1985 (P2P onion routing on 4G)

A link to -http://1985phone.com/ was recently posted by grarpamp to the tor-talk list. It's an indiegogo crowd funding project for P2P onion routing over 4G. I don't see any technical details, but it's from Jonathan Corbett at FourTen, an app developer -http://www.fourtentech.com/.

Edit: I see that the indiegogo campaign was terminated

 

Hello,

Jon Corbett here. The 1985 Indiegogo campaign raised about $500 when about $50,000 was needed, so unfortunately, I don't see the project moving forward. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thanks,

--Jon

 

P2P phone calls is super cool! I hope this happens!

 

No question, just one comment: nice username!

 

Thanks for joining the discussion.

I suspect that the Indiegogo campaign failed because too few knew about it. I didn't see anything until the recent tor-talk post. Have you talked with The Guardian Project? This seems like something that they would in some way endorse.

Creating a P2P onion-routing network on 4G is a very cool idea. However, rather than replicating Tor, I wonder whether it would be better to join it. Participating devices would run suitably restricted Tor relays. That would provide better anonymity, especially at first, when 1985 was small.

 

I highly recomend contacting the Guardian Project. I am collaborating with them on a different project and I can say they are a great group of people with similar goals. I sent them a link to your website to see what the think. I personally think this project is great as I am working on creating Mesh networks for decentralized telecommunications. P2P voip is the only missing part. This would make the Mesh-Network I have been working on fully functional as a self-deployed teleco. Meaning privacy and noone can shut the entire system down.

 

Thank you! See my work to tame the TSA here

--Jon

 

I tried promoting the campaign on Reddit, HN, etc., but it didn't really take off too much. Disappointing, but I guess it's understandably not easy to get people to throw $50K at you.

I think keeping it separate from the existing Tor network will be useful because we'll be able to fine-tune the protocol for low-latency voice transmission. Latency is the reason we haven't seen VoIP-over-Tor yet, and I'm not sure that issue can be resolved within the confines of the protocol.

--Jon

 

@Jon: Thanks for the link and more than that, the good work that you are doing! I made a donation and really hope that it helps in your fight to right the wrongs of the TSA. We need more good people like you in this country.

 

Very much appreciated -- thank you!

This board is full of smart people who can brainstorm civil disobedience, ways to embarrass abusive agencies, and of course, technical solutions to eavesdropping, spying, and other assorted government ~ Snipped as per TOS ~. I'm happy to help you guys get media coverage if you're up for pulling something off. Some things I've been thinking about:

• What if you could create a service to obfuscate cell tower location data (thus preventing your location from being tracked) by rotating the phone ID you present to the tower using an ID pool? Most of us use unlimited plans now anyway, so participating in the pool wouldn't cost us anything more, and the service could map a permanent virtual (forwarding) number to whichever phone ID you're currently using to make incoming calls function.
• What if social networking were a distributed service -- a protocol, really -- instead of a centrally managed Web site? Your friends list and content permissions could be enforced using PKI. Imagine the peace-of-mind knowing that the picture you posted can be viewed only by the friends to whom you've provided the key.
• What if we could persuade the top 100 largest e-mail providers to transmit Internet mail using SMTPS? The NSA's e-mail database would crumple.

All of these kinds of ideas are up to us all, personally, to implement. It's so tempting to think that the ACLU, EFF, EPIC, etc., or some mythical well-funded tech start-up will take care of it, but they haven't, and they won't.

--Jon

 

I know enough to be dangerous about secure VoIP, but how is this better than running OSTEL.co through a VPN? Or RedPhone? Is it the de-centralization?

Your other phone ideas are awesome. Any way to get around IMSI/IMEI, etc.. is badly needed.

Thanks,

PD

 

Decentralization means no meta-data. Meta-data is just as bad as unencrypted phone calls in some cases. Ostel would be fine if you ran your own server.