Pirate Software, week 5: i2p

The idea of a private, completely anonymous internet guarded with strong encryption and re-routing of messages seems to be from at least mid 1988. Two fascinating reads are The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and A Cypherpunk's Manifesto. If you hesitated just a millisecond before you clicked on these links, then you know the reason these ideas still exist! Because today government agencies, companies and military organizations across the planet are monitoring what we all do on the net. The words "crypto", "anarchist" and "manifesto" surely attracts some search queries. Is that desirable? Does it feel good to drop into a bucket labeled "suspicious" just because you're curious about cryptography?

Many people think not, and some even try to do something about it. One of the best efforts out there is ip2, also known a Invisible Internet Protocol. It is completely open source and very actively developed by a large bunch of people. (As a side note, one of the developers went under the name of jrandom, but he (or she, who knows) mysteriously left the project in 2008 and has not come back. There are other similar mysteries if you know where to look.)

Anyway, ip2 is very simple to install, very simple to upgrade (being developer myself I must say it is exceptionally well done), and just works. There are lots of services built on top of i2p:

• Web browsing
• BitTorrent
• Chat
• Email

Some of these services are completely hidden inside i2p, so if you use an i2p chat, then the messages never leaves the encrypted network. As such it is as private and anonymous as you can ever get. i2p uses strong encryption and p2p networking, technology that is threatening to many, and if our societies goes completely to hell it is likely i2p will be banned. So, we'd better start using it now!