The Iran Firewall: A preliminary report • Hacker News Board

Re: The Iran Firewall: A preliminary report

#141

Post by pyinstallwoes » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 1:13 PM UTC

cookiengineer wrote: post #121

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #94

The only real solution long-term is completely peer-to-peer ad-hoc networking that doesn't depend on BGP. A few projects are in similar territory but none I've seen are working at the layer of bypassing BGP. Many are just acting as an overlay; which works to an extent. https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-go It's probably begging for a different model of the "internet" and where data lives. My requirements:…

Most of the things you mentioned are implemented in the "Browser" that I've built. It's using multicast DNS to discover neighboring running instances and it has an offline cache first mentality, which means that e.g. download streams are shared among local peers. Global peer discovery is solved via mapping of identifiers via the reserved TLD, and via mutual TLS for identification and verification. So peers are basica…

Thanks for sharing your comment and contributing to the solution.

I like what you're doing. Do you have a Discord? Is it a solo project? Working with a team or just "community pull-requests?"

Curious about your trajectory.

Re: The Iran Firewall: A preliminary report

#142

Post by sweetbitter » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 5:19 AM UTC

HyperSane wrote: post #140

sweetbitter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was speculating that the notion of a laser-based mesh network could deserve more attention, if it is economically viable. That seems like a better choice than something like WiFi, because you do not have to share a channel with huge amounts of other devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communicati... It is already a thing but not common due to many limitations, mainly very short useful range.

Several kilometers of range seems tolerable with enough collaboration. I do wonder though, whether mesh networks for bidirectional (synchronous) comms are a good idea in hostile environments. It seems too easy to map out the positions of the nodes. Systems that support distrbuted, asynchronous comms and use of wireless protocols on phones seem like a good match for them though.

Re: The Iran Firewall: A preliminary report

#143

Post by cookiengineer » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 11:08 AM UTC

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #141

cookiengineer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the things you mentioned are implemented in the "Browser" that I've built. It's using multicast DNS to discover neighboring running instances and it has an offline cache first mentality, which means that e.g. download streams are shared among local peers. Global peer discovery is solved via mapping of identifiers via the reserved TLD, and via mutual TLS for identification and verification. So peers are basica…

Thanks for sharing your comment and contributing to the solution. I like what you're doing. Do you have a Discord? Is it a solo project? Working with a team or just "community pull-requests?" Curious about your trajectory.

Currently we only have a public (and another private) Telegram channel where we occasionally discuss upcoming features, problems and solutions to technical problems.

The Stealth browser is kind of a solo project for now. It grew out of my personal intention to build a better architecture for a more efficient web scraper + browser that doesn't waste internet bandwidth, because I have pretty crappy internet abroad. But I'd love to grow a community out of it.

Before the 4chan attacks last year there were a couple of other devs that occasionally contributed to the project, but they faded slowly away with the discreditation campaigns against me/us. As the 4chan raids led to us realizing that we're better at building cyber intelligence + defense products, we also pivoted with the company to this area because of it. The threat analysis mechanisms and peer-to-peer networking parts (with trust ratio of nodes/edges/paths) are very similar in nature, so it was a good fit, technology-wise.

I'd still want to build the stealth browser further and make a better project out of it (especially with the RetroKit fork which is WebKit minus the tracking APIs), but I've pivoted with the company to a different area and that's currently the primary objective. As our country is regularly attacked by a lot of cyber threats right now, we've focussed our efforts on developing the cyber defense technologies.

Right now, stealth is primarily being used as a Web Scraper via it's node.js APIs by us. So it's still actively used and occasionally we'll push some features to the repository.