On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Matthew
Toseland<[email protected]> wrote:
> I propose that as a darknet value-add, and as an additional tool for those in 
> hostile regimes who have friends on the outside, we implement a 
> web-proxy-over-your-darknet-peers option. Your Friends would announce whether 
> they are willing to proxy for you, and you could choose which friends to use, 
> or allow it to use all of them (assuming people on the inside don't offer). 
> You could then configure your browser to use Freenet as a proxy. This would 
> not provide any anonymity but it would get you past network obstacles and/or 
> out of Bad Place and into Happy Place. It's not a long term solution, but:
> - We have expended considerable effort on making darknet viable: IP 
> detection, ARKs etc.
> - It could take advantage of future transport plugins, but even before that, 
> FNP 0.7 is quite hard to block.
> - Many people are in this situation.
> - It is easy to implement. HTTP is complex but cache-less proxies can be very 
> simple.
> - It could be combined with longer term measures (growing the internal 
> darknet), and just work for as long as it works. Most likely it would be 
> throttled rather than blocked outright to start with, hopefully allowing for 
> a smooth-ish migration of users to more robust mechanisms...
> - We could allow recursive proxying to some depth - maybe friend of a friend. 
> This would provide a further incentive to grow the internal darknet, which is 
> what we want.
> - The classic problem with proxies is that they are rare so hundreds of 
> people connect to them, and the government finds out and blocks them. This 
> does not apply here.

I like it.  Darknet features are a very good thing.  This probably
also needs some care wrt bandwidth management (related to 3334 --
similar considerations probably apply).

However, as I mentioned on IRC, there are several things I think
should be higher priority.  Of course, I'm not the one implementing
any of this, but here's my opinion anyway ;)  In no particular order:

- Documentation!  Both the plugins api and making sure that the FCP
docs on the wiki are current and correct.
- Bloom filter sharing.  (Probably? I have no idea what the relative
work required is for these two.)
- Freetalk and a blogging app of some sort (though these are probably
mostly for someone other than toad?).
- A few specific bugs: 3295 (percent encoding is horribly,
embarrassingly broken -- in at least 5 different ways), 2931 (split
blocks evenly between splitfile segments -- should help dramatically
with availability), fixing top block healing on splitfiles (discussed
in 3358).
- Low-latency inserts flag as per 3338.  (I know, most people probably
don't care all that much, but I'd really like to see whether Freenet
can hit near-real-time latencies for the messaging app I'm working
on.)

Also, it's worth considering other ways to make darknet connections
more useful (in addition to this, whether before or after I don't have
a strong opinion on).  Enabling direct transfer of large files would
be good (at a bare minimum, this shouldn't fail silently like it does
right now).  Improving messaging would be good; I should be able to
see recently sent / received messages (including timestamps), queue a
message to be sent when a peer comes online, and tell whether a
message I've sent arrived successfully.

Evan Daniel
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