[P2P-F] Scientific American: The Shadow Web

[Rose Kudlac]

http://dev.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-shadow-web

 


The Shadow Web


Governments and corporations have more control over the Internet than ever.
Now digital activists want to build an alternative network that can never be
blocked, filtered or shut down

By Julian <http://dev.sciam.com/author.cfm?id=3251>  Dibbell  | February 14,
2012 

*	[The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system: every node
should connect to many others. This design helped to make the system
resistant to censorship or outside attack.
*	Yet in practice, most individual users exist at the edges of the
network, connected to others only through their Internet service provider
(ISP). Block this link, and Internet access disappears.
*	An alternative option is beginning to emerge in the form of wireless
mesh networks, simple systems that connect end users to one another and
automatically route around blocks and censors.
*	Yet any mesh network needs to hit a critical mass of users before it
functions well; developers must convince potential users to trade off ease
of use for added freedom and privacy.]

 

Just after midnight on January 28, 2011, the government of Egypt, rocked by
three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through
Facebook and other online social networks, did something unprecedented in
the history of 21st-century telecommunications: it turned off the Internet
<http://dev.sciam.com/topic.cfm?id=internet> . Exactly how it did this
remains unclear, but the evidence suggests that five well-placed phone
calls-one to each of the country's biggest Internet service providers
(ISPs)-may have been all it took.

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