Hello! 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…
Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
31–40 of 196 posts
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#32Hello! 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
#33Hello! 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…
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#34So the business plan is to become the oligarchs of the new network?
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#35Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#36Hello! 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…
The FAQ says you can break through the Great Firewall of China. I believe that you can in some limited way now by flying under the radar, but I absolutely do not believe you could maintain that ability if this became widely used and targeted specifically by the authorities. What would you do if they started really cracking down on Orchid?
> We are working on techniques involving "traffic steganography" that will make the the traffic used by Orchid look like "normal" internet traffic (such as web requests and video calls). There are also existing simpler techniques such as "domain fronting", where you send your traffic to a large company such as Amazon--one which uses a CDN to efficiently route traffic--and cause their CDN to forward your traffic to your servers; this has been used successfully against the Great Firewall of China in the past.
> Of course, we also need to hide the list of destination servers, as otherwise these could be collected by the adversary and blocked outright. Our current solution to this involves cycling through large numbers of random IP addresses on various hosting solutions, which we believe will force anyone trying to block our traffic to end up blocking large areas of the internet--such as every server being hosted on Amazon Web Services--which would cause a serious problem for Chinese businesses and residents.
> For more information on this, see our discussion of Firewall Circumvention Features (Section 12) of our whitepaper.
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#37The 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,…
Are you concerned that,
1. If node operators have the power to control content, they will be held responsible for the content by authorities? For example, consider a node operator in mainland China who allows access to criticism of President Xi.
2. Unpopular content will be censored by node operators just like it is now by more centralized powers?
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you solve the problem of penetrating NATs and firewalls without relying on a central coordination server?
If I understand your question correctly, and you are looking at "how do we do hole punching and NAT traversal without a way to get your canonical external IP address", in addition to techniques that don't require that kind of functionality (such as modern routers with UPnP port forwarding support), other nodes on the network can run something analogous to ICE servers (we have yet to decide if it should literally be S…
But this begs the question. How does the user get the public key and address of a node without connecting to a public directory? How does he know he's connecting to something trustworthy?
Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what are the benefits over Tor?
It seems intended to be more anonymous and decentralized than Tor, and safer thanks to the strength of numbers, but their whitepaper is diseharteningly incomplete and disingenuous, particularly about problems that are shared with Tor. For example: "The distribution of Entry Nodes is a difficult topic. If oppressive governments are able to access this list, they will block user’s abilities to access the list." Or simp…