> This is the bit where I like the Gnutella system a little better.
>
> The way Gnutella works is that you find an web-site containing the seed node
> information. You download this and use it.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Gnutella. It would be more accurate
to say "This is how Gnutella users do it." However, this also happens to
be how Freenet users do it. That's what inform.php is, a web-site
containing seed node information. Although there is a difference in how
that information is updated.
The Gnutella community has pretty much explored all of the different ways
that seed addresses can be propagated. The absolute best for users is to
have defaults pointing to trusted nodes included in the distribution. You
have to trust the distributors of the software before you use Freenet. So
you can probably trust the nodes that they point you to. If you are weird
and don't make that trust connection, you can override the defaults to
point to your friend Bob's node instead. Letting the distributors assign
trusted seed nodes is a pretty good amount of centralization. You're not
adding a weak point. The existence of distributors of the software is
already a weak point. If they take out sourceforge and hawk and Mr. Bad
and Sebastian then they've pretty much screwed us. We might as well admit
this when deciding on our seed node propagation system. Sure, other
distributors could arise in the case of our demise. In that case the task
of assign seed nodes would fall to them.
However, this system begs the question of how the list of trusted nodes
gets updated. There is the current inform.php model in which anyone puts
their node in the list. There is the mostly similar model used by the
Gnutella web sites in which they just run a node and report announcements
that they get. Both of these are obviously attackable.
The only way that I can think that we could have a list of trusted seed
nodes where we know the seed nodes to be actually trust-worthy is to have
the developers themselves run nodes that just do announcement. This of
course does not scale very well. This is because trust itself does not
scale very well.
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