andrel wrote:
> - IP owners try to restrict the use of any technology that *could* be 
> used to transmit content that they own.
> 
> This seems to be the major motivation of this paper. 

I think that's one motivation. The other, of course, is being executed 
for what you write online. :-)

> - The internet is used for SPAM, viruses, trojans, identity theft etc.
> 
> No mention of that as far as I can see, apart from his reassurance that 
> it has been taken care of. But I don't see any substantiation of that.

I think he means that you won't be able to send anonymous spam through 
the system onto the general internet. Nobody is going to be using this 
to threaten political figures via email without getting identified, 
because nothing that's anonymous will actually go onto the non-anonymous 
internet without someone specifically approving it.

> - Content on the internet may contain child porn, attack plans from 
> terrorist groups and other things that any government wants to block.

My search of the document revealed none of the words "child" nor 
"terror" nor "government". I'm not sure where in the document you saw that.

> - Content on the internet may contain information that some governments 
> might want to block.
> 
> Claimed to be solved by this protocol, however page 19: '(remember, it 
> is not a secret that you are connected to the anonymous network, only 
> who you are communicating with on this network, and what you are 
> communicating!). Unless this protocol is used in a myriad of other ways, 
> if you live in a country that restricts the internet to sites that they 
> agree with, being connected to this network will be a problem. Besides 
> you can be pretty sure that cross border anonymous communication will be 
> impossible too.

Near the end of the paper, he recommends that it run over the normal SSL 
mechanisms on the normal 443 port number, to make it difficult or 
impossible to distinguish this traffic from normal e-commerce type 
traffic, and to make it financially difficult to filter it out 
automatically.

> - Companies try to restrict bandwidth use by restricting traffic to work 
> related activities.
> 
> This is an on going problem. I think companies have a point if the block 
> e.g. youtube. If you can use another protocol to circumvent that at the 
> extra expense of a bit more overhead, I would not be happy as a company.

Except that youtube would have to explicitly serve their content onto 
the anonymous network. Not that they couldn't, but if you're going to 
have an anonymous protocol at all, this is exactly the sort of thing you 
can't stop - some particular group of people getting to particular stuff.

> There is also the related problem of leaking of IP (trade secrets) and 
> privacy information. The firewall of my hospital is already leaky 
> enough, I don't need another tunnel, thank you very much.

You already have one. SSL is a killer in this regard. That fight was 
lost 15 years ago, as soon as people started tunneling inappropriate 
content over HTTP explicitly to bypass firewalls. Why do you think Java 
.code files get served as application/octet-string instead of something 
that actually says it's Java?

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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