On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 09:03:47PM +0200, Zenon Panoussis wrote:
> 
> Toad wrote:
> 
> >>>I recommend you set the following:
> >>>logLevelDetail=freenet.client:debug
> 
> >You did uncomment it, right?
> 
> Of course :)
> 
> >>...that now the URIs don't get logged. '
> 
> >That's strange. What URIs were you after? 
> 
> Those of requests in transit and inserts. Because of the
> "island-like" nature of freenet publishing, traditional
> spidering won't get very far; you can't seed a search
> engine with a few sites and assume that you will find
> the entire network by following links. Monitoring requests
> and inserts musters the collective URI knowledge of one's
> peers and of their peers, so it could go a long way,
> especially if you can put together a mesh of URI-grabbing
> nodes in different places.

In a word, NO. You cannot monitor the URIs of requests going through
your node. If you could, you could decrypt the data. Then you could
search it, sure. However you'd also be liable for it. It would probably
make tracking authors down easier too. We have no way of knowing how big
the other "islands" out there are... we can only spider out from known
sites, and from publicly visible Frost traffic.
> 
> The thing is, the lack of search capabilities reduces
> the useability of freenet

Of course. There are ways to implement search, however. Sooner or later
somebody will implement a good spider based anonymous search. This would
probably have two components: 1. A spider, which would spider out from
known freesites, scan NIMs, and Frost traffic, and insert index files.
2. A client, probably integrated into fproxy, which would fetch the
index files that are appropriate to the search given.

> and, indirectly,  compromises
> anonymity too. 

Not really.

> I can publish stuff anonymously all I want
> but, unless I post a URL somewhere, nobody is going to
> find my publications. 

Indeed. Thus we have NIMs, FreeMail and Frost within Freenet, and
outside it we have Mixmaster remailers, IIP, I2P, various kinds of
proxies and so on. Sadly some people use hushmail too, which is not
exactly the safest option. But there are many possibilities.

> And conversely, if I'm looking for
> a piece of information that might well be on freenet, I
> won't find it without asking.

No. You will search for it. Just like on the real Internet. You may use
a search engine, or you may follow links. Either way, there are issues
of trust which are ironically much more readily solved by hypertext than
by just making everything "searchable". A spammable search system is of
little practical use.

> Especially for someone who's
> new to freenet and doesn't already have a set of bookmarks
> and starting points, the threshold for getting anywhere
> is pretty high despite the proxy bookmarks. 

How do you propose to protect against spam, and plain malicious content?

> A non-anonymous
> search engine on the web could solve part of both these
> problems and at the same time function as an invitation
> to freenet for non-freenet users.

So spider! We're not stopping you.
> 
> > Freenet does not know the
> >URIs of data that passes through the node, only those requested locally.
> 
> It does know the requests that pass through the node.

Nope. It doesn't. It only knows the routing keys, which are insufficient
to decrypt the actual data. Any other URIs in the logs will be locally
originated. Example:

CHK@<routing key>,<decrypt key>/<human readable key>

The node only knows the routing key. It does not know the decrypt key
and therefore cannot decrypt the data. If it could, it could guess the
human readable key.

> Last night, all of freenet for me was the few URIs that
> are published on freenetproject.org. This morning I had
> a whole long list in my logs, and through that I was
> able to start finding my way around. 

Would be interested to see some of this list. Are you running a public
gateway? Are you fetching lots of stuff locally?

> That's how this
> idea of a search engine popped up and turned into a
> small project in itself.
> 
> >Most of these would go through freenet.client... some might go through
> >freenet.node.states.FCP, and there are a few internal ones.
> 
> I'll look. I'm grateful for any tips you might have.
-- 
Matthew J Toseland - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/
ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so.

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