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by impossiblefork 204 days ago
What you'd do is that you'd write a distributed remailer where fixed-size messages are sent on fixed timeslots, possibly with some noise in when it's transmitted, with a message always being sent on its timeslot, even if a dummy message must be sent.

I've been writing a system like this in Erlang, intended to be short enough that you can take a picture of the source code and then type it in by hand in a reasonable amount of time, as a sort of protest against Chat Control. I'm not sure I'm going to release it-- after all, they haven't passed it yet, and there are all sorts of problems that this thing could needlessly accelerate, but I've started fiddling with it more intensively recently.
2 comments
47282847 204 days ago
You may be interested in Katzenpost and the research behind it: https://katzenpost.network/
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impossiblefork 204 days ago
Ah. It actually looks very sensible. I knew things like that existed, but didn't know they had dummy messages.

I guess my approach is more P2P, more simplicity, shortness and clarity focused, as well as perhaps emphasizing general networking less-- I sacrifice more, I'm fine with 3-6 second delays on all messages, for example. I guess I also emphasize scale in that I intend to have 10,000+ connection open simultaneously on every peer, and because of this you don't even always need the retransmission aspect, since the person you want to talk to might be in the group of 10,000 that you send a message to every second.

So in my thing the mixing is less important and the retransmission aspect is only needed when the network grows so big that you, when you connect don't happen to randomly end up directly peering with the person you want to talk to.

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zmgsabst 204 days ago
Don’t things like Freenet do similar?

Except that every user is also a node, thereby mixing their personal traffic into a share of network traffic. Or so I understand it.

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impossiblefork 204 days ago
I'm not sure. Freenet actually stores information, this is pure communication system. I don't think it uses dummy messages.

My target size is also <500 lines, and I think <200 is feasible, whereas Freenet is apparently 192,000 lines.

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