=head1 AnoNet, Take 2!

=head2 Theory

L<anonymity in general and its place in AnoNet in
particular|http://www.anonet2.org/anonymity>

L<darknet comparison page|http://www.anonet2.org/darknet_comparison>

L<AnoNet FAQ|http://www.anonet2.org/faq>

L<quick introduction to darknets and anonymity in general and AnoNet2
in particular|http://www.anonet2.org/intro>

=head2 How to Join

There are many ways to join AnoNet.  If you just want to hang out with
us and chat, it's very easy:

=over

=item webchat

L<KwaakNet|http://webchat.kwaaknet.org/?c=AnoNet> (doesn't hide your identity)

=item IRC chat

L<SRN|telnet://ufo-net.nl:2324/> (hides your identity)

=item IRC chat

L<UFO|telnet://ufo-net.nl:2325/> (partly hides your identity)

=item telnet chat

L<SRN|telnet://ufo-net.nl:2323/> (hides your identity)

=item IRC chat

L<KwaakNet|irc://irc.kwaaknet.org:6667/anonet> (doesn't hide your identity)

=back

If you're feeling adventurous enough to connect at the IP level, L<UFO has a client port|http://ix.ucis.nl/clientport.php>.

Once you're online, you can reconnect to IRC from inside AnoNet:

=over

=item IRC

L<KwaakNet|irc://1.3.3.7:6667/anonet> (doesn't automatically hide your identity)

=item IRC

L<SRN|irc://irc.somerandomnick.ano:6667/RendezVous>
(L<SRN|irc://1.0.27.103:6667/RendezVous>, if you don't have DNS for some
reason) (automatically hides your identity)

=item IRC

L<pragmo|irc://irc.pragmo.ano:6667/atomic>
(L<pragmo|irc://1.0.16.111:6667/atomic>, for the same reason as before
and if you want you can use SSL on port 6697) (doesn't automatically
hide your identity)

=item telnet

L<SRN|telnet://irc.somerandomnick.ano:2323/>

=item Jabber

irc.somerandomnick.ano (RendezVous MUC)

=back

Note that if your only aim in joining AnoNet is to search Google
anonymously, you can save yourself the hassle L<by just heading over to
Scroogle|http://www.scroogle.org/>.  If you're looking to browse the rest
of the public Internet anonymously, though, we now have outbound proxies,
which you're more than welcome to use.

=head2 Why to Join

(Note: There's now L<a separate page with links to many more reasons to
join AnoNet|http://www.anonet2.org/links>.)

You'd want to join AnoNet2 for the same reasons as you'd want to join
AnoNet1: to exercise your freedom of speech and action, without having
to worry too much about people who don't like you making too many
connections between your online and offline identities. Unlike AnoNet1,
we're not nazis about our rules, so if you don't feel the need to conceal
your real-life identity, we won't get all mad at you. Just please be
considerate of those who would like to stay anonymous ("pseudonomous,"
technically), and everybody is happy.  (For more discussion on this
topic in particular, you may want to check out L<a separate page
here|http://www.anonet2.org/anonymity>.)

A secondary reason for joining is to gain an opportunity to experiment
with internet technologies without breaking "the real thing." While
that's not the purpose behind AnoNet, it seems to be a common reason
for joining, and as long as you don't break too much with your fun,
you're more than welcome to have your fun here.

You may want to join for the social scene (we even have our own social
network, although nobody uses it for what should be obvious reasons),
or you may want to create your own social scene. Again, you're not
looking at an "official" reason for joining, but nobody owns AnoNet, so
"official" is an artificial term 'round here.

Finally, you may be getting a bit nervous at the amount of regulation
piling up around the world against the public Internet.  Since the
"public" Internet is owned and managed by a number of multinational
corporations, it's fairly easy for governments to regulate it.  Part of
the main purpose behind AnoNet has always been to get away from those
private control points, in order to create a truly public internet.
In AnoNet1, anybody who can regulate crzydmnd can regulate AnoNet1's
"official" wiki (and by extension, its resource "database"), and
anybody who can regulate Kaos can regulate AnoNet1's "official" client
port (and by extension, all new AnoNet1 users), so the private control
point problem hasn't quite been solved there.  AnoNet2 is still largely
controlled by UFO and somerandomnick, but we have both technical and
administrative measures in place to ensure that as the network grows,
the two of us will no longer have enough control to destroy the network,
even if our own governments ever decide to try regulating us.

