CheshireNet Manifest
The network without medium is like a smile without a cat.
Have you noticed than revolution made by Tim Berners-Lee have somehow reversed revolution made by Gutenberg? In the world of printed books each text exists in thousand copies, and no one is able to silence a word, once word have been printed and copies sold. Even most oppressive governments were unable to collect and burn all the copies of most hated books.
Moreover, in the pre-Web world everyone kept a copy of some Encyclopedia in his home library. and every town run a local library. So, if for some reason communication with entire world was lost, there were sources of information which can help to solve a problem.
So, we want to build an offline web - an information-exchange network, where each node keeps a local copy of information which is synchronized with other node each time a possibility arises. Sounds much like good old Usenet or FIDO? Yes. These things were invented when communication links were weak and no one would rely on immediate availability of a link to other end of world.
But Usenet was invented when computers were big and unmovable. And there were few of them, so each system administrator was able to maintain his own UUCP maps of the world.
Now, if two friends meet in the pub, both probably have something with few gigabytes of storage and high-bandwidth Wi-Fi interface in the pocket. So, while people exchange tidings by the world of mouth, their smartphones or tablets can exchange much more information using ad-hoc wi-fi network.
So, there are millions of computers which can be potentially members of this network, and no one could account for all of them. So we should be prepared to synchronize our news spools with a stranger.
One consequence of this is that messages are passed through number of untrusted nodes. So, each message is protected by digital signature to ensure that in was not changed in the way.
Of course, if internet is available, we would use it for synchronization. It is also planned to utilize torrent-like protocol to speed-up synchronization if more than two nodes can see each other.
- Every body has full control of the node one owns. This makes it different for example from FreeNet. Every node is allowed to filter all information it receives and keep only what he wants to keep.
- Each message is protected by digital signature to prevent tampering.
- Each signature key represents itself only. We would use some algorithmic way to derive memorizable nicknames and/or userpics from the key fingerprint.