fractalnavel

wouldn't you know it, i finally try something, and it happens to be the day a lot of it dies.  i thought it was just an unfortunate isolated incident when suddenly yesterday suprnova.org [hard to imagine a high traffic site like that getting slashdotted, but they are completely offline at the moment] went offline (leaving only a tombstone [repeated in various forums]).  one minute it was there, then poof! it was gone.  strange to be one of the first to notice, even if i didn't recognize the significance.

turns out to be a widespread effort by “authorities” to shutdown bt.  and just in time for the holidays too !  check the news sites yourselves.  and of course it popped up on /. as well.

a common concern with preserving bt is how to provide anonymity to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.  clearly, an encrypted protocol could be used for transmission.  as for anonymity of peers & trackers, why not use the old pgp anonymous remailer idea, with all the techniques they used, except now for routing packets instead of emails ?  and in fact, that service could be - would have to be - distributed as well, in quite the same manner as the primary bt packet streams themselves.  ie - all peers are anon mixmaster re-routers as well as bt peers.  it's just that no one really knows where the endpoints are.

of course, the visible end points could still be implicated, even though they are not explicity involved in the particular bt swarm in question.  i guess at that point anyone involvement at all would be considered suspect.  which is what i think happened with the remailers.

when was the golden age of the internet ?  yes, “was”.  in some ways, it was the precommercial days, whose end more or less coincided with the birth of the web. well, somewhat after the birth.  this was followed by a few years of relative innocence.

if we consider an analogy with what happened with radio, telephone and power distribution, we are seeing the beginning of the end to the internet as a commons.  each of these other industries became heavily commercialized, quickly followed by heavy regulation.

the 'net is still relatively young.  but its age is starting to show.