Our old friend sdiz came up with some interesting, if depressing, news from China: <sdiz> just some news from china -- no english media have reported this yet... china gfw have "upgraded". if your ip have download too much data from foreign hosts, it is blocked from accessing any foreign ip. <sdiz> they call it "the whitelist", because all foreign host expect a short whitelist are affected
Given that there is no obvious evidence of a lot of chinese users on freenet, and yet the recent survey showed that Freenet is the most trusted circumvention tool in China, there is some chance that there is already a large Chinese darknet, but I doubt it. In any case, our options appear to be: 1) Try to make opennet work in China. We could do some sort of selective announcement protocol, but the problem with this is: a) Why would any chinese nodes be connected / reachable through an announcement from a western node? b) We'd need to reannounce every time we reconnect. Most people in China have limited uptime because of how broadband is sold. We could try to rotate links even, so that only a few nodes have external connections at a time. The catch is that we don't know what the limit above is, and it will probably vary from time to time. So this is probably a dead-end. 2) Focus on darknet. This is my preferred option. There are a number of relatively easy things we can do to make darknet easier and perform better, such as FOAF connections and invites. Difficulties: a) If the Chinese darknet is completely sealed off from the western network, how would they even get software updates? We need better tools for migrating binary blobs. b) We need some way to ensure that FOAF connections don't result in dangerous external connections. In any case we should add an option to warn about / not connect to peers outside or inside a given jurisdiction. Thoughts? Also, we might be able to get some publicity. Given we have less than 17 weeks funding even with relatively generous bitcoin donations recently included, we need something soon. Of course the obvious thing is Freetalk, but there remain serious performance and scalability worries which are being worked on... -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20110514/c4a33f72/attachment.pgp>
