On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Dave Noha wrote: > I'd like to summarize some recent points from this thread that I think > are very important, just to confirm my understanding: > > 1) Sending content type (and other kinds of content-describing metadata) > in the clear would allow strategies of traffic analysis that are > contrary to the Freenet philosophy. IOW, one could see that Bob is > looking at lots of porn or that Alice is trafficking heavily in MP3s. I > agree wholeheartedly with this point and I'm glad it was raised.
This is a given. We should be minimalist about the Nodes - keep them as blind as possible, they should only see what they NEED to see. > 2) Storing metadata separately from the data it describes doesn't work > very well, because the metadata could/would end up on different servers > and have different patterns of access, so most of the time you'd end up > in a situation where either the metadata or the data would be present, > but not the other. And it would also be inefficient: two > requests/inserts where there should be one. The meta-data is just stuff about the data, it doesn't make sense to put it elsewhere. It would be like putting every footnote in a different document (I might agree to put a really long Appendix elsewhere though) > I'd like to add: > 3) Stuffing metadata in the trailing segment leads to a data reuse > problem. If my client dumps a bunch of extra headerish-type fields in > front of the actual data, no other client can use that data unless it > understands those headers too. This is not true, why should it be? They can just skip the fields they don't understand. As decided, there should be a plaintext field in the message that says how long the Meta-data is, in bytes, at the beginning of the trailing field. A client that knows nothing about Meta-data can simply skip that many bytes. <snip> > The advantage of methods B and C is that they would support a > header-only request, whereas A could not, because the metadata would be > in the trailing segment which can't/shouldn't be looked into by nodes. The _decided_ approach allows for a header-only request - the node would just send back the number of bytes from the beginning for the data that it knows is the Meta-data. I don't see what the issue is? (and it is too late for this discussion anyways). > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freenet-dev mailing list > Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net > http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev -- Oskar Sandberg md98-osa at nada.kth.se #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
