On Thursday 11 December 2008 16:26, Matthew Toseland wrote: > IMHO we should ship a full bundle-installer by default, i.e. one including the > latest main jar, the latest extra jar, the latest plugins. > ADVANTAGES: > - Security: Once you have obtained the installer, somehow (over Tor, from a > friend, etc etc), you can run it without needing to fetch it from the > website. People in hostile environments won't accidentally fetch the wrong > version of the installer over Tor and then run it and reveal themselves. And > us having less idea how many people are running it is arguably an advantage. > - Performance: The actual installation should take less time to complete. > - Simplicity: It would reduce the number of stages in the install, especially > for non-IzPack installers.
Another security advantage: Users could get an installer from their friends and be completely invisible, at least as far as website logs go, as with the distribution servlet in 0.5. This would also help to build the darknet. Of course this relies on: - For pure darknet, both sides must have static-ish IPs, and the new user must get his ref back to the old user somehow, or the old user must have a static IP and be port forwarded. - Either way the installer will need to be sent from the old user to the new user. It's not a good idea to run stuff you receive by email, even from your friends - they may have a virus. And downloading it from them has a similar issue, but additionally they need a TCP port forward. Nextgens' idea of a polymorphic nano-installer that pulls everything from the node it was sent from is not bad though ... > DISADVANTAGES: > - People will sometimes download an installer and then run it months later. > Resulting in an old version being installed. This should update itself, but > only after configuration, and will slow down the process of getting started > with Freenet significantly for a new user. > - Websites (or even magazines with physical DVDs) may mirror old versions of > the installer. Again resulting in an old version being installed. > - Statistics: We would not get the reasonably reliable statistics on how many > people install Freenet that we do now. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 827 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20081211/6f5d678a/attachment.pgp>
