On Tuesday 04 April 2006 01:00, you wrote: > Cool. Do you expect Galet to scale? Do you have anything in the way of > routing algorithms or do you rely on broadcast search? We could really > do with some local and semi-local stuff e.g. instant messaging (as an > extra incentive for people to add their friends, for example). How do > you do tunnelling? How do you do search? > > The big thing we have is the routing algorithm IMHO. Maybe our > architectures are complementary.
Yes, fortunately it seems that, though our aim is the same, we have started at opposite ends of the problem :-). ATM, Galet is mostly local (the horizon is 1), so there is no public network on top of it yet, and no routing algorithm or search beyond the immediate neighbours, nor scaling problems. It has an invitation system based on cryptographic tokens to be transmitted through offline means (can be e-mail or whatever). The token consists of the hash of the nodes public key (which serves as the nodes identity) and a shared secret (which serves for the first connection only). The key exchange for normal connections is station-to-station, which provides perfect forward secrecy. Galet (in SVN) has semi-local IM, as in, if Alice knows Bob who knows Charlie, the three of them can chat together, Bob acting as a relay for the Alice and Charlie's messages. It also has pretty standard local file-sharing (resuming, priorities...). For the tunneling, Alice configures a tunnel in the GUI, by specifying a local port on her machine and a remote host and port to which Bobs machine will forward the data to (like the ssh -L option). Obviously, tunneling is disabled by default (Bob must enable it). > Oh and Freenet is in Java, and always will be in Java, at least until > 1.0. :| (the language is fine, it's the runtime that's such as *******). > Swing or SWT aren't that far from QT, but anyway, client apps can be in > any language... I do not mind Java at all (a preliminary version of Galet was in Java), but compilation under Windows is not that bad when you get used to it :) and you do not need any extra package installed (JVM), while the application feels more 'native' to the user. And unfortunately I am not familiar with Swing nor SWT... > What core stuff do you think we are missing? I am not familiar with Freenet 0.7, so I cannot tell. > Have you read the papers on our routing algorithm? If the routing is the same as of old (1-2 years back) then yes. Am I right to think that 0.7 is the same routing algorithm than before, but on top of a 'darknet' ? > On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 12:35:48AM +0200, Jean Krohn wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > Hum, this is awkward. I have followed the evolution of Freenet in the > > past and just received the Freenet 0.7 alpha announcement mail. > > > > Since the beginning of last year I have been working on a project > > (Galet) which looks *very* similar to Freenet 0.7. From the web page > > (http://galet.sourceforge.net) : > > > > "Galet is a peer-to-peer application, which primarily aims to provide > > easy to setup secure communication channels between the computers of > > people who know and trust each other. Its secondary goal is to create a > > public network based on these channels. No direct connection occur > > between two nodes that has not been explicitly accepted by the users of > > theses nodes. This makes the network very difficult to censor, as an > > attacker's direct access to the network is limited." > > > > Some details: Galet is already pretty stable and features messaging, > > file-sharing & tunneling (it can be used as VPN). It is written in C++/Qt > > and is available on Unix & Windows. It also has a nice GUI and a very > > cute first time utilisation wizard. It is GPLed. > > > > It seems we have similar goals and are doing pretty much the same thing. > > In that case, would there be any way we could cooperate (fusion / > > interoperability / sharing solutions for similar problems) ? > > > > I just looked on the Freenet web site and failed to find any technical > > documentation on 0.7. The Galet web site is similar in that aspect, but I > > am currently working on a paper detailing the cryptographic protocols > > used. Would that be of any interest ? > > > > Cheers, > > > > Jean > > > > PS: I have to admit that the name "Freenet" sounds *way* cooler than > > "Galet", though :-)
