Yea SOPA is horrible. I can't even imagine what will happen if the bill passes as is. And the morons voting on it really haven't a clue about technology (most of them anyways).

Indeed, the person who made it up in the first place is 64.  :|

To me, it seems the punch line of the whole thing is that it won't stop the piracy.  People will almost find a way around whatever barriers are placed in the way, the only people it'll block are normal people.
I'm half-wondering, if this does get passed, it would trigger some new breakthrough like boot 1.03 caused around here

It reminds me of what happened in France a while ago. They tried to pass a bill that looked like SOPA but with huge fines everytime you download something illegal, free software would severly be harmed, of course, the entire Internet opposed and the legislators looked like complete morons (is OpenOffice a firewall?). When you call OpenOffice a firewall, I guess you're really a moron. Thankfully, the bills didn't passed.

I hate to rain on your parade, but having attempting to do something like this in the past, I can give a bit of advice. My school had a blocking system, so I thought, why not create a system to bypass it and would take a considerable amount of power to figure out what was going on. Just before I deployed it, a couple of things happened. One, some illegal downloading was seen and the IT people were put on high (read: "the world is coming to an end!") alert. Two the said person (not me in case you were wondering) was located pretty quick. Three no one except of a couple of administrators know who this person is and not much else was let out. So I decided not to deploy this system because of things that I did not think of.

So, to apply it to this new protocol thing I can give a few tips:
1. If you invent something to keep the government out, you are inviting pirates and similar folk in.
2. From point 1, the FBI,  NSA and other alphabet agencies are going to invest more to crack it. If you do manage to keep them out, then they may appear at your doorstep (if they haven't done so already)
3. You could still be shut from the internet with a couple of letters to your ISP (unless you are doing this over a really big WiFi network or equivalent)
4. The content that would appear there would be limited.

Well, hope this gives the community a bit of insight from someone who had the same idea.

Oh, also please don't take this like I oppose this idea. I think it is a great idea to make everything more secure. I'm just pointing out some things to look out for.

@systwo: Good point and great insight. I am sure we could find something, though, but I am also in an excitable mood

I think we could do it! I mean, we have some VERY smart and talented people here! We have the potential to become more then just calc and computer game makers!

(jsyk I am in no way trying to start an uprising against the world or government, but I am Anarchist (don't ask why) and I don't like the government and people trying to mess with our rights, so please don't take offense to me, and if you do just go ahead and ignore me lol)

So do we actually have the ability and tools to successfully battle this if need be?

Well... Kindof.

For the first phase (from project start until it is slashdotted) you probably will be successful. I know there are a lot of great minds here in this community and I do not doubt that a client using this secure protocol with none of the HTTP overhead can be created. To ISPs and governments at this point, it would look like another game or sharing software has appeared. To the RIAA, MPAA, etc., it would be a waste of their time. For us, it would mean slightly faster internet (it wouldn't be a huge boost to speed, as the security protocols would take more time to process, possibly balancing the low overhead).

The second phase (slashdot to the end of the internet) is a bit more in the grey area. As soon as this project is shown to all the geeks and nerds out there, they will start using it. People with illegal content will see this as another way to store their data and release it without being caught (this will set the red flag for the FBI). But the nerds and geeks may be people like Bruce Schneier or the folks at EFF, who will support this if they see it as successful. If this is the case then we may have a good working protocol that will prevent snooping from people who use their powers maliciously.

Oh and also, FBI honeypots may appear as well. So, you will need to take that into account when making this protocol.

Tl;dr
If you make this system, then you will need to take into account everything I said in the last post and make sure it is secure enough that 'honeypots' cannot exist. And you will need to get the attention of privacy and security advocates to support this.

Quote from: systwo on January 15, 2012, 08:59:31 pm

So, to apply it to this new protocol thing I can give a few tips:
1. If you invent something to keep the government out, you are inviting pirates and similar folk in.
2. From point 1, the FBI,  NSA and other alphabet agencies are going to invest more to crack it. If you do manage to keep them out, then they may appear at your doorstep (if they haven't done so already)
3. You could still be shut from the internet with a couple of letters to your ISP (unless you are doing this over a really big WiFi network or equivalent)
4. The content that would appear there would be limited.

It's already been invented and it's called the http secure protocol. The entire point of encryption is to prevent third parties from being able to read your data and https is a well known, well supported, and well tested way of doing that. Those third parties can still most likely see where the traffic is coming and going from, but they can't tell what the actual data being transmitted is.

Also, the FBI/NSA could really care less about most individuals. Any reasonably knowledgeable person can already prevent them from reading their data.

Thirdly, your ISP can shut you down no matter what. There are very few large router stations in the US (or even abroad). Two or three requests at most could ban a location from connecting to the internet.

As for the fourth thing, every site that has the proper certification can use the https protocol. Not many sites invest in it, but enough do.

I do agree with this what you say, but I'm just giving some advice. HTTPS is a recommended way to do things, and it has a large community supporting it, but if our community wishes to create another protocol, I'm all for it.

On your first point, we could make it better by not showing where the traffic is going and where it is from. See "The Onion Router" (TOR) for a similar system. It works but it is very slow. Improvements can always be made

On your point about individuals, yes the FBI will not go looking for one person, but what if this person was the creator and distributor of the software to make things secure?

On the third point: Uh, that is what I said...

Addressing your fourth point, HTTPS is a very expensive (CPU-wise) way of encrypting. That is one of the major reasons that not many people use it. Also it is expensive in the financial sense as you do need to buy a certificate. I don't think that all the webmasters can pay for it every year. Yes, you can make your own but users get a suspicious "This certificate is not valid and can be a malicious phishing site" warning, which will deter many users.

Again, I'm not trying to oppose you or the community, just trying to give a few points (also I like to debate too)

By the time I make this post I think there will be 10 posts between when I started typing

Edit:
@jwalker
Who is right?

Um, what's an FBI honeypot?

Well, think of those 14 years old girls who are in fact FBI agents trying to catch pedophiles. That's a honeypot. It attracts bees so you can catch them easier.