On Sep 27 2008, Matthew Toseland wrote: >On Saturday 27 September 2008 15:41, Michael Rogers wrote: >> On Sep 27 2008, NextGen$ wrote: >> >If someone you don't trust has physical access to your computer you are >> >doomed in any case... whether freenet is running or not when he gets his >> >hands on the keyboard doesn't change anything. >> >> It's worthwhile to protect against casual attackers even if you can't >> protect against determined attackers. For example I have a password on >> my laptop, even though someone *could* pop the case open and clone the >> hard drive. > > Nonetheless, starting the node during startup rather than when the user > has logged in is an improvement, especially as we will probably have to > reseed every time (making Freenet a centralised network in practice - he > who controls the seednodes controls most of the network).
I don't think it's as simple as saying "it's an improvement" - there's a tradeoff between uptime on the one hand, and privacy and convenience on the other (convenience because Freenet's quite a large app to have running in the background if you're not the person who installed it). We're only talking about multi-user PCs here, because there's almost no difference in uptime for a single-user PC: the user typically logs in when the machine starts (either automatically or as soon as the login screen appears) and logs out by shutting down the machine. So the question is, what's the tradeoff for a multi-user PC? To my mind, squeezing extra uptime out of a multi-user machine by running in the background while other users are logged in is an underhanded tactic that's likely to piss people off. Freenet uses quite a lot of memory and bandwidth, so it has a non-negligible impact on the machine's responsiveness - you've said yourself that gamers might want to shut it down, but what if they don't even know it's running? Uptime is really important, I'm not disputing that, but we shouldn't try to get it in ways that are likely to piss people off. Cheers, Michael
