Subj : transparent proxy for .onion connections
To   : Alterego
From : Oli
Date : Wed Nov 27 2019 12:34 pm

On Mon, 25 Nov 2019 11:18:19 +1100
"Alterego -> Oli" <0@116.2.21> wrote:

 Ol>> useful or abuseful ...

 A> Well, I think useful - and I'm taking the glass half full approach.

 A> If the "operator" was abuseful, would you still want to be part of
 A> the network?

I'm always thinking 90s Fidonet scale, ten thousands of nodes/points. And yes,
people wanted to be part of it even if there were a lot of coordinators that
were abusing their power.

 A> I dont think it is any different to somebody twitlisting you out, or
 A> even more, firewalling you out.

Somebody blocking me is different than getting kicked out of the VPN.

 A> This is not a public service, its a hobby with hobbiests. If the main
 A> hunchperson has morals that you dont agree with, then I'd figure you
 A> wouldnt want to be part of the group anyway...

Again I'm not thinking benevolent dictator style (e.g. fsxnet), but networks
that were meant to be decentralized (e.g. Fidonet). I know many disagree, but
in my understanding Fidonet is a public network, like the networks around SMTP,
 XMPP, HTTP are not controlled by anyone and the public part of does not depend
 on VPNs for encryption or access.

 A> Anyway, the glass half full approach, to me it means it becomes a
 A> network of known (trusted?) individuals (you apply, your application
 A> is accepted, you are authorised to connect to the network), and by
 A> definition "strangers" are out. (Strangers being script kiddies who
 A> take fun out of denial of sevices and other activities to bring down
 A> a service.)

I'm not saying that you never should do that, but it shouldn't be part of
Fidonet technology. If you want to participate in a closed network that is fine
 and it has it's advantages, but this model is not a solution for encryption in
 an open FTN.

 Ol>> this project which uses ztaddr and nwid directly to connect to
 Ol>> nodes:
 Ol>> https://nanomsg.github.io/nng/man/tip/nng_zerotier.7#_uri_format

 A> Now this looks interesting - it looks like coms outside of the IP
 A> stack. I wouldnt mind having a play with this - but it'll be a while
 A> before I can think about looking at this - and I'd have some learning
 A> to do.

AFAIK it uses some modified libzerotiercore and it's nothing we could use
directly. IN theory it looks like it would be possible to use these zerotier
addresses directly, but somebody would have to write code for binkp or a socks5
 proxy.

---
 * Origin:  (21:1/151)

.