[liberationtech] state of TeleHash

[carlo von lynX]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 09:41:40AM -0500, Doc Searls wrote:
> http://telehash.org

TeleHash = JSON + UDP + DHT.

That sounds simple & brilliant, yet too simple for many applications. This
equation is neither considering protection of the social graph (onion routing
is missing and the currently popular Tor solution doesn't work with UDP) and,
what's even harder to solve, the scalability, that large scale social
applications need.

Telehash doesn't provide distribution trees, so it only works as well as
round-robin transmission works, which can be okay if it were just UDP in an F2F
style, but this cuts out social transaction data protection. Or you try to fix
that, but then you can no longer use "just" UDP and a round-robin approach. You
need to use something like Tor which is a lot heavier than just UDP and will
not scale for the one-to-many distribution use case, let alone many-to-many.

Also, the single parts of the equation could be improved. GNUnet's GNS could be
used instead of a regular DHT, so you get to have query anonymity, reasonable
consistency, a censorship resistance strategy and more. A generic lower layer
transport system that runs well over all sorts of NAT and mesh, even bluetooth,
could make sense rather than just UDP. A more efficient syntax than JSON, like
for example PSYC.

The original planning for TeleHash didn't include any encryption at all, so
that was very simple. Now that encryption does need to be wrapped around the
UDP packets and a public key infrastructure does need to be deployed, the
question of cryptographic discovery comes up, just like for any other of the
crypto and darknet platforms.

Maybe it's better to go for a platform that was designed with all of these
aspects in mind from the start. There is a reason why so-called darknet
platforms, or we could call them public-key-based routing systems according to
#youbroketheinternet, are not so simple. TeleHash shouldn't be too simple to
actually serve a job for privacy, either.

Retrieved from "http://about.psyc.eu/TeleHash"
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> Doesn't (and shouldn't) cover everything, but it comes from good motivations and hackers.

Can you point me to some free software releases that
came with evil motivations? Would love to try some of that..  :)