How is this different from Freenet or Tor?
Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
11–20 of 196 posts
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#12Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…
Is this anonymous like tor or i2p? if so, how do you do it?
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#13Very interesting. Visited Noisebridge a while back and there was a post on the door telling visitors what to do when the FBI visits to ask about the TOR exit node. I wonder how this tool avoids the exit node problem.
Also, from the FAQ:
>Can't NSA just hack into this too?
>No. Because of its fully decentralized approach, distributed architecture, and the size of the global network, Orchid cannot be easily hacked by any single government or entity.
That's not really a satisfactory answer. First, it doesn't answer the question. The question was not "can NSA easily hack into this." And I don't think the NSA is necessarily deterred by something being not easy. The bar needs to be higher than not easy, even if "not easy" is a polite understatement. Also relying on the size of the network means there is a bootstrapping problem, right? Hopefully they will get there.
This doesn't mean the system is bad... I'm just saying the FAQ answer is bad.
On the positive side, given the cred of some of the people involved (saurik!) I am optimistic this may well have a shot at working.
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#14The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth." So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.
How so? If it's under individual control, you'll just end up with sub-networks where people will agree to distribute that type of content.
You cannot pair anonymity and security with censorship. They are fundamentally incompatible. So either accept that nasty content will be out there, or acknowledge that you don't actually want perfect anonymity and security.
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#15The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth." So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.
That is absolutely our intention! While users who run nodes can choose to forward content to anywhere on the Internet, we want to provide people a feeling of control over the usage of their bandwidth, as we believe that (along with being paid to forward traffic!) will increase the number of people who are willing to provide bandwidth to the service. Being able to say "I am only willing to help users get to Wikipedia, or the New York Times" is something that we think is very important to being able to have enough people using the service to provide the levels of security needed for everyone on the network.
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#16How is this different from Freenet or Tor?
(edit: When I wrote this answer, the person I was responding to had not yet added "or Tor".)
Freenet builds its own domain of content where people post websites that are hosted in a distributed fashion by the platform. What we are working on with this initial implementation is a fully-decentralized tunneling service to access existing content posted on the internet (so if you were to compare it to an existing technology, you might look at Tor, or the "out-proxies" from I2P).
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#17Very interesting. Visited Noisebridge a while back and there was a post on the door telling visitors what to do when the FBI visits to ask about the TOR exit node. I wonder how this tool avoids the exit node problem. Also, from the FAQ: >Can't NSA just hack into this too? >No. Because of its fully decentralized approach, distributed architecture, and the size of the global network, Orchid cannot be easily hacked by a…
Ugh. FWIW: we agree. That FAQ answer was rewritten, and it failed to go on the website.
Here is the updated text that was written a couple nights ago by one of the people who helped design the protocol with me after being confused by the answer on the website.
> Yes. Our initial release targets China as the adversary, which is a more tractable problem. We may implment full Chaumian mixes in the future (which are immune to metadata/traffic analysis), but they are unlikely to be complete for our first public release.
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#18The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth." So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.
For that purpose I would think optional whitelisting would make more sense. Instead of spyware lists you subscribe to in uBlock Origin, you would subscribe to a vetted, whitelist of known to be generally acceptable Orchid content.
Others might want to have empty filter list to be a complete transit/peer.
Therefore I don't think there's much room for users who want to blacklist but are not rather looking for a whitelist.
The blacklist will grow and grow, while the whitelist size will be pretty stable.
That said, I haven't used it, so the implemented blacklist approach might already support the above cases and be sufficient.
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#19the project seems very cool. related: https://medium.com/@stevewaterhouse/how-token-sales-can-be-a...
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#20How is this different from Freenet or Tor?
(edit: When I wrote this answer, the person I was responding to had not yet added "or Tor".) Freenet builds its own domain of content where people post websites that are hosted in a distributed fashion by the platform. What we are working on with this initial implementation is a fully-decentralized tunneling service to access existing content posted on the internet (so if you were to compare it to an existing technol…
So what are the benefits over Tor?