Darknet

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This article is about private file sharing networks. For machines or clusters of machines unreachable by other computers on the internet, see Dark internet. For website content not indexed by search engines, see Deep web.

A Darknet is a private virtual network where users only connect to people they trust. Typically such networks are small, often with fewer than 10 users each. In its most general meaning, a Darknet can be any type closed, private group of people communicating, but the name is most often used specifically for file sharing networks.

The term originated from The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution, a 2002 article by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman, four employees of Microsoft. They argued that the presence of the darknet was the major hindrance to the development of workable DRM technologies. This term has since seen usage in major media sources, including Rolling Stone, The Economist, and Wired magazine, and it is also the title of a book by J.D. Lasica.

When used to describe a file sharing network, the term is synonymous with the perhaps more widely used "friend-to-friend" - both describing networks where users' computers share files only with trusted friends. The most widespread file sharing networks like Kazaa, and even heavily encrypted networks like Freenet, are not darknets since peers will communicate with anybody else on the network. The perhaps most widely used darknet software is Nullsoft's WASTE. The developers of Freenet have stated that they are working on a new version that will be a darknet, which unlike typical Darknets, will be capable of supporting potentially millions of users using an application of small world theory.

Early versions of Apple's iTunes allowed users to specify the IP of a remote subnet and share their music with users in that subnet in a Darknet like fashion. Newer versions disable that functionality, but still allow users to stream music within their own subnet; hacks such as ourTunes allow users on the same iTunes network to download each others' music with no loss of quality.

The video game mentioned an interesting concept for a wireless Darknet that used non-standard frequencies, possibly illegal unlicensed ones, to make it very difficult for any signal to be intercepted. With sophisticated hardware and use of spread-spectrum random frequency hopping over a large frequency band of, say, 900MHz to 10 or even 50GHz, this could be a very effective method of security, and indeed is similar to the random frequency hopping that is used by military radios to make signal interception very difficult. Note that this, in and of itself, is pure fiction as this method would only serve to make presence of the communication very obvious.

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Darknet

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