Hi Josh, > It seems that the argument for a darknet is that somebody watching your > traffic won't see you communicating with "known Freenet nodes," thereby > making it harder to know if you're running a node.
I don't think that's the argument - as I see it, the argument is that nobody can find out you're running a node just by joining the network; they actually have to sniff your traffic. To take your example of the Chinese dissidents: in an open network the authorities could just crawl the network looking for Chinese IP addresses, connect to those nodes in order to see what kind of queries they were issuing, query them in order to see what kind of content they were sharing, etc. I agree that a friend-to-friend topology isn't perfect, but it seems a lot less vulnerable than a completely unrestricted topology. Cheers, Michael
