Distributed browsing

[aevl]

There is a lot of discussion on the issue of privacy and internet blocking.

Most of the solutions are based on using a proxy or VPN to access restricted websites.

While thinking about p2p I had an idea to use this concept to bypass website blocking. It is an idea however, it needs clever people to make the idea work (and I am not so clever...)

The concept is as follows:

Instead of using p2p for file sharing, use it for website sharing.
Suppose 100 persons are using this program to visit website X. The data (html/java etc) is distributed among all these persons, each has some of the data on his/her computer and others are getting it from various places to construct the website X again. After some time all data is distributed and the original website can be removed because the data from the site is available from several sources - the same as with p2p file sharing.

What this implicates is that the original website X is only used as a kind of seed. After a while the website is distributed and is not located on one server anymore but instead on thousands of computers that are interested in this website.

Of course this is only an idea and perhaps it is already implemented. There are several issues that should also be implemented like:
- data protection to avoid tampering with the original site contents
- comparing the data with the original site (when available) to make sure the data is up to date

So when you enter an URL in the address-field of this program it will first check to see if the site is already on some of the other computers in the p2p network. If it is it will start downloading from the other p2p sources and check with the original site if the data is still up to date. If not it will download from the original site and flag the data that is in the p2p network as old. When it can't reach the original site then it displays the data from the p2p network together with a message that the data might be outdated.

It is just an idea but it might be a solution to bypass internet restrictions in some countries.

[mountain_rage]

It already exists, look up Freenet. http://freenetproject.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet, the beauty is that it also encrypts and obfuscates the source of the original data making it anonymous as well. The big limitation at this point is the user count and internet speeds. But if enough people were to use it, it would mean fully anonymous internet. In its current form there are fears that if law enforcement or copyright holders place enough peers in the cloud, they might be able to identify your IP.

[aevl]

I already expected something like this should already exist but didn't know where to find it.

I gave it a try but discovered that at this stage it is far from perfect. The following points need to be improved before it gets used by the main majority of internet users:
- You can not enter an url the same way as in any browser
- There is a list of url's but that is far from perfect and adding one is rather complicated
- The url's that are available are mainly on anonymity, security and porn
- The program is complicated to use for the average user

In my opinion the interface should be much more transparent - the looks and feel should be comparable with any browser or it should be implemented as a plugin for for instance Firefox.

Anyway, I am glad that there are efforts to make something that is based on p2p. As soon as it starts to get more usable I will certainly use it.