Fully encryted Internet.

Donavonyoung

Check this out, this guys hopes to create a full encrypted and private internet, to keep the govt. out of your computer. Sounds pretty damn good to me, especially at the price point he claims. What do you guys think about this?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57412225-281/this-internet-provider-pledges-to-put-your-privacy-first-always/?tag=mncol;topStories

Ace-Angel

Lets see, guys creates encrypted service.

First few months are great, even years maybe.

Suddenly, some guys does something illegal or bad (pedophile, rape, murder, etc) and the media demonizes the service for being his shield.

People who don't understand the internet, get on everyone's back.

Government orders 'decryption' service to be started.

We go back to square-one, only that now everyone sees you as 'someone hiding something' if you use the service, and the Government still has the ability to spook on you, while you're paying extra for something that doesn't really work anymore.

This sends internet users to the tipping point.

They start creating scripts and other stuff to combat the 'idiots' from all sides.

The issue escalates to physical level.

Rioting in streets start, neither people nor Government will try for a compromise.

Meantime, Google gains sentience from all this 'extra' collective given to it.

Google controls the internet, makes people dumber while itself escalating the violence.

...

Yep, I don't see anything wrong going here.

Bigjohn

I'm not sure how encrypting internet traffic really helps privacy. Whatever privacy concerns people have now are largely irrelevant to encryption.

Like your information being visible on Google+ or Facebook. Or if you download a torrent, your IP number is visible so that other people can connect to you. If you have a keylogger, they can record your login info for sites, even banking sites.

What does encryption have to do with any of it? If someone wants to send an encrypted message today, what's stopping him? Unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Edit:
Ok, so the article was kinda lame I guess. I read the page on Indiegogo and it makes a lot more sense. They actually want to set it up as a VPN service together with an ISP service. This means that it will be essentially impossible to trace internet traffic back to a user. Pretty interesting. Though it still doesn't solve the Facebook problem... but I guess that's where personal responsibility kicks in.

Donavonyoung

Apparently this ISP will prevent IP tracking through some kind of masking. So you will always be invisible. At least that is what he is going for. Basically it prevents the govt. from knowing where you go and what you upload\download etc. If it worked the way I would hope it would, I would be very happy. Will it happen not so sure, but the idea makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Ace-Angel, Love the path that our society takes in the internet revolt. Maybe this is what transforms our world into an Idiocracy.

katana

Sounds like a wet dream for the terrorists out there...

Ace-Angel

Did a quick google search for extra info, nothing really substantial, but from the looks of the it, the internet provider will need to (again, just rumors) cut back on the speed, dropping it below American average...ouch.

Also, the 'extra' will need to be taxed by the respective country apparently, and the entire structure itself relies on 'bouncing' of IP's? Ouch again if it happens (especially since you will need to use other people's established lines, not everyone will want to put up a dish).

So yeah, high latency and low speed will be the main issue of the service, I'm not sure how I feel about that, I mean we're already barely breaking the 1MB download rate in many place, with 800, 512 and 256 being the more common, so cutting something even more doesn't seem to make it worthwhile.

Many ISP providers also tend to 'turn a blind eye' at certain hours when you're using their services, so there is that, if I want to watch someone dressed up as Tali is doing bestiality, I will do it during those hours.

adam

TOR is already out there and is entirely secluded. It's riddled with gore and child porn, though. (obviously). There is, as I see it, no reason to use something like that as it is today.

DeadlyFreeze

TOR only fully encrypts tor sites. If you logged onto polycount using tor your leaking your info to god knows who, it isn't built for that kind of end to end encryption.

Donavonyoung

Definite bummer about the bandwidth drop. Got to admit didn't do any research before throwing this up here.

AlexLeighton

As much as Ace-Angel's scenario made me chuckle, I don't think it's really that far off the mark.

Bigjohn

You guys are talking about TOR, but this is more on the VPN side.

You can already get today a paid VPN that will be about as fast as your connection could handle. You'd lose some bandwidth and get increased latency because it's an extra bounce. You go from you, to your ISP, to your VPN, and then onwards.

But this project seems like it would provide a VPN as part of its ISP service. So I don't see why there would be any significant performance drop.

And unlike TOR, you still have access to the whole internet as it's just a regular ISP otherwise.

The encryption and the TOR stuff are done on top of all that. So that means if the government ever wants to get some records or e-mails, all that information would be encrypted anyway and nobody but you would have access to it.

dfacto

The internet is too big to encrypt. By which I mean governments would never let it happen. An evidence free means of communication would be disastrous for organizations geared towards control. At most you'll get the illusion of security, with only the deepnet and TOR as alternatives.

So basically like now.