> I'm not suggesting that users shouldn't run their own nodes. Just that > most users wont have their own nodes simply because of the > relative difficulty in setting one up.
There is no relative difficulty. To run the client (in Windows, for example), you run frequest.bat. If you are going to run the node first, you run fserve.bat. In fact, it's easier to run the node first because fserve; frequest; frequest (that was two requests) is less to type than frequest -serverAddress tcp/blah:2222; frequest -serverAddress tcp/blah:2222 > Sure, security is an issue. But for most users, having a trusted server > is enough. Most of the time the users wont need the extra security. How > often are you getting illegal information? How often is it not illegal > enough for law enforcement to care? The freenet protocol already provides > a good deal of protection and anonymity. Only the most paranoid will > *need* to run their own nodes because of security. We can't take this attitude or else encryption == illegality in the eyes of the persecutors. By encrypting everything we avoid making the paranoid persecuted. Okay, I admit that people don't usually NEED to run a node. But it's better in every way to run one. First, there is the security issue. Then there is the issue of giving back to the network. If everyone has to run a node then, unless they change the code to make it less friendly, they will be acting as a datastore for the network. If we're talking about naive users, ones that can't take the trouble to launch the node before they launch the client, then I doubt they'll modify the source. The success of Napster/Gnutella rests on the fact that everyone connected is a datastore, even though it's possible to configure it so that no one finds any files on your machine. If we make it easier to run a node than to just run a client, then more people will run nodes, which is better for the network. So I'm not saying that people shouldn't allowed to run just a client (there's no way to stop them anyway), I'm just saying that the premise that most users will just use clients shouldn't be accepted. Rather, the implementation should be changed to make it false. _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