Here's an interesting exchange:

=over

=item Relay> [Ivo @ KN] governments do not intend to harm everybody

=item Relay> [Ivo @ KN] some criminals just intend harm everybody

=item somerandomnick> and some governments do, too

=item Relay> [Ivo @ KN] they usually at least pretend to be good for some people

=item somerandomnick> People are people.

=item Relay> [anonno @ KN] right now they can eavesdrop on telephones, and they like it... if we all move to encrypted voip, they're in trouble

=item somerandomnick> It doesn't really matter that much what hat a guy is wearing.

=item somerandomnick> A government is just a pretty face for a person to hide behind.

=item somerandomnick> It doesn't actually mean anything beyond "I'm stronger than you, so I make decisions for you."

=item somerandomnick> A person's government should be his own brain.  You should never outsource your free choice.

=item Relay> [anonno @ KN] you know what, you could use this as a marketing tool for anonet ;)

=back

=head2 The AnoNet Advantage

You may be wondering what AnoNet buys you, relative to IcannNet.  The answer obviously depends on what you tend to do on IcannNet.  Here are some points to note:

=over

=item Read Headlines

If you only read the headlines from your local news (without clicking
through to interesting stories, etc.), your anonymity on AnoNet is
actually significantly _worse_ than on IcannNet, because you're giving
away geolocation information that your IcannNet ISP already knows but
that AnoNet probably doesn't.

=item Read News

Once you start clicking around for "interesting" stories, you're giving away information that your ISP probably wouldn't already know.  However, if you read local news it's probably still wise to avoid AnoNet.  (You can still use tor directly.)

=item Do Research

AnoNet shines here.  Governments can force Google to cough up your search history, but only if Google can figure out which searches you're responsible for.  If you use Scroogle (HTTPS) through one of AnoNet's HTTP proxies, the proxy doesn't know what you're looking for, Scroogle has no clue who you are, and by the time the search makes its way to Google, connecting it to you is all but hopeless.

=item Share Files

BitTorrent doesn't hide your IP address, so seeding files for L<TPB|http://www.thepiratebay.org/> is not necessarily safe.  BitTorrent on AnoNet doesn't hide your IP address either, but the authorities can't easily connect your AnoNet IP address with your IcannNet IP address (in order to get your ISP to reveal your identity).

=item Speak Out

If you know something that you'd like other people to know, and you fear retribution from those who would prefer for others not to know what you know, traditional IcannNet forums can be forced to turn over your IP address, which can then identify you.  On AnoNet, it's comparatively easy to cover your tracks, in such a way that even your own peers would have a hard time figuring out who said whatever it was.

=item Blog

If your blog is easy to connect to your offline identity (say, it
has your name and address, and/or dwells primarily on local issues),
then moving it to AnoNet obviously won't gain you much anonymity.
On the other hand, if it's "just another random blog," AnoNet has the
potential to keep it that way.  For example, if you like to tell readers
about your experience with various products, you always run the risk of
having to defend yourself against a lawsuit if a corporate lawyer decides
his client would be better served if your critical review went away.
Now, since defending yourself in any court of law is never a trivial
matter (since the judges in nearly all first-world countries assume
that you know all the laws, regulations, relevant case histories,
civil procedures, etc. - you know, the stuff you'd normally spend
years in law school learning how to make sense of), you may decide
that publishing your blog on IcannNet simply isn't worth the risk.
On AnoNet, your blog is pretty well-protected against civil liability
lawsuits, since before a lawyer can sue you, he first has to find you.
(While there are legal mechanisms in place in many countries to allow a
lawsuit to get started even when the defendant is unknown, it should be
pretty obvious that a court will need to find out who you are before it
can meaningfully involve you in a case.  If you've done your homework,
the cost of finding you will far outweigh the benefit, especially if the
plaintiff knows he has no real case against you and was simply hoping to
intimidate you.)  In addition, the company hosting your IcannNet blog
almost certainly allows itself to delete (any part of) your blog in
its own sole discretion without even notifying you.  That potentially
allows a lawyer with an upset client to take a shortcut and bypass you
entirely, simply "asking" your blog hosting provider to remove (that part
of) your blog.  To avoid having to activate its own lawyers, your blog
hosting provider may very well decide to pull (that part of) your blog,
especially if you're paying little or nothing to host your blog.  In fact,
if your blog is on its own domain, there's yet another canidate for the
weakest link, in that anybody who wants your blog gone can simply appeal
to your domain's registrar.  (Recall the WikiLeaks case, for example.)
On AnoNet, you can easily host your own blog, forcing attacks against
your hosting arrangements to go through you (or at least through _all_
of your peers).  Your domain is even harder to attack, since wiping your
domain off of a single resdb repository would only prevent one AnoNet
user from seeing it (and a simple git rollback would fix the situation
even for that individual user).  Moreover, the deletion would quickly
propagate throughout AnoNet, potentially raising alarms everywhere.
(Even if only a single user notices the attack and re-adds your domain,
his own re-addition will quickly propagate throughout AnoNet, restoring
access to your domain for everybody.)

