The monkeynet project has the following advisory commitee:
Noon founded Monkeynet after realising that the traditonal Internet was not working for him. You can find out more about Noon on his personal site: lets.coozi.com.au. Noon also runs a site, Box of Good Feelings!, where you can buy a box of good feelings (and other types of feelings) for your friends and family! Over half of the profit of the box sales goes to charity.
Silky believes that monkeynet will pave the way for a new, environmentally-focused, global communications system.
Drazen is the chief writer at BeastorBuddha and CEO of a successful research and consulting business. With over 18 years industry experience, he's seen many global industry collaborative projects come and go. He believes MonkeyNet is founded upon more solid foundations and potential for success. So much so, he has put his support behind the project to be a founding partner.
"Everyone’s thinking green... maybe we need to think yellow!"
Miguel is a Physicist and researcher of interesting language topics and problems. He has provided many valuable ideas to the monkeynet project, but he doesn't have a personal site at the moment. He should.
Nini is responsible for the consideration of the monkeys' needs and behaviour in current business plans. Her experience with young people enables her to predict, with an 85% success rate, the monkeys' actions in new situations.
Let's start from the initial idea by Silky:
So I've been thinking recently of giving up on society, tv, internet, whatever. It'd be nice, I think,
to live in a Japanese/Canadian-style forest in a tree-house that I've built, right near a lake, and so
on.
Then I thought to myself, 'hmm but it may be nice to have the internet still'. But of course, It'd be wrong
to drag a cable all through the forest, or install a satellite.
Enter monkeynet ...
So we know the purpose of monkeynet - to provide an environmentally-friendly internet.
So how does monkeynet work? what does it involve? monkeys. Specifically, monkeynet operates by monkeys passing USB keys to other monkeys (referred to, inside monkeynet, as "nodes") who then continue to pass it around other nodes, until the data reaches it's destination.
Nodes can self-replicate via the miracle of love-making with other nodes. Further, nodes can actually repeat this behaviour with many nodes (if they are so incined) creating a very productive and 'ever-increasing' node-base. This is in direct contrast to the regular internet, where nodes cost money and must be put in place by large organisations.
Ask yourself, would you have the balls to try and stop a monkey from achieving it's goal, as it's barrelling down the street USB-key in hand? I think, if you look deep inside your heart, you'll find the answer to be no. You won't mess with a node in transit. You can't XSS a node. You can't "spoof" a node; other nodes will recognise monkeys via node-2-node recognition protocol, that is in-built into the brain of the nodes. The nodes maintain a database of 'known' nodes that they will work with. When finding they must work with a new node, they will first undergo a series of 'trust' exercises (falling back into the node, to see if it catches them, eating dinner with the node, exchanging numbers, etc).
This pretty much speaks for itself. The environment isn't harmed by the generation of nodes; in fact it is aided by it. The nodes help sustain environment by spreading seeds and generally enjoying trees and vines. As monkeynet increases, the need for 'modern' facilities will decrease, and we can enjoy the wonder that is nature by allowing more trees to grow, and encouraging vines in our general area (so-as to speed up the delivery of monkeynet messages).
monkeynet also provides a valued and special work environment for the otherwise un-employed.
Although we know that monkeynet won't be vulnerable to the classical MITM attack (as discussed above) it may be susceptible to BITM - Banana in the Middle Attack. We here at monkeynet HQ are working on this problem, and we hope to mitigate it by teaching monkeys to not accept bananas from unknown agents. We're making progress, mainly we need to instruct by example (you know the old saying: "monkey see, monkey do".)
Our motto at monkeynet is: monkeynet - the environmentally-friendly net!
1st of September, 2008 - Drazic takes on the cloud
Today monkeynet Founding Partner Drazen Drazic has launched an attack on the cloud. Read more here. You can show your support by immediately punching anyone that refers to storing information in the cloud, performing computation from the cloud, or generally refering to the cloud as an entity that can be used for specific purposes.
The only type of cloud we at monkeynet support is the cloud used by one of our heros - Monkey Magic.
