Download this Free Beta!

    Actually, it ain't quite ready yet. It hasn't been, uh, written yet.
I just wanted to mention it in case anybody wanted to volunteer to crank out some code!
 
We'll be swinging Java, because hardly anybody's got around to hating that one yet.
I'm set up for ms J++1.1, with AFC and the SDK2.0; get in touch to resolve version conflicts.
Redmond will probably be glad to set you up as a Site Builder, for putting an IE logo on a page.
Once in the SBN, you can download J++ trial (21 MB) and the SDK (25 MB).
No charge nor any particular further obligation is incurred;
just tell ms how to make it work better, should that illumination be yours.
It seems best to synchronize versions in the beginning,
before crunching out a bunch of code that won't work with the project.

 
What the project is:
A multihoming networked heuristic AI, with storage and bandwidth optimizing,
to channelize collective resources nontransactionally,
forming the commonwealth of anarchist people,
designed to replace the economic system at the opportune time.
 
The strength of this AI is in its decentralization.
Control functions are spread throughout the nodes in the network.
Therefore, the system is functional with only a fraction of its nodes on line at any given time.
Obviously, we will have some probability that required data will be unavailable at a given moment.
As programmers, we will have to deal with this probabilistic approach to data access.
Full redundancy storage may be assigned to recently-installed nodes,
and to nodes at sites with low connect time.
Full redundancy for the entire system storage is impractical,
because that would be, you know, redundant.
Error-recovery coding can be used to work around much of the storage problem of off-line nodes.
 
What we have is a lot of nodes, each node installed and resident on someone's PC.
These people have voluntarily installed the core software package,
and have agreed that some of their disk storage and some of their bandwidth
can be used by the cell node installation to talk to other cells.
Each participant's understanding is that the system is evolutionary,
that as the system gets "smarter" it makes their computer smarter.
They understand that the resources of the commonwealth increasing
will directly increase their effective wealth,
though thinking in such transactional terms should be discouraged.
 
Lots of good anarchists are Luddites, opposed in principle to computers and high tech.
We won't have to worry about those doctrinaires.
They won't ever hear about us anyway, until the project is well advanced and unstoppable.
We will have to deal with government spies, provocateurs, ringers and saboteurs.
System security will be designed to deal with a "one-node-compromised" assumption.
We will assume that at any given time, one of our nodes is malicious,
that is, it's running as a simulation in some basement room at NSA.
Nodes will have to be aware of data-request patterns involving sensitive data tags,
which emenate from a single node in a short period of time.
The suspect compromised node is queried, and its data-rate throttled,
as a first precaution to minimize system damage.
Should the system determine the node is compromised, it is ordered to suicide,
and permanently cut off from the network.
 

Each node is a client-server node. No node, even if it is only a stupid robot, is only a client.

More on security concerns:
Administrative nodes include network monitoring features.
These features are bound to a machine certificate (X.509) and must be reinstalled if the certificate
becomes void, as by a system rebuild.
Frist, of course, the certificate must be re-issued.
These precautions are to ensure that some little gnome in Bethesda, or Redmond, or Zurich,
doesn't volunteer to anonymously assist us in administering our anarchist network.
Administration traffic is by secure-sockets layer, SSL3.
The primary perspective of the administration console is a 4-d model of actual network traffic.
Active connections are shown as vectors,
on which are superposed color-coded curves graphing packet delivery.
Hey, you say, that can't be done in TCP,
that kind of traffic data is hard to come by unless you run the router.
Let's bump up a topic and study some of our networking options.

Networking Options:
We can stay within the Internet protocols, with much of our traffic secured by SSL.
This leaves us with lots and lots of wheels already invented.
It's secure, and we don't have to struggle with making a connection.
Each user has already established a connection through his/her ISP, and has Internet access.
That's obviously how to start out.
Most commodity ISP's, like AOL, etc. who had trouble with SSL or networked execution,
are struggling to reconfigure their firewalls to adapt to these high-demand services.
For users behind more rigorous firewalls, or noncompliant ISP's,
well, we would just have to give those users up,
until they could come up with more direct Internet access.
 

I would like to raise a few longer-term networking issues here, though...
We could get a toll-free number, where these are available.
In this way, we could become the primary ISP for our members.
There are money costs involved in operating "toll-free" lines, which are unavoidable.
If the established members are sharing enough,
this approach should make internet services available to the poor at no charge,
if they have the hardware: computer, modem, and active phone line.
The really poor don't have this hardware, which is another issue.
Overall, this step enables one further divorcement from the accursed money economy:
the monthly bill from the ISP goes away.
If we can do this, it also helps security.
Our own network traffic is completely apart from the Internet protocols, ports, and routing.
Therefore, any snooping done on us would have to be specifically targeted at us,
not a part of any wider Internet snooping project.
This cuts off the amateur hackers, because nobody could see or access our net,
without actually tapping the phone connections.
This means, in the government case, that a snooping project on us would have to be separately funded.
Furthermore, it wouldn't be legally done without a warrant from a judge.
In my humble opinion, government would take these steps in our case.
They know who's bad.
When they do, they will only be able to tell these few things:

1. The presence or absence of traffic (they can't break our codes).
2. That an individual computer comprises a node in the net.
3. Should they be operating a compromised trusted node,
   and so have some codes to read some traffic,
   they will find no evidence of criminality to prosecute. (See Legal.)
   

