SYNDIE – ANONYMER BLOG & ANONYMES FORUM

English description:

Syndie is a free software cross-platform computer application to syndicate data over a variety of anonymous and non-anonymous computer networks. SYNDIE is e.g. an anonymous Blog- and Web-Board-Service based on I2P2.de. A decentralized forum: While many different groups often want to organize discussions into an online forum, the centralized nature of traditional forums (websites, BBSes, etc) can be a problem. For instance, the site hosting the forum can be taken offline through denial of service attacks or administrative action. In addition, the single host offers a simple point to monitor the group's activity, so that even if a forum is pseudonymous, those pseudonyms can be tied to the IP that posted or read individual messages.

In addition, not only are the forums decentralized, they are organized in an ad-hoc manner yet fully compatible with other organization techniques. This means that some small group of people can run their forum using one technique (distributing the messages by pasting them on a wiki site), another can run their forum using another technique (posting their messages in a distributed hashtable like OpenDHT, yet if one person is aware of both techniques, they can synchronize the two forums together. This lets the people who were only aware of the wiki site talk to people who were only aware of the OpenDHT service without knowing anything about each other. Extended further, Syndie allows individual cells to control their own exposure while communicating across the whole organization.

I2P (originally short for Invisible Internet Project, though it is not commonly referred to by this name anymore) is a free software project building an anonymous network (or, more accurately, a pseudonymitous overlay network). The network is a simple layer that applications can use to anonymously and securely send messages to each other. Possible uses include anonymous surfing, chatting, blogging and file transfers.

The developers emphasize that there are likely to be bugs in the software and there has been insufficient peer review to date; thus those seeking strong anonymity should look elsewhere.

The network itself is strictly message-based (like IP), but there is a library available to allow reliable streaming communication on top of it (similar to TCP, although from version 0.6 there is a new UDP-based SSU transport). All communication is end-to-end encrypted (in total there are four layers of encryption used when sending a message), and even the end points ("destinations") are cryptographic identifiers (essentially a pair of public keys).

Although many of the developers had been a part of the IIP and Freenet communities, there are significant differences between their designs and concepts. IIP was an anonymous centralized IRC server, Freenet is a censorship-resistant distributed data store, but I2P is an anonymous peer-to-peer distributed communication layer designed to run any traditional internet service (e.g. Usenet, E-mail, IRC, file sharing, Web hosting and HTTP, Telnet), as well as more traditional distributed applications (e.g. a distributed data store, a web proxy network using Squid cache, and DNS).