Think of a scenario where Freenet is adopted by many people around the world and different regions or groups of people request different content. Like Americans requesting English-only content and Chinese requesting and inserting mostly Chinese-language content. With NG routing, American nodes would start to specialize in American content while Chinese nodes would specialize in Chinese content (first by locational latency, then accelerated by the fact that nodes in your specific locale would much more quickly get content specific to your region since those nodes would actually have the content). The problem with this is that it could tear the network in two if the two sides of the network do not cross-request content.
Basically this boils down to a fundamental flaw in NG routing's design that might cause nodes to specialize by content. Since it relies on the latency of request queries, it can easily be affected by what set of content is often requested. If a node downloads all of the content off from Movie Central, then the noderefs that have the lowest RTEs would be nodes that the lowest latency FOR THOSE MOVIES. This could cause RTEs to cause significant specialization by content, which is bad for keeping the network together and getting good routing for varying genres of content. This problem is not as bad as it could be because: 1) the network is fairly small (wrt content variety and specialization of users requests) for this to be a big problem as of now and 2) most RTEs on fresh nodes are initialized with routing times for the widely-requested-by-almost-all-nodes TFE, TFEE, and all of their ActiveLinks. _______________________________________________ devl mailing list devl at freenetproject.org http://hawk.freenetproject.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
