http://tinyurl.com/7088

The Six/Four System is peer-to-peer technology that makes it possible to carry out almost any Internet activity securely and—more importantly, for all sorts of reasons—anonymously. The Hactivismo system, or anything based on it, just may become the Internet's next killer app.

Many who will be affected by Six/Four might use the term "killer" in another sense of the word—from record industry executives fearing a file sharing network where they can't see who's sharing what, to law enforcement personnel tracking illegal activity, to oppressive governments attempting to filter information to its citizens.

This last is the reason that Hacktivismo created Six/Four. An offshoot of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group, Hactivismo is dedicated to preventing state-sponsored censorship of the Internet. It created the Six/Four System, which is named for the June 4, 1989, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, to make it possible to access information anywhere on the Internet and put a big hole in things like China's Internet firewall.

eWEEK Labs evaluated a beta version of the developers edition of the Six/Four System, which became available this week, and found that Hactivismo hasn't quite achieved its goals. The peer-to-peer network, which relies on many node clients with some trusted peers that handle routing, is understandably very small right now. Also, the Six/Four System's capabilities are very raw.

The main application in the beta we tested was the Web proxy. Once we set up Six/Four on a Red Hat Linux system, we were able to define our local host as a proxy in our browser, then use the Six/Four network to anonymously go to Web sites. The process worked much like the old SafeWeb site.

This will be useful to those who want or, due to restrictive governments or ISPs, need to surf anonymously. However, in its current beta form, Six/Four will likely be too difficult for novices to install and use effectively.