Shadownet

The shadownets are a fairly recent creation, although the precise date of their inception is not know. However, this illicit network has already established itself with its own culture, traditions and slang.

The shadownet protocol was created by skilled hackers, and this data is always free to access, even between very distant worlds. There is no formal name registry, and no way to trace the creator of a given topic. This means that policing heretical or illegal topics is nearly impossible.

A shadownet is available on every world with a ghostnet cache, although not all such worlds are currently equipped to publish to shadownets. The basic procedure is highly illegal - while the planet's worldnet is being uploaded to a temple ship's cache, a rogue datacentre (known as a station) inserts an additional stream. This normally contains only header data about fictional worldnet nodes under a hierarchy which is valid but does not actually exist on that world. This data is routinely left unchecked, as there will never be a conflict with any valid data. When the data is then downstreamed to a ghostnet mirror on some other world, it can easily be scanned by a shadownet reader which can extract the small messages concealed within the address headers. While it is not possible for a message to be read on the same world from which it was sent in this way (as a world's mirrors never contain a cache of its own worldnet), most shadow datacentres will ensure that they upstream a copy of all recently received messages when they post data - therefore ensuring that messages eventually bounce back to their world of origin, and to other worlds, and are available to everyone.

A registry query for an unused address hierarchy will normally be ignored by a worldnet's name registry. However, these messages can be picked up by the planet's shadownet stations, and a message concealed within them is inserted into the next shadownet upstream. In this way, anyone on a world with a suitably configured datacentre can publish their own messages to the shadownets. These messages are almost entirely unmoderated, and generally anonymous. Therefore the shadownets are an online haven for illegal content, stolen data and heretical theories. Although many worlds have tried to shut them down, doing so would involve a total change to the way in which ghostnets operate involving regulatory committees on most worlds of class 2 and above as well as the cooperation of the Temple Grand Synod. This would be a very complex and political process, and would probably only be a temporary resoluion to the problem anyway.

Format

As content can be posted anonymously and with no regulation, the mass of data in a shadownet upstream would increase exponentially. If this happened, it would be increasingly difficult for shadownet traffic to remain hidden in the overhead of the mirrors. It was decided by the original creators of the system (commonly known only as the Cabal) that rather than censoring data based on their own opinions of what is important, or charging for publishing privileges, only the most recently published content would be upstreamed. Some stations judge based on a message's ago (such as repeating only 30 days of messages), while some instead use a metric based on the number of hops (temple-to-mirror downstreams) a message has been through.

Therefore rather than an information archive, a shadownet appears as a kind of discussion forum. A message may take much longer to reach some destinations than others, and some destinations may not even get a complete message feed, but this is considered unimportant as important messages can be recreated from the fragments of them which are quoted in other messages. Therefore the more replies a particular message gets, the better than chances of any user receiving it and the longer it will persist for.

A user normally creates a publication, which is either an initial post or a response to some point in an existing message. If the same user creates multiple publications in reply to the same topic, the station will often aggregate them into a single message before upstreaming. In this sense, a message is understood to mean a single person's responses to a topic. Some more advanced clients allow a user to even remove or replace their own publications in the time until the next upstream - but once a message has been compiled from the various publications, it cannot be changed. Messages are then grouped into topics, a topic being a message and all the messages which reply to it, as well as the messages it references. A topic is then encapsulated within an echo, commonly understood to be a group of topics or discussions on a common theme. For example, the topic 'Possibility of spoof bank IDs' might be in the echo 'Computing:Security'. Echoes generally have a semi-hierarchial name format, although it has been known for some users to create new echoes with entirely unstructured names.

Most clients now allow a user to see a list of all available echoes, then get a list of topics within an echo, then to retreive all messages in a given topic. The main exceptions to this are the "5hadow:Caba1" and "5hadow:5seurity" echoes (and possibly others), for which most stations block a listing of topics. In order to receive messages addressed to these echoes, you must either run your own station, or have received the explicit topicID from somewhere.

Culture

Ingenuity and obvious intelligence in messages earns the publisher a good deal of respect. Puns and clever wordplay are often praised. It is also seen as a sign of good manners to express the content of a message tersely where possible. Asking for more clarification on something simple, or asking for help on something that could easily be found elsewhere, is a waste of headers and can attract quite a hostile response.

Although most users are hackers or other computer experts, there is also a surprisingly large proportion of echoes on entirely unrelated echoes, especially where censorship or anonymity would be a problem through other communication methods.

There is already a sizeable volume of shadownet-specific slang, known as shadowtalk, although more recently this is starting to bleed into other subcultures.