The final step: Secure Links
Ultimately, we should get our network traffic off the telephone system.
The telephone system wasn't designed to handle this, and doesn't do it very well.
We should strive for a cellular direct-link arrangement, with these parameters:
a cell is an area circumscribed by an effective optical horizon;
transport media within the cell are high-bandwidth line-of-sight channels,
like point-to-point microwave links, or aligned laser links.
For example, a station-keeping airship could contain a router-repeater for an anarchist community,
with a wide effective optical horizon, using laser split-beam modulation
for assured privacy and high bandwidth.
This configuration, wireless point-to-point links with or without concentration,
is preferred because it is persistent through the transition to statelessness.
When we don't have to worry about prisons, and soldiers, and debts,
and we don't have the bias of arbitrary authority restraining our thoughts,
we still want to talk to each other.

Fiber-optics drops to the door could also provide high-bandwidth enablement.
It's probably too late for the legal economy to provide the citizenry with such threshold technology.
Very likely, we shall have to implement this ourselves, after the death of business.
The quick and dirty way to do it would be to drift the clad fibers over the treetops,
from an airship. Stick a floater balloon where the fiber needs to be held up.
These suspensor balloons would trail a tube, through which their gas could be refilled.
 

Most power used in isolated locations could be generated locally,
from solar and wind energy sources.
Many times, the water needed is also locally obtainable.
Should airship transport replace ground transport as a standard,
rendering country roads superfluous,
then the only remaining physical connection would be that for signal.
As we have seen, there are numerous ways to channel signal to/from an isolated place.
By choosing a signal carrier which does not require a physical line laid,
communicating by beam,
we can achieve the ecological ideal of minimal environmental impact,
in isolated settlement.
Without roads and ditches and fences and pipes and poles,
we do not impede the ceaseless drifting of life through a region.
With attractive self-sufficient locales available for settlement,
we could disperse our population gradually out of the cities,
without causing mass death of wild creatures.

Legal Considerations.
Most people automatically think that any enterprise endorsed by anarchists
must automatically be illegal.
As it happens, that isn't necessarily true,
regardless of the observation that most law enforcement agencies also feel that way!
It doesn't help the situation that anarchists are so vehemently opposed to the law,
that they honestly don't care that the cops will break the law to get them.
That pessimistic analysis behind, let us examine the realistic prospects of our network enterprise,
vis-a-vis the legal aspect.
We must remain very blunt about organizing to keep the cops out.
We are networking to keep the police out of our business,
which doesn't sound very helpful for the ol' legal position.
Technically, though, we are well within our rights to do so,
and to form an association dedicated to that very purpose.
That's what the Blue Ribbon internet campaign is about, after all.
Privacy means keeping people from spying on you.
In today's world, the only real spies are the cops, working for the government.
You can make up stories about international spies, about corporate spies, about gangster spies,
or whatever. That's all fantasy.
The only real effective, organized spook agencies are those organized by the government
for espionage against its own citizens.
This problem is an order of magnitude more intense in our own liberal Western democracies
than it ever was in the most repressive of the totalitarian dictatorships of the 1940's:
the classical evil regimes of Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy,
Salazar in Portugal, Peron in Argentina, Franco in Spain, and a dozen more,
all together they could not muster as many secret police agents
as are working full time in the US right now. The UK is no better.
If you don't like the facts, keep working with the fictions.
 

Nevertheless, the legal guideline applicable to anarchists in political discussion
seems to run thus:
You may advocate the replacement of the system of government.
You are protected in your political expression of that advocacy,
until the point you are conspiring the particular use of force to remove the current government.
Beyond that point, you are in sedition, and the white hats have a carte blanche.
Our specifically economic networking venture falls well within the legal range.
We're OK, we're cool. The problem is...
The problem is, we are openly announcing our intention to set up channels
for secret communication.
We're within our rights to do so, and those secretly communicating on those channels
are also within their rights to do so.
The problem is that the spook agencies will make the presumption
that people talking on secret anarchist channels must be plotting the violent overthrow
of government. That's them. That's what they'll think.
The problem is that they might find a judge who thinks so too.
Judges are part of government. Government doesn't like anarchists.
The problem is, they might use such a case to expose some of our communications.
Or try to. We'll deal with that bridge when we're dealt it.
 

When worked into a charter, I think that should serve to keep the courts from breaking us up.
Assuming, of course, that they don't find any kind of criminal activity going on!
The mere fact that we are anarchists,
that each of us anticipates a future free of courts and cops and money,
is not enough to make us criminals under the present law system.
(Although, strangely enough, many of us are!)
We are free to associate with others of our peculiar belief structure.
By extension, we can form a cooperative buying club, or other lawful economic entity.
The fact that our buying club is composed all of people who don't believe in money,
should be received with amused tolerance by the body politic.
Our outlandish claim that everybody might want to join our network by and by,
hah -- well, that's nothing new, every multi-level marketing scam says that!
So I expect we're safe enough legally, as long as nobody talks about guns and bombs.