=item Publish

If you thought publishing blogs was tricky, try publishing a book.  ("Alms for Jihad" comes to mind as one obvious example, where the publisher went so far as to delete the book from its own database and buried the copyright.)  While physical books may not be so simple to publish on AnoNet (although you can certainly raise awareness of them by speaking out about them on AnoNet), e-books enjoy considerable anti-censorship advantages on AnoNet.

=item Teach

You may want to teach disciplines that can get you into friction with "the authorities" in a tyrannical regime.  (Judges in prominent first-world countries have ruled, for example, that knowing your way around a computer is an indication that you may be involved in computer-related crimes.)  AnoNet gives you an opportunity to teach without your students being able to point you out to the authorities, even under pain of torture.

=item Report

You may find yourself in the middle of a news story, but other parts of that news story may not appreciate your reports.  When you report something to WikiLeaks without going through tor, you're leaving a long trail that may lead to you.  With AnoNet, you can hide that trail to a certain extent, if you don't want to use tor.  (WikiLeaks over tor will still give you better protection than AnoNet, if you're worried about your government's intelligence agencies getting involved.  AnoNet's optimization towards pseudonymity with common IcannNet protocols is the weakness, here.  We're working on that, but in the meantime you have L<tor|http://www.torproject.org/>, L<i2p|http://www.i2p2.de/>, L<Freenet|http://freenetproject.org/>, L<GNUnet|http://gnunet.org/>, and others.)

=back

=head2 Why Not to Join

If you're looking for a ready-made community, where you just show up and
"browse," AnoNet (either 1 or 2) is probably not quite what you're after.
The whole concept behind AnoNet is that it's whatever you make it.
Of course, that's not to say you'll have to build everything from
scratch, but if you want to be happy here, you're best off bringing
your creativity along rather than leaving it behind when you join.
(If you've been around darknets before, you're probably quite familiar
with "design by committee."  On AnoNet, you're more than welcome to
invite a committee to discuss anything you want, but you don't have to
organize onebefore doing anything.  If you already (think you) know what
you're doing, just "build it and they will come.")

=head2 What You Can Do

Since AnoNet uses the same protocols as the public Internet, anything
that's possible on the public Internet is theoretically possible on
AnoNet. In practice, we don't have anything that nobody bothered to
provide on AnoNet.

Here's a list of things you can currently do on AnoNet2 (i.e., without
having to set anything up yourself):

=over

=item *

L<AnoNet1 Wiki Mirror|http://1.82.98.27/mediawiki> (You got that right: AnoNet1 can't seem to keep their own wiki (at wiki.ano) up, so we decided to do it for them.)

=item *

Webchat (looking to relay to IRC, L<http://www.sevilnatas.ano/chat/>)

=item *

L<WikiLeaks Mirror|http://wikileaks.ucis.ano/> (The real WikiLeaks may be down, but not our mirror!)

=item *

L<Some Random Wiki|http://www.somerandomwiki.ano/>

=item *

Pastebin (without time-zone leaks, L<http://www.sevilnatas.ano/pastebin/>)

=item *

Encode/Decode text, binary, hex, base64, and dec/char (L<http://sevilnatas.ano/translator/>)  

=item *

Live WorldCup Stream (offline until next year)

=item *

DNS (Recursive: 1.0.27.38 & 1.3.3.64; TLD: 1.0.27.37 & 1.3.3.66; Root: 1.0.27.39 & 1.3.3.65)

=item *

IRC (L<irc://1.3.3.7/anonet> or L<irc://irc.somerandomnick.ano/RendezVous>)

=item *

Jabber (irc.somerandomnick.ano)

=item *

Web (for example, L<http://www.somerandomnick.ano/>)

