[freehaven-dev] Review: WShAnon, Berkeley '00

[Michael J Freedman <mfreed@MIT.EDU>]

So I just returned from the Berkeley workshop, and I thought I write
some notes/comments/minutia/etc about the conference.

First of all, Roger's talk went really well.  Although we made it fairly
clear it was still a mostly-design project, and the somewhat-
implementation we have yet is to be scrapped while we keep working on
design, the design/project seemed to have been greeted fairly well.  Our
attempts to look for stronger anonymity were acknowledged, a lot of the
people brought up the same questions/concerns/doubts about Freenet (who
presented before us) that we have had.

Roger and I talked to a number of people, including Andreas Pfitzman (of
ZKPs, theory, mix cascades fame) and Paul Syverson (onion routing).  We
also spoke a bit with Stuart Stubblebine (onion routing, VP CertCo),
David Chaum (no intro necessary), and Hannes Federrath (web mixes).

Beyond the more theoretical people, we talked a bit with John Borking,
who is the VP of the Dutch Data Protection Authority, about European
legal efforts towards privacy, as well as possible legalities that might
be involved with such an effort.  An MIT Alum now at Compaq research,
Mark Lillibridge, expressed a lot of interest and generally seemed
/very/ excited about this project and the whole realm.  Jim McCoy is at
Autonomous Zone Technologies developing Mojo Nation (supposedly released
tomorrow at DefCon under LGPL), which does distributed storage/CPU/
bandwidth sharing via micropayments (at least, that's the idea.)
Lastly, we spoke with two businessmen from Daewoo (one of the huge
conglomerates that helps run Korea) who were at the conference, and they
started mumbling about commercial opportunities and how we can use
funding, but there was a large language barrier.  I have contact
information for all these people.

Third, I think we definately gained some ideas from the conference,
both in the modeling/ideal world sense (Roger should have more ideas
about "Ted and his transcripts") and some more practical design and
considerations.

I will hopefully be finishing a draft paper for a redesign of the
trading/accountability/trust system sometime this weekend.  It still
might have some glaring holes I'm overlooking in my current red-eye
flight state, so I'll be asking for feedback once that's done.

With that in mind, I'll also be working on adding more information to
the web page (this weekend?), as well as a "working drafts" section to
our _Papers_ page, which probably should also include our drafts like
model.tex and other equation-writing and ideas.

There are a few more upcoming things which should be handled soon after
the web site gets updated:

   - go public to mailing lists for comments:
             - freenet/gnutella
             - cypherpunks
             - cryptography@c2.net, eternity, etc.

   - be availabile to answer questions

   - be ready for people offering help (I have one or two 
     who have expressed interest already)

   - I suggest creation of new @freehaven.net mailing lists:

        dev@freehaven.net  (new list:  for implementation) 
       tech@freehaven.net  (non-implementation discussion, 
                            alias for freehaven-dev@seul.org)

Last notes about conference:

Hannes and Andreas are contacting Springer-Verlag to get the
Proceedings of this conference in the LNCS series.  If so, we 
can submit an editted version.  I think Roger has some ideas
for the beginning "theory" areas.  A friend at ZKS also
suggested that our Scientology reference can be construed
as libel - something to consider if we can resubmit.

The Info Hiding Workshop is being held in Pittsburgh, PA
in April, 2001.  Papers due Dec 7, 2000 (? this is from
memory), and they explicitly mention anonymous communications
and systems as an area of interest.  The next WShAnon should
be held is approx 1.5 years.

That's my summation for now.  After this week, I'm excited to
start working again...

--mike



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"Not all those who wander are lost."                  mfreed@mit.edu