Decentralized Internet and Privacy
Reclaiming the Web: Surfing the Internet on Torrents
<p>In recent decades, the internet has increasingly become centralized, shifting from its hacker-driven origins into a cartel of advertising companies. It won't get better if we allow these same companies to drive the design of the web browsers and their protocols.</p>
<p>Within hacker communities, many solutions have been developed to mitigate centralization, but their adoption has been limited, often because they require specialized expertise to be operated safely.</p>
<p>In this talk I'll introduce you to a new open-source project that aims to provide an accessible alternative by building a web browser that is able to fetch web content using the BitTorrent protocol in tandem with the Tor network.</p>
<p>We will dive into the ethical, security, and privacy trade-offs at play when designing such an alternative web.</p>
<p>The IvI Project: https://ivi.eco</p>
<p>Historically, peer-to-peer communication has been at the heart of the internet since its early days, reaching its peak in the late 90s when the web truly became a platform for sharing knowledge and art. For a moment it felt like we could exchange freely with anyone else. Unfortunately, that did not last long: legal restrictions, centralization and the emergence of commercial streaming services did eventually reshape the internet.</p>
<p>But the peer-to-peer spirit did not die. Over times many tools have been developed to try to keep the web decentralized and open. They are all contributing to forge a vision in which the internet network must be owned and operated by its users.</p>
<p>The project "IvI" that I'm introducing to you tries to bring those pieces together in a way that makes it accessible to anyone: a web browser that streams web content using BitTorrent while guarding privacy using the Tor network. It allows people in different parts of the world to help each other access content freely, even when local internet providers or policies impose restrictions on torrenting.</p>
<p>Rebuilding the web using this model allow us to mitigate the risks of mass surveillance and censorship by design. Though seeding activity is public, the decentralized nature of the network makes it difficult to trace who is accessing what, or from where. It also builds solidarity into the web itself: users helping users across borders through open technology... but it does also raise complex ethical questions.</p>
<p>When users set up their "Akoopa" browser, they will have the choice to operate under a public or private (cloaked) profile.</p>
<p>By choosing a public profile, the node will communicate with the BitTorrent mainline DHT, it participates as an active node in traditional BitTorrent swarms. But here's the twist: a public node also exposes itself using an onion service which is only advertised to peers running the IvI stack. On the other hand, all the HTTP browsing traffic goes through Tor, effectively preventing websites (or their advertisers) from correlating the torrenting activity.</p>
<p>Alternatively, by choosing a private profile, all communications will go through Tor. This means that the node can not directly communicate with BitTorrent mainline DHT. Instead, it relies on the overlay network of public IvI nodes to proxy its requests. In such situation it can participate only passively with the traditional BitTorrent nodes, but it is actively supported by the other IvI nodes in the swarm.</p>
<p>With this design in mind, and a carefully hardened BitTorrent client implementation which is respectful of Tor bandwidth and exit policies, we should be able to work around the issues traditionally encountered when torrenting with Tor.</p>
<p>This initiative is not commercial, not governmental; it is just a community effort to reclaim the web’s original spirit. It’s a simple idea that poses this question: What if we delivered the web itself through torrents? The technology exists; now it’s about putting it together and doing so collectively to figure out how to make it work for everyone.</p>
Additional information
| Live Stream | https://live.fosdem.org/watch/ud2218a |
|---|---|
| Type | devroom |
| Language | English |
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