=item *

PSYC (psyced: IRC, Jabber, social networking, "twittering," newsgroups, etc.) (irc.somerandomnick.ano)

=item *

git (including a decentralized "wiki" replacement) (L<SRN|git://git1.somerandomnick.ano/>, L<UFO|http://anogit.ucis.ano/.git/>, L<cronix|git://1.22.48.100/>, L<pragmo|git://pragmo.ano/>, L<quintum|git://1.0.18.1/>, L<wakawaka|git://1.0.111.1/>, and possibly other repos)

=item *

outbound HTTP proxies to the public Internet (L<http://a.privoxy.somerandomnick.ano:8118/>, L<http://b.privoxy.somerandomnick.ano:8118/> (doesn't work) and L<http://a.polipo.somerandomnick.ano:8118/> (doesn't work))

=item *

Web-based resource database viewer: L<http://ix.ucis.ano/anonet/>

=item *

Decentralized Web mirroring service (at least L<http://a.mirror.somerandomnick.ano>) (technical difficulties)

=item *

BitTorrent Tracker/Indexer (three separate ones, each with some cool
features of its own - ask for details on IRC) (no need to worry about
"Three Strikes" ISP policies)

=back

Here's a list of things that somebody claims to be working on:

=over

=item *

email

=item *

news (NNTP) (guy appears to have died)

=back

If you want something that's not on either list, you'll either have to
set it up yourself, or con somebody else into setting it up himself.  (If
it's something that others are likely to find useful and/or interesting,
you'll probably have an easy time recruiting guys to help you out.)

=head2 What You Can Contribute

Well, each of us has his own wishlist, but most of us are working on
moving stuff from our TODO lists to our DONE lists, so you're looking
at a bit of a moving target.  You're more than welcome to contribute
anthing you want, and if it's interesting and/or useful, it'll probably
attract a following.  That said, here are a number of things that would
benefit the AnoNet as a whole:

=over

=item Client Ports

When a new user wants to connect, he'll normally come in through a
client port.  The more client ports are available, the harder it is for
any individual client port to abuse its position (for example, if the
local government decides to try regulating it).

=item Public Email Services

Currently, every AnoNet user who wants an email address on AnoNet has
to set up his own mailserver.  AnoNet1 used to have a public email
service so people could get email addresses without running their own
mail servers, but it hasn't been online in nearly a year (although the
AnoNet1 Web continues to advertise it).  SRN is working on setting up
such an animal on AnoNet2, but competition here is a good thing.

=item IRC Servers

IRC on AnoNet2 isn't one big network under centralized control.
Rather, anybody who wants runs his own IRC (or other chat) server,
and links whatever channels he wants to channels on other servers,
using a collection of relay bots.  (Right now, UFO and pragmo field
relays, and the scalability problems are becoming visible.  How relay
bots may want to deal with this is still a topic for open discussion.
Feel free to join in the discussion, or just do your own thing and let
everyone else be damned.)

=item Outbound HTTP Proxies

SRN runs three right now and ryuk runs one, but that means between the
two of them they can snoop on all HTTP traffic from AnoNet2 to IcannNet.
Having more proxies gives you an alternative to blindly trusting SRN
and ryuk not to sell your click-through data to Google, invert the order
of search results to your queries, and inject malicious JavaScript into
your Hotmail homepage.

=back

=head2 See Also

If AnoNet sounds good but not perfect, don't despair: there are a number
of other projects that may interest you either instead of - or possibly
in addition to - AnoNet.

=over

=item L<dn42|http://www.dn42.net/>

dn42 is another highly decentralized darknet, and it's also quite
friendly.  The main differences are that it doesn't claim anonymity as
a goal, and that it's significantly larger than AnoNet.  A number of
AnoNet members are also active in dn42.

=item L<VAnet|http://www.vanet.org/>

VAnet is a strange animal.  It's a highly I<centralized> darknet, making
the curious claim that centralization actually aids in privacy protection.
It's still quite small, but it should scale extremely well from a
technical perspective, due to its centralization.  VAnet's official IRC
is part of the AnoNet IRC monster for now, so the easiest way to find out
more about VAnet is actually just to join AnoNet IRC and ask about VAnet.

=item L<UCIS IX|http://ix.ucis.nl/>

The UCIS Internet eXchange is an attempt to link a bunch of darknets
together.  If you connect using UFO's CP, you're already on the UCIS IX.

=back