Welcome to AEON!
Home of the Ad-hoc Emergency Online Network.
Inspired by Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, a story of resistance by H.M. Forester.
The AEON Network
AEON is a decentralised, trust-based, non-hierarchical, democratic, browser-based, online network (with no vulnerable central server or database). It uses gossip to propagate individual users' digitally-signed registry entries (using a private key) containing details such as hostname, IP address, nickname, X509 security certificate, and personal biography or blurb on any site and community resources they choose to host in the network.
A would-be member can contact any other registered member, via the latter's built-in server (a http web server running on port 8008), and become a registered member of the AEON network.
Any registered member can moderate users' behaviour, and it is up to individual members which (if any) moderators they trust, and hence whether or not to act on their trusted moderators' actions. Though we can't block individuals from a decentralised network like AEON, we can limit their audience reach by applying trusted moderator overrides. This will limit the propagation of the individual's registry entry and updates, and hence reduce their social reputation and reach in the network.
Though the AEON browser can be used to browse the regular Internet, if and when that is available, it can also visit sites in AEON's private network, using the aeon:// protocol (which, like https:// (SSL) is secure). As for the AEON network itself: that is not entirely secure, due to its decentralised nature, but it must be remembered that AEON is designed for situations where the regular Internet may be inaccessible, due to disaster, emergency, or political oppression. So, since email or SMS text messages may not be available to activate accounts, offer once-only tokens, or reset passwords, membership of facilities such as chat, hosted by members of the AEON community on their own machines, is facilitated not using an email address and password but by a hostname and certificate (or certificate thumbprint that can be checked against an individual's signed registry entry). In other words, the network needs to be as self-contained as it can be. A user can discover their latest private or public IP address by sending a request to the web server of a random bunch of candidates drawn from the network's registered members (with a fallback public IP address service that may not be available in an emergency).
It is expected that community services and resources will include offline snapshots of sites like English Wikipedia; offline maps; chat; downloadable items such as Office, LibreOffice and PDF documents, eBooks, survival guides; audio; video; etc. The browser allows a wide-range of downloadable file types via a "right-click" on a hyperlink, and what can't be downloaded (such as executable files) can be zipped up and downloaded (.7z, .gz, and .zip are permitted). Though the browser has no "Save image as...", you can "Save link as..." to download an image from a hyperlink to the image on a web page.
The AEON software browser and networking are written in C# 7.3 for the .NET 4.8 framework and using the CefSharp multi-tabbed, Chromium-based web browser. It is designed to work on legacy 64-bit PCs running Windows 64-bit from Windows with 7 Service Pack 1 installed, onwards. It will not run on x86 32-bit PCs or with 32-bit Windows, nor any version of Windows prior to Windows 7 with SP1 (and four necessary Windows KB updates in the case of Windows 7). An AEON network can be run either within a local area network (LAN) or in public. If you're behind a LAN or home network firewall, one PC in the LAN can access a public network by port-forwarding incoming TCP on port 8008 to that machine.
The first image contains a scene in nature showing a group of people sitting around a communal campfire in a grassy area, with a large tent nearby, various trees dotted around, and a pond in the foreground. The scene is framed on the left and right foreground by tall, shadowy tree trunks and branches. Together, the roots, trunks and branches of the two trees enclose the camping scene in a circle. On the horizon and high above the heads of the campers is a glowing, blue green logo designed to look like computer circuitry, which symbolises the AEON community, and bearing the name AEON, which stands for Ad-hoc Emergency Online Network. There's more, smaller glowing circuity in the foreground, to the left and right, at the base of the two trees that frame the picture. Image generated by DALL-E, via ChatGPT.
We must remember the often-overlooked and neglected 'A' for Accessibility in 'DEIA' (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility).
The second image is a screenshot of the AEON web browser, showing the hard-wired html web page that shows in the first tabbed page when the browser is launched. See the first image in this post for a description of the image embedded in the web page.
The actual networking is in place, but not yet tested and debugged.
Update
Update (Friday 27 June 2025): Networking is being expanded and debugged as we speak. It's been a helluva bumpy ride thus far.