> > Who controls the spider program? Who are they, and why should > > we trust them? Freenet's stability and power is in it's decentralized > > and anonymous nature. This sounds like it would centralize the search > > process, which would either create a bottleneck, a single point of attack, > > or both. > > This is probably totally incorrect, > but why not just decentralize the process and have the nodes do the > spidering while they're working? > > (I'm basing this idea on the premise that nodes can decrypt the data they're > passing along as intermediate nodes in a chain...)
I'm not sure whether that's right or not, but if I had to guess, I would guess that it's not right. It would be a potential anonymity compromise for node Y to know that it's passing Subversive Material A from node Z to node X. Besides, wouldn't one of the main points of document encryption fall by the wayside if the document wasn't encrypted en route from node Z to node X? > If each node randomly chose to decrypt the content and index it, then nobody > would have control over the indexing process. > > The problems I see with this are: > 1. How to issue search requests to nodes which have a likelihood of keeping > the index > 2. How to spread commonly requested indexes without compromising anonymity. > 3. I've probably hit some major problem already that compromises anonymity. Here's the biggest problem, that always crops up when dealing with decentralized peer to peer applications - what do you do about rogue nodes? Say you're node X, and you request information about fluffy bunnies from my node Y. I in turn ask Z, who returns information about fluffy bunnies. Being the evil node operator that I am, I register this document under the keywords "political dissident", "gaping wound", "RIAA can bite me" and so on. How would you deal with this issue? (Of course all of this again assumes documents aren't encrypted when moving between nodes...) _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
