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Shadow Internet

An alternative communication infrastructure working phone to phone.

Shadow Internet is an alternative communication infrastructure developed by researchers at Technical University Delft that enables people to distribute videos by copying them from phone to phone wirelessly. So even without an Internet connection you can share content. Specifically crafted to be resilient.

Shadow Internet is an innovative and robust communication solution running on smart phones which ensures people are able to share information with each other under any circumstance, without being reliant on third party services and the availability of infrastructure. This will allow normal end users to view and share content with their friends, relatives and the rest of their environment.

The Shadow Internet is an alternative communication infrastructure. Under active development for several years, it's specifically crafted to be resilient to sniffing, blocking, filtering and shutdown. A place for free expression and innovation. Censorship is a key threat to The Internet, with the Shadow Internet we will protect you.

Android-based smartphones, the TOR protocol, Bittorrent and a novel reputation system form the technical foundations of this project.

For the past years dozens of scientists and engineers have worked hard to realize their vision: full privacy protection using the TOR-inspired hidden services.

The project is specifically targeted for recording and spreading of protest videos. Work on easy-to-use cryptography for protecting content on your phone and masquerading it as innocent content is ongoing. The Shadow Internet ensures people no longer are reliant on surveillance-prone commercial websites to view and share content with friends.

Many smartphones have data limits and these deter people from uploading video files. The appliation should let you share content with friends simply by holding your phones against each other.

A survey of robust and resilient social media tools is available in this paper by Paul Brussee and Johan Pouwelse

The project is developed at Parallel and Distributed Systems at the Technical University Delft.