We will only get a darknet if it is really easy to swap references with your friends - opennet or no opennet.
The original idea for Freenet 0.7 reference swapping was that you: - Go to your node, and ask it to create a bundle. - Send the bundle to your friends. - They unzip it and run it to install Freenet. - The bundle includes your noderef. - It also includes a one-time key that allows the node to automatically connect to yours despite yours not having their noderef yet. There are two big problems with this: 1) Everyone and his dog is behind a NAT. This means in order to connect you must have already exchanged references, full stop. THIS SUCKS. It also affects connectivity for newbies in a bad way (which is important IMHO). 2) Generally people shouldn't run programs that they receive in emails! Solution to the first one - and to newbie connectivity issues - is to implement UP&P and hope that routers implement it properly in future - is this a realistic hope? Solution to the second one is to just send the noderef and a link to the website, and only use full bundles when e.g. giving somebody a CD-R (which we should make really easy). Plugins for e.g. IRC clients, IM clients, have been suggested but I'm not sure how well this would work for newbies, and in any case I set up a darknet-tools list for people to talk about this and nobody has even talked about it since a few days after it was set up, let alone done anything. <_ph00> so the basic problem is "how to safely exchage refs", and the solution "eliminate ref exchanging by implementing opennet"?!? Am I the only one to think that's very stupid? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20070305/1fe1de12/attachment.pgp>