On Apr 22, 2009, at 7:38 AM, Matthew Toseland wrote:
On Wednesday 22 April 2009 02:09:21 Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
So we get to the question, what a freenet contact is: A friend or an
aquaintance.
If you look at myspace and similar sites, you'll see people with
hundreds of
"friends" which in truth are aquaintances.
Also the question arises, which number of friends will be efficient
for
freenets algorithm: How many people have similar interest?
In terms of routing, the main issues are:
- There must be a small-world network. Clearly random automatically
selected
participants will not form a small-world network, but acquaintances
probably
do. I repeat, randomly selected people through any automated
mechanism WILL
BREAK ROUTING!
Are we even sure of that???
I know that the whole routing algorithm is based on small world
theory. However, if we load up a sim of a large randomly connected
network, would freenet not operate on it? Perhaps it would sort out
effective and usable locations anyway (simply on graph theory)?
BTW, like you, I am NOT in favor of making any such random/automatic
darknet connections.
I think the general question is: How does increasing the cardinality
effect the network? Presuming that all nodes are currently running at
throttled speed, then surely it could only effect routing.
- It might make a request get out of an overloaded 'clump' faster
(around backed off peers/but most of my peers are not backed off).
- It dilutes both relevant (friend) and irrelevant (IRC) darknet links.
From a free-software standpoint, if someone really wanted to have
more than 20 connections, why-would/how-could we stop them? If it is
so popular a request, how would a few super-connected nodes negatively
effect performance/network? Just make it an obscure/advanced option.
- There must be enough of them online at a time that there is a
viable,
routable network.
Right... better with more connections, I suppose.
In terms of security:
- Darknet is much more secure than opennet simply because the cost
of getting
a connection to the target node is much higher. This greatly reduces
the
effectiveness of mobile-attacker source tracing attacks, one of the
most
serious known attacks.
- Clearly you are vulnerable to your peers. But no more so on
darknet than on
opennet, really. On opennet, it is possible to get many connections
to the
target; on darknet, you have to persuade the user to give you such
connections by e.g. pretending to be many people.
So IMHO unless you have serious security requirements there is no
reason not
to connect to acquaintances.
I agree. Unless your acquaintances are a bunch of snoops and hackers
(you know... those sort that use freenet) :)
--
Robert Hailey
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