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Reticulum: Anarchic Networking For The Apocalypse
By GingerNigger ·
The Internet is the most resilient network on the planet, allowing us to connect across different continents and access endless amounts of information. You may have heard that due to its decentralized nature, no single company controls the internet. But in reality, This is merely a myth. A handful of Tier 1 ISPs (Internet Service Providers) control the Backbone of the Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone This is unavoidable since the Internet requires a hierarchical structure for IP (Internet Protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol if you wanted to avoid scaling problems.
Imagine you have Network A (192.168.0.0) and inside Network A you have Router A (192.168.0.1), Computer A1 (192.168.0.2) and Computer A2 (192.168.0.3). But there's another - Network B (192.168.1.0) which contains Router B (192.168.1.1) and Computer B (192.168.1.2).
If Computer A1 wants to talk to Computer A2 all it has to do is send the packet to Router A then the router forwards it to Computer A2. This is the route: Computer A1 -> Router A -> Computer A2. This is how your LAN (Local Area Network) works.
If Computer A1 wants to talk to Computer B, it needs to travel across different networks (Network A to Network B) since the router cannot see Computer B in Network A, it broadcasts to all other routers until it finds a router with the IP address 192.168.1.* prefix. It eventually finds Router B with the IP address 192.168.1.1 and sends the data to Router B, which finally forwards the data to Computer B since it is in the same network. This is the route: Computer A1 -> Router A -> Router B -> Computer B. This is how the Internet works, just on a much larger scale. You can see how Router A and Router B are on a lower-level network in the whole tree and are connected together, otherwise they couldn't connect to each other. If you keep travelling down the tree you eventually end up at the bottom with the Tier 1 providers.
Why is this such a problem? Isn't it a more managable and scalable way to organize networks? Well the problem is that Tier 1 providers have an enormous amount of control and is directly controlled by the Government. Here are some facts:
New Zealand Launched Mass Surveillance Project While Publicly Denying It
Top secret documents provided by the whistleblower demonstrate that the GCSB, with ongoing NSA cooperation, implemented Phase I of the mass surveillance program code-named “Speargun” at some point in 2012 or early 2013. “Speargun” involved the covert installation of “cable access” equipment, which appears to refer to surveillance of the country’s main undersea cable link, the Southern Cross cable. This cable carries the vast majority of internet traffic between New Zealand and the rest of the world, and mass collection from it would mark the greatest expansion of GCSB spying activities in decades.
Upstream collection is a term used by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States for intercepting telephone and Internet traffic from the Internet backbone, meaning major Internet cables and switches, both domestic and foreign. Besides the Upstream collection, NSA also gathers information from Internet communications through arrangements with Internet companies under the program codenamed PRISM. Both the Upstream programs and PRISM are part of the Special Source Operations (SSO) division, which is responsible for collection in cooperation with corporate partners.
BT and Vodafone among telecoms companies passing details to GCHQ
BT, Vodafone Cable, and the American firm Verizon Business – together with four other smaller providers – have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. The cables carry much of the world's phone calls and internet traffic.
_On a sidenote, I've always hated that privacy ecelebs start off the justification for privacy with "protecting against the greedy corpos trying to shove le heckin' ads in your face!" instead of "Every single government in the world collude together to surveil you and actively trace every single thing you send over the internet to find out if you're a dissenter"._
So how can we fix this?
Introducing Reticulum: The Savior of Networking
Reticulum is a cryptographic mesh networking stack, created by a single dev (markqvist), built for making unstoppable networks that can freely disassociate or associate with each other (just like muh heckin' hoppean covenant communities!!) in complete anonymity. It does this by not using source addresses, using per-packet encryption and using destination hashes with announces. Basically, it’s built for the apocalypse.
The way it transports packets is completely different than TCP/IP (The networking stack used by the Internet combining TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP). It periodically makes announces to every device in the network and sends the node's (a computer participating in the network) public encryption keys because every single packet in the network is encrypted (giga). Encryption is directly built into the networking stack, you cannot receive a single unencrypted packet in Reticulum.
It can be used on literally every single interface (a specific type of communication medium used to send and receive Reticulum packets) that exists from radio (Packet Radio, HF Radio, LoRa) to overlay networks (Yggdrasil, I2P, Tor (with a custom interface) ), to the Internet itself (TCP/IP, Pure Ethernet, Pure WiFi) and a custom interface for any interface type not currently supported or for hardware you created yourself. If it can flip 1s and 0s, it can become an interface. All different types of interfaces can communicate with each other despite being entirely different from each other and not normally being compatible directly. So if you are connecting to a Reticulum node using a LoRa interface and that same Node is also using a TCP Interface to connect to the Reticulum network on the Internet, you can directly connect to people on the Internet Reticulum network just with your LoRa device. You effectively have created a Internet <---> LoRa bridge. _Just imagine the possibilities with intergalactic space communication networks_.
Finally, it lets you create sovereign networks that can be as private as you want, similar to hoppean covenant communities and you can choose to create or destroy a link to any network you want - providing all networks connected to each other, the ability to communicate with each other no matter where they are located or arranged. You do not even have to connect to the global Distributed Backbone. You can keep your network private. The ability to create groups on the same interfaces to segragate virtual networks just like Network A or Network B in the previous TCP/IP example.
Protocols and Applications
There are already quite a few protocols developed for Reticulum. The most useful protocols developed right now are LXMF (the Lightweight Extensible Messaging Format) for messaging people and LXST (the Lightweight Extensible Signal Transport) a streaming format for calls and media streaming.
As for applications, there are 3 LXMF clients that are popular in the Reticulum space. Sideband (mobile client), Meshchat (A desktop LXMF client built with electron) and NomadNet (A terminal LXMF client and browser for NomadNet nodes that can host content with Micron).
NomadNet
Aside from being just another LXMF clients which let you communicate with people, you can setup NomadNet nodes for hosting content using its special markup language Micron. NomadNet nodes can also send LXMF messages with each other normally. This is the web alternative for Micron right now.
Further Reading
- Reticulum Network website
- The Reticulum Network and How it Works
- Reticulum Network: How it Works and Why it’s SO GOOD (YouTube)
- Programs Using Reticulum
- Mark's Blog