our darknet and its bright spots

This talk will give you the opportunity to take a look at the shades of grey of interconnecting hackerspaces and people's networks. Mc.Fly presents ChaosVPN, reborn in its darknet-ish approach and gaining momentum from established hackerspaces in the US and Europe with spaces like NYC Resistor, Pumping Station: One, Noisebridge and c-base. The Agora Network will be presented by Aestetix and Eric in covering the community and technical aspects and what to expect. Equinox will show you the white-ish side called dn42 - the old but nice lady that connects mostly german people and younger spaces like sublab and entropia.

Leveraging the efforts of the ChaosVPN network in the US is the Agora Network (Currently In Private Beta). By doing this we are not having to duplicate the efforts of every one involved we have settled on a standard platform utilising tincd. With hackerspaces popping up very rapidly and successfully in the US for the last 24 months we find this necessary. Agora is a mesh vpn service that serves to tie them all together on a common intranet. On the network people will be hosting machines for VMs, development, file hosting, PBX phone services, and a number of high performance clusters at the disposal of users which we are currently developing including those provided by node users. In the process several universities in the US have asked to join the network for several research opportunities not previously available to them.

dn42 is built with tunnels (OpenVPN, GRE, tinc, etc) and has BGP running over them - the same dynamic routing protocol the internet runs on, albeit with less networks in the routing table. We will shed some light on both the technical and social aspects of dn42. Our walk starts at technical foundations and heads over to what BGP allows us to do on a social level. We'll also see how the flow of traffic can be engineered according to external constraints (think your plain asymmetric DSL at home), and last but not least we'll discuss different cases of maliciousness and how they're treated. While dn42 is our playground for testing and modelling all this stuff, most of it apples to the internet as well.

This talk is somewhere around entry to immediate level. You should roughly know what an IP subnet, a route and dynamic routing is.