency mix network, and there are limits to the anonymity offered by such a system, but the applications on top of I2P, such as Syndie, I2P mail, and I2PSnark extend it to offer both additional functionality and protection.
I2P works by routing traffic through other peers. All traffic is encrypted end-to-end.
http://www.i2p2.de/
TRIBLER
Tribler is an open-source decentralised peer-to-peer filesharing system. Tribler is based on the BitTorrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching. Due to this overlay network Tribler does not require an external website or indexing service to discover content and is designed specifically to stay online under any circumstances - including attacks by governments and anti-piracy organisations. It has been said that the only way to take Tribler down would be to take down the internet.
OSIRIS
Osiris is a free portal creation software. The portals created with osiris don't need a central server, they are safe, indestructible and anonymous. In those portals, all users have the same rights, so the standard hierarchys (administrators, moderators, members) of regular forums are not present, even if they are supported.
The data of the portals are not saved on a single computer, each member of the portal has a copy of them on his hard disk. The same parts of the portal are saved on many connected units, in order to avoid compromising the integrity of the portal if one of them disconnects. This ensures that a portal built with Osiris will last forever.
Osiris includes components to create forums, image gallery, repository, polls, news, articles, documents, etc.
Download the software at:
http://www.osiris-sps.org/download/
RETROSHARE
RetroShare is a cross-platform private peer-to-peer sharing program. It lets you share securely your friends, using a web-of-trust to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication. RetroShare provides many services including filesharing, chat, messages and channels.
Download the software at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/
retroshare/
IMPORTANT ISSUES TO BE AWARE OF
These are virtually 100% uncensored and unregulated.
This means that you ***WILL*** encounter potentially objectionable/illegal/etc. material on dark networks.
Secondly, don't get sucked into a false sense of security just because you're sitting behind multiple layers of encryption on a decentralised network.
It is important to get out of the habits you may have picked up from facebook resulting in you indiscriminately giving away personal information to people that you probably shouldn't be giving that kind of data to.
ADDITIONAL MEASURES
For extra additional security, we strongly reccommend you investigate the following utilities.
VPN'S
VPN stands for "Virtual Private Network" and refers to methods of establishing a secure, private connection over existing infrastructure (I.e. your internet connection). To summarise, a connection to a VPN will encrypt your entire connection and protect your IP by routing it through a secure VPN server.
RiseupVPN
https://help.riseup.net/en/vpn
VPNTUNNEL
http://vpntunnel.se/
IPREDATOR
https://www.ipredator.se/
The Darknet is not a single network and it is not accessible by conventional means. It consists of various mediums, mostly peer-to-peer, which are accessible using only "unconventional" means such as specialised software. This gives them many advantages over conventional social networking sites:
A) They are often highly anonymous and do not require you to give up personal information.
B) They are almost impossible to take down, disrupt or censor.
C) They often offer built-in encryption.
D) It is very easy to spread and publish things to them.
E) They are virtually 100% free, unregulated and open.
WHY IS THIS SUDDENLY SO IMPORTANT?
Because, quite frankly, the march towards a state controlled, state monitored internet is well under way.
We are expecting, within the very near future, for the state to advance plans for widespread internet spying. This includes activity on social networks, email communications, web habits and pretty much everything that you might already be doing on the internet.
This has enormous implications for any kind of political activist, hackers and in general, regular ordinary people who would like to keep their data private. It would mean that everything you did would be reported and read by the state, the police and the security services.
No matter where you live, then there is a huge risk of this.
With the USA, we have already seen the likes of SOPA and PIPA
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/intellectual-property/2011/11/21/sopa-piracy-bill-allows-provision-for-ip-blocking-40094463/ These are NOT past threats. SOPA and PIPA are very, very likely to be reintroduced.
There is also a current threat from SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith's HR1981 Bill.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/301371/20120220/hr-1981-sopa-lamar-smith-internet-surveillance.htm In the UK then there is very similar legislation being put forwards.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-threats/2012/02/20/isps-kept-in-dark-about-uks-plans-to-intercept-twitter-40095083/ http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/how-the-uk-plans-anti-terror-phone-email-monitoring/3127 Ireland recently passed their own equivalent of SOPA into law:
http://rt.com/news/irish-sopa-made-law-597/ On the continent then there already has been widespread discontent around the ACTA trade agreement.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/how-acta-would-affect-you-faq/2773 All of the above points to an international crackdown on internet freedom. Most of it the result of collaboration between corrupt corporations and corrupt politicians looking to protect their own power and profits.
There must be resistance. The first step in this is to actively explore communication mediums and social networking platforms that are more immune to potential state and corporate snooping operations.
This is the Darknet.
HOW TO GET STARTED:
The first thing you need to start accessing areas of darknet is familiarise yourself with the various networking software that is freely available on the internet. Much of if it open-source, compatible with both linux and windows and often will work alongside your favourite browser.
FREENET
Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect.
Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are routed through other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.
Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Files are automatically kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files are encrypted, so generally the user cannot easily discover what is in his datastore, and hopefully can't be held accountable for it. Chat forums, websites, and search functionality, are all built on top of this distributed data store.
http://freenetproject.org/ DIASPORA
Recommend social networking platform.
Diaspora is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service. Installations of the software form nodes (termed "pods") which make up the distributed, decentralised Diaspora social network.
Diaspora is intended to address privacy concerns related to centralized social networks by allowing users set up their own server (or "pod") to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs, and other social data. It allows its users to host their data with a traditional web host, a cloud-based host, an ISP, or a friend. The framework, which is being built on Ruby on Rails, is free software and can be experimented with by external developers.
A key part of the Diaspora software design concept is that is should act as a "social aggregator", allowing posts to be easily imported into Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. As Village Voice writer Nick Pinto explained, "the idea is that this lowers the barriers to joining the network, and as more of your friends join, you no longer need to bounce communications through Facebook. Instead, you can communicate directly, securely, and without running exchanges past the prying eyes of Zuckerberg and his business associates."
https://joindiaspora.com - The main pod. https://poddery.com/ - Another pod. https://www.redblack.me - A dedicated pod for anarchists! TOR
Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.
Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.
Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recommend Tor as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication. Which locations have employees working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting websites? Which research divisions are communicating with the company's patent lawyers?
A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.
The variety of people who use Tor is actually part of what makes it so secure. Tor hides you among the other users on the network, so the more populous and diverse the user base for Tor is, the more your anonymity will be protected.
https://www.torproject.org/ I2P
I2P is an anonymizing network, offering a simple layer that identity-sensitive applications can use to securely communicate. All data is wrapped with several layers of encryption, and the network is both distributed and dynamic. Many applications are available that interface with I2P, including mail, peer-peer, IRC chat, and others.
The I2P project was formed in 2003 to support the efforts of those trying to build a more free society by offering them an uncensorable, anonymous, and secure communication system. I2P is a development effort producing a low latency, fully distributed, autonomous, scalable, anonymous, resilient, and secure network. The goal is to operate successfully in hostile environments - even when an organization with substantial financial or political resources attacks it. All aspects of the network are open source and available without cost, as this should both assure the people using it that the software does what it claims, as well as enable others to contribute and improve upon it to defeat aggressive attempts to stifle free speech.
Anonymity is not a boolean - we are not trying to make something "perfectly anonymous", but instead are working at making attacks more and more expensive to mount. I2P is a low latency mix network, and there are limits to the anonymity offered by such a system, but the applications on top of I2P, such as Syndie, I2P mail, and I2PSnark extend it to offer both additional functionality and protection.
I2P works by routing traffic through other peers. All traffic is encrypted end-to-end.
http://www.i2p2.de/ TRIBLER
Tribler is an open-source decentralised peer-to-peer filesharing system. Tribler is based on the BitTorrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching. Due to this overlay network Tribler does not require an external website or indexing service to discover content and is designed specifically to stay online under any circumstances - including attacks by governments and anti-piracy organisations. It has been said that the only way to take Tribler down would be to take down the internet.
OSIRIS
Osiris is a free portal creation software. The portals created with osiris don't need a central server, they are safe, indestructible and anonymous. In those portals, all users have the same rights, so the standard hierarchys (administrators, moderators, members) of regular forums are not present, even if they are supported.
The data of the portals are not saved on a single computer, each member of the portal has a copy of them on his hard disk. The same parts of the portal are saved on many connected units, in order to avoid compromising the integrity of the portal if one of them disconnects. This ensures that a portal built with Osiris will last forever.
Osiris includes components to create forums, image gallery, repository, polls, news, articles, documents, etc.
Download the software at:
http://www.osiris-sps.org/download/ RETROSHARE
RetroShare is a cross-platform private peer-to-peer sharing program. It lets you share securely your friends, using a web-of-trust to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication. RetroShare provides many services including filesharing, chat, messages and channels.
Download the software at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ retroshare/
IMPORTANT ISSUES TO BE AWARE OF
These are virtually 100% uncensored and unregulated.
This means that you ***WILL*** encounter potentially objectionable/illegal/etc. material on dark networks.
Secondly, don't get sucked into a false sense of security just because you're sitting behind multiple layers of encryption on a decentralised network.
It is important to get out of the habits you may have picked up from facebook resulting in you indiscriminately giving away personal information to people that you probably shouldn't be giving that kind of data to.
ADDITIONAL MEASURES
For extra additional security, we strongly reccommend you investigate the following utilities.
VPN'S
VPN stands for "Virtual Private Network" and refers to methods of establishing a secure, private connection over existing infrastructure (I.e. your internet connection). To summarise, a connection to a VPN will encrypt your entire connection and protect your IP by routing it through a secure VPN server.
RiseupVPN
https://help.riseup.net/en/vpn VPNTUNNEL
http://vpntunnel.se/ IPREDATOR
https://www.ipredator.se/
Darknet
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