11th of June, 2008 - Rogue monkeys expierment with fishing
Today monkeynet is mildly concerned by recent news that some types of monkeys have taken up fishing. We are worried that this, combined with prolonged exposure to the mainstream internet, will lead the monkeys into bad grammar and spelling; and hence entice them into the world of phishing. Luckily at this time, monkeynet monkeys don't have any online accounts, so we can be happy that the monkeys themselves, are at least safe.
We are pleased, however, that monkeys, in general, continue to demonstrate their ability to learn and adapt to their environment. We feel we are continually vindicated in our choice of monkeys as the backbone of the new-age of technological communications.
9th of June, 2008 - Chimps discover facebook; start creating first monkeynet social network
Update
The site and news appears to be a hoax. We apologise to any monkeynet loyalists who believed this information. It seems that monkeynet is the only project with the foresight to be conducting this sort of research at the moment. We will keep you informed. I'd like to thank our newly-appointed CMS, Nini Ponsaing, for drawing my attention to this today. Thanks Nini! I'll leave our initial news-item below, for posterity.
"More information here and here: CyberChimps. We at monkeynet are very excited about this as it paves the way for the nodes to make inter-continental connections and form the backbone of the monkeynet global network."
7th of June, 2008 - A relatively cool guy from Canada posts first monkeynet RFC!
The community is gathering around monkeynet today as a friendly Canadian has posted the a draft RFC for Monkey Data Transfer Protocol. We at monkeynet are yet to review this protocol but we are happy to see the that everyone feels a part of monkeynet, and it again shows the the reach the monkeynet has.
An exerpt from the RFC is: "To fragment a long Monkeynet bananagram, an Monkey Data Transfer Protocol module (for example, in a gateway), creates two new Monkeynet bananagrams and copies the contents of the Monkeynet header fields from the long bananagram into both new Monkeynet headers."
We at monkeynet will continue to review the RFC to see if it meets the technical specification of monkeynet that we have internally, before we send to the RFC working-group for approval.
6th of June, 2008 - Internet Globally slowed, twitter ground to a halt, as monkeynet launch continues ...
Savvy internet users have been noticing that the internet is running slowly and twitter has ground to a virtual halt with the launching of monkeynet. Local programmer, Neil, had this to say on the matter: "The internet is actually run by monkeys, and monkeynet is taking away monkey-resources thus the slowdown."
Monkeynet apologises for this, but we do feel that it will facilitate faster adoption of monkeynet globally. We will keep you informed.
Below is a list of the monkeynet project members (outside of the founding committee). Please contact us if you feel you can offer a valuable service, or mad skills, to monkeynet. Contact details are over to the left a bit.
"Boringly tedious technical guy with no responsibilities whatsoever"
"Chief Monkey Fancier"
"Chief Monkey Scientist/Researcher"
irldexter is an architectural slash infrastructure slash designer slash consultant zen like monkey who has been back of house, front of house, basically all over the house and is now working to build his own IT house on the side. irldexter has lots of experience in the outsourcing of monkey related work and is currently focusing on storage of bananas and dreams of a free market where bananas and bananagrams are not only counted but costed.
Congrats, you made it to the secret monkeynet labs. Here you will find our real projects. One of the main ones is "Monkeynet SCAN" project that Silky has been working on. Initially it started as an OWASP project, but it has now been moved by Silky to the monkeynet site. Original code by Silky remains with OWASP, but all new work is being conducted here.
Will post more details when available.
Another project is cryptter which will be a twitter-like service only encrypted in some fashion yet to be decided.
A few others are quepasa which is a new password-storing application like PasswordSafe, and the "web content hash" idea, which is a way of signing content posted to the web.
Do you want to get involved in monkeynet? well, contact us on twitter @ monkeynet and you can find our what we're up to and get involved.
Otherwise, feel free to shoot an email to the banana monkey net near gmail (remove the banana and get closer) and let us know your thoughts.
Our main current project is to raise awareness of monkeynet and gather members. We will engage in other projects as time goes on, and you can find them here.
We are also actively researching the following areas of the monkeynet project:
If you have any comments on these research matters please send them through.
We do have a few secretive projects you may be able to find if you tried.