On 2010/10/21 (Oct), at 1:33 PM, Matthew Toseland wrote:
I'm not saying that media attention is a bad thing, but we're
letting it affect
the development process too much. It puts a lot of unnecessary
pressure on
these "colourful pieces of candy".
IMHO Freetalk is strategically important, even in the complete
absence of media attention. It greatly enhances the possibilities
for anonymous community, and makes Freenet much more useful out of
the box. As regards the rest I have explained my approach in the
other mail - there are big strategic deficiencies in Freenet,
particularly in security, performance and usability, and fixing
these has to be the top priority before 1.0.
I could not agree more (!!!).
Freenet is trying to solve a large goal (collective storage), but the
fundamental idea is communication!
IMHO, this sort of communication software should follow this sort of
roadmap:
(1) point-to-point communication (like a multi-user node-to-node chat),
(2) "viral" spreadability (like social conveyance not a computer virus),
(3) easy/untraceable/limited-spam message-board functionality (beyond
node-to-node, but maybe pre-trust darknet links for WoT),
(4) easy "new-darknet-link" via message boards, and only then...
(5) collective file storage (which is fetch with origin offline). At
least in the worst-case scenario or in disaster recovery, etc.
Right now we only have #5 mostly working and hope to implement the
others on top of it (which might be the best course of action), but
with just 1 & 2, you can pass a cheap usb key to your friend and
bypass all instant messengers, email, etc.
I've had at least one person already ask, "how can we talk privately
[over the internet]" and though I could think of many "solutions" they
are all seem too complex for non-geeks: e.g. you can setup outlook
with gnupg with a particular plugin trusting the pubkey I email to
you, or download this particular IM with OTR encryption which might
not be available for your platform (so long as there is not a MITM the
first time...), or install java & freenet w/ a second in-person ref-
exchange & we'll use awkward n2n chat [but you might run into some
porn if you travel too far from the home page] :-( ...
--
Robert Hailey
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