Concern about whether or not nodes might cache plaintext is misguided, and the answer is irrelevant, but I'll give you mine anyway. I can suggest no way for a node to verify that a document it caches is not meaningful. An image can probably be made statistically random yet still legible, thus frustrating the best test I can imagine.
That answer is a waste of your time and mine for a frustratingly obvious reason. If a node operator is responsible for verifying that files in his cache are legal to possess or distribute (and this is, after all, the premise of our debate), he'd have a far easier time doing it by checking their search keys against a blacklist. Encryption of the whole datastore and routing table is popularly held to be a way to hide those troublesome search keys from the operator. Simply not printing them would do that just as well, and, in any case, you'll have to climb rather farther down the proverbial rabbit hole before any of that nonsense should relieve him of whatever responsibilities he might have. A few people will explain that potentially incriminating evidence may be more easily destroyed by encrypting it and wiping the key. Unfortunately, there would almost certainly be more evidence outside the datastore than in it. Personally, I ascribe the phenomenon to encryption fetishists who should themselves be encrypted perhaps six or seven feet beneath the earth. They'd probably even endorse the idea. _______________________________________________ devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
