>> 1. Paying for becoming a "VIP" Freenet node is not out of the >> question (people buy invites to elite torrent trackers for sizable >> amount of money), but the benefits must be *very* obvious. > > There's no point if it's only the handful of elite nodes. It needs to > be the bulk of the network - everyone who routes requests where they > could conceivably spy on other nodes. The benefits could be made > obvious though: If we have a high bandwidth threshold then we'll have > much higher average transfer rates, and people will have less need to > hack their nodes to have 500 peers, as the Japanese are doing on > Frost after Winny and Perfect Dark fell down.
"Elite" trackers have tens of thousands of users. Granted, most of those obtained their invites for free; but a fair amount had paid anywhere between $5 and $100 for such invites. > There isn't anything else. Except darknet. And everyone keeps telling > me that darknet is impossible, at least until the network is much > bigger. We (as a community) just hadn't figured out such a way, IMO. Perhaps it doesn't really exist - I'm not qualified enough to tell yet - but I highly doubt it. > On opennet, your peers choose you. Hence MAST and connect-to-everyone > surveillance. On darknet, you choose your peers. Umm, would there be any benefit to security if this was reversed? If Freenet will go down the "tangible verification" route (certificates, yubikeys, whatever), hiding the fact that you run a Freenet node would become pointless anyway. > If you trust your friends less than you trust the jack-boots, then > you probably don't have much to fear from the jack-boots. As I'd mentioned in a previous email, it's not a question of trust as is, it's a question of damage my friend can do to me if he decides to betray my trust. >> 4. I think that performance issues *absolutely* should be handled >> before anything else, even before security. I understand that many >> - even most - will disagree with me, but if I found *one* thing >> from practice, it is that people widely prefer less secure, but >> working, systems to more secure, but non-working, ones. > > Right up until the point when somebody publishes a toolkit for MAST, > and a list of paedophiles they busted with it. That's sort of a catch 22. The network won't be "worthy" of growing until it's secure, but it won't be secure until it grows. I'm not saying security isn't important; that would be stupid. But for an *experimental* network *under heavy development* lightly secure, but well-performing, network will be preferable to very secure (until the next attack vector is found), but poorly-performing, network. >> Right now, Freenet exhibits a level of performance which can only >> be called "abysmal". I can download torrents at 4 MB/s, reliably, >> one after another, from different trackers in different countries; >> considering that in Freenet mine (and everyone's else) traffic >> should pass through several nodes (say, 20 of them, worst case), > > Typically for requests it should be 5-7 or thereabouts. Yes, that's why I'm assuming 20 as worst case. >> I'd say Freenet should provide around 200 KB/s of sustained >> download performance (with the rest of my pipe being donated to >> other nodes, thus hiding my traffic). In reality, in my tests, on a >> lightly-loaded and well-integrated node I'm lucky to see speeds >> above 10 KB/s, with "typical" downloads making 2-3 KB/s on average, >> start to finish. My node with 90 peers only consumes around 200-250 >> KB/s (out of 1 MB/s allocated); my higher bandwidth allocation is >> effectively *wasted* by the inefficient network. > > Most nodes have relatively low bandwidth limits. We could boost > performance by excluding slow nodes (say under 40KB/sec). This is the > first part of the proposal. Of course we'd lose a large number of > nodes - but we'd probably gain more to compensate when performance > improves. I still don't get why it happens. Are torrent clients run by significantly different slice of users? Again: I can reliably demonstrate speeds of *at least* 500 KB/s for any torrent with 10+ peers; with 20 peers, 90% of torrents, taken from all over the world, will max out my internet connection. This indicates average upload speeds of at least 50 KB/s, and probably closer to 100 KB/s (and with most connections being asymmetric in one way or another, we can safely assume that upload bandwidth is the limiting factor). >> If another major rewrite of Freenet is ahead (which, I'd argue, is >> long overdue), I'd be happy to provide more input (i.e., I think >> that filesharing and social communication is *much* more important >> than keyword search and site publishing), but I feel this email is >> already too bloated :-(. > > Filesharing implies keyword search, no? At the very least it requires > working forums. Filesharing implies content indices of one sort or another, that's true. But it doesn't imply, for example, spidering for content, like the Web does. Also, I was talking about a longer timespan - i.e., the decision to implement a keyword search for freesites, which, as far as I can see, *still* doesn't provide anything approaching a useable system (i.e., on my machine I routinely run out of memory if starting more than one search at a time), was made in what? 2008, IIRC? > Feel free to rewrite Freenet, but I won't be around to do it. Dropping db4o, introducing new peer tiers, fully reworking bootstrapping - it already seems like a major rewrite of the key architectural pieces. I personally see no harm in taking a good hard look at other pieces at this time - and either getting rid of them, or reworking them, given the opportunity. Regards, Victor Denisov.
