On 20 Sep 2005, at 14:08, Matthew Toseland wrote:
On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 12:58:44PM +0100, Ian Clarke wrote:
On 20 Sep 2005, at 11:33, Matthew Toseland wrote:
Well, if that would truly be the topology then the alternative is
"clusters of isolated dark nodes", which is worse?
There would be no real reason to grow the darknet, that's the
point. If
the only way to connect (easily) is by growing the darknet, it will
grow.
So you propose to force people to run darknet nodes even though they
might be quite satisfied to use the opennet? I don't believe in
forcing users to do things against their will.
Eh? I don't understand. If they want to use the opennet, they can use
the opennet.
Yeah, but then they can't be part of the darknet. You are saying to
people: "I'm sorry, you can only connect to people you trust, you
aren't allowed to connect to strangers". If the user wants to
connect to strangers, and those strangers are happy to connect to
them, then it is futile for us to try to prevent it.
The result of which is that it does not tell
us anything about the viability of the global darknet. And WHEN,
not if,
the opennet is compromized, there is no global darknet. Just a few
disconnected nodes.
If you truly believe that dark nodes would be in small isolated
pockets, then what makes you believe that a pure-darknet is
viable at
all without open nodes to glue it together?
I don't believe people would make the effort to grow the darknet if
they
are connected by open nodes. And furthermore, if they are
connected by
open nodes, it tells us nothing whatsoever about the viability of a
fully dark network.
People get a choice. If people chose to leave their nodes open, then
so be it. It isn't our place to force people to do one thing or the
other.
In which case the whole experiment will have been totally
pointless, and
there will be NOTHING to build on in the future, because we won't have
actually prototyped the globally scalable darknet.
Perhaps according to your definition of "darknet" we won't, but my
definition of "darknet" includes the choice to connect to strangers
if the user is willing to take that risk.
What you don't seem to realise is that we don't get to choose whether
or not people will connect to each-other indiscriminately, many
people will regardless of what we say to them. We will see "Freenet
matchmaking" websites set up that will probably ruin the network's
topology as they will have no regard for the requirements of a small
world network.
The best option is to offer people the choice, and if they want an
open node, then at least we can ensure that it won't screw up the
small world topology.
Sure, we might not know for sure whether it could have worked in a
"pure" trusted-link network, but who cares so long as it works in a
realistic scenario which is a mixture of open and dark nodes?
Ian.
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