On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 02:41:14PM +0200, TLorD wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > toad at amphibian.dyndns.org wrote: > > I apologize for provoking a flamewar, but the article is utterly untrue > > and a personal attack. This may not be the author's intention, but it is > > the fact of the matter. > > Is this a flamewar? Oh well. Whatever. > > As an ex-freenet user, I've moved to I2P for some reasons: speed, usability, > the fact it's dynamic rather than static, the feeling it's more versatile > overall. This was back when freenet was 0.5-something.
Right. This is perfectly reasonable. I2P is faster, and more usable, today. It offers reasonable security. Possibly better security than Freenet in some contexts. > > I reckon I2P wouldn't last more than few seconds in China. Minutes, perhaps, > but that's not the point. Harvesting makes things very hard in countries where > it's forbidden. I do recognize the darknet idea is a good thing. But, I have > a few doubts regarding what you say about darknets. > > First, why would it be a slow process to catch the darknet users? once you > have a mole in the network, you (governmet agency) can rather easily check on > traffic flow between users and outline the network. You just need the traffic > logs for a week or so. Also, once you catch a node, you can easily see the > direct peers and repeat the (abduction) process. What mechanism do people have > to remove the proof that they used the darknet? > Unless you implement the darknet as a hidden feature of a modified > pre-existing P2P program (say eMule), so that its trafic is submerged between > the other requests, you're open to traffic analisys. Right, darknet isn't enough in the long term. In the long term we need steganographic transports, and if that doesn't work (note that traffic flow analysis is rather expensive at present and tends to produce false positives), then we need non-internet transports such as wifi and sneakernet. The former is easy; the latter isn't too hard, and IMHO would still be useful even though the latency might be days. > > Secondly, why do you think the network would become a small world? (a FAQ or > paper link would be enough) There are some papers indicating that social networks are small world, however it is by no means certain at present. > Somehow, I can hardly imagine why someone would > build loops in the chain. I'm more prone of thinking about a rather > random-looking tree structure. Expecially in situations like China, adding a > new node is risky. Would YOU talk about adding someone who says he's already > in the network? He could be lying. He could be dangerous. Unless of course > you're talking about each chinese connects to someone outside China for the > darknet, in which case I suspect the gentle users on the our side ot the wall > would quickly get blacklisted, once again cutting out chinese users (and > paying them a visit for connecting to a forbidden address) Depends. If we connect to 500 chinese users, probably; if we advertise it on the web, probably. OTOH, if I personally know a chinese person I want to give bandwidth to, it might well work. Even if I meet people on IRC and connect them by DCC chat, it might still work. > > Lastly, speed. While I2P can easily balance traffic to unloaded nodes, a > darknet cannot do that, for the simple fact that its possible connections are > in a much smaller number. And, it's easier to saturate a darknet because its > connections are arbitrary and not optimal in some performance metric. I > believe a caching scheme can mitigate the problem, but not solve it. In fact > it's plain possible that a number of similarly-interested users are connected > in very different places of the network. Studies suggest small world networks are reasonably robust; we will see. It will surely be less efficient in some ways in terms of more data duplication; that is inevitable with any constrained-links topology. > > Last words, I do think that freenet 0.5 was rather a failure. I also think 0.7 > has some interesting possibilities, and as such it's not dead meat in its > cradle. A scalable darknet IS interesting stuff. > But, I2P over freenet, not yet. This is some very future talk. I wouldn't say it was a failure as such; people still use it. But 0.7 will be better. As for I2P over freenet... we will have more services in 0.7 (e.g. irc), but they will be severely limited on bandwidth. If they don't work, we'll find a way to make them work, or we'll disable them. :) > > So spoke I. And I might be wrong :D -- Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/tech/attachments/20051005/6bc5d23c/attachment.pgp>
