Part one, of perhaps Many.

Modern American culture is entirely dependent on a common disregard for copyright law. Proving the morality of such or the truth of such is far from the point of this article, however. This is about how to lock in such culture: to prevent society from being dragged back into the stone ages from before it was so.

What America, and the World, needs here is an easy to use, yet secure filesharing network. For that, you need a secure backbone. And that’s what this document intends to create.

First, some definitions. Easy means that it needs to be simple enough that anyone who could use previous filesharing networks can use this one. Secure means that it will be hard for the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, or any other organization that would prevent said sharing to discover who is talking to who, and what they are saying, or more importantly, make it hard to prove such.

Next, some limitations: This project cannot keep the such forces out. Part of the idea is to make the framework robust and resilient to such intrusion. However, we can make it hard to do something stupid and get yourself discovered.

Basic idea: The Network, codenamed for the moment DUMPNET (After Justin Frankel’s WASTE, Tag: The DUMP, where WASTE goes next), will be composed of several distinct parts.

1) The DUMPTRUNK. This is simply a darknet “Trunk” based upon the ideas of a web of trust with anonymity within. Each user will run a DUMPTRUNK node, which knows very little about it’s surroundings but has a lot of logic for the packets going through it. Unfortunately, despite it’s name, it’s not a big truck: It’s a series of tubes.

2) The DUMPSTER. Named for Napster, the start of the revolution, the DUMPSTER is a protocol for caching file lists and searching. Again, this is based on a web of trust, but still anonymous: The trusted server knows only the Public key of the users, not their actual identity. The Server also hosts no files itself, it simply tells people who to request from.

3) The DUMPFTP. A simple file transfer protocol, based on the DUMPTRUNK. Routes using an ant-logic algorithm, built into the DUMPTRUNK, that sets up TCP-like connections.

Each user would have separate keysets for each app, “listening” for packets aimed at it’s public key.