> I disagree, it is not just a question of degrees, Freenet *depends* on > the path compression functionality, giving people the option of > switching it off would effectively mean that they are not implementing > the Freenet protocol, merely exploiting the network, gaining the > advantages without contributing back.
Freenet depends on path compression being used generally in order to be fast. The paranoid only talking to each other will only effect the area of the network they belong to (by definition since if they don't talk to other people they can't slow these other people down). You can't really argue that these private clusters can hurt the network since any private cluster can be treated simply as a node. Any path compression can pass through these clusters. So paths can compress around private clusters. Besides, you can't force people to talk to nodes they don't trust. That's just insane. > Besides, I am sceptical about the security benefits of this anyway. > Do you seriously thing Joe public is going to go to the trouble of > identifying other Freenet users, confirming that they are trustworthy > (how?), and then getting their public key through non-electronic > means? Even the most paranoid wouldn't be bothered to do that. I'm not suggesting this for the benefit of Joe Public but for those that care enough about their security to not want to talk to nodes run by the people they're trying to hide their activities from. The persecuted political dissidents. And yes they will go to the trouble to do this. I want the ability to only talk to the people that I trust. How do I determine which nodes are trustworthy? I know the person that runs it. Repressed people have been doing this kind of underground networking for a long time. We do want to help depressed people, don't we? > Secondly, even if you did connect directly to a corrupt node, you > could maintain deniability about who initiated the messages which > were sent on to that node, which you can currently do in Freenet. That won't help in a country where being caught running a Freenet node could be punishable in and of itself. In such situations you need to be able to talk only to certain trusted parties. > Neither of these precautions require any action on the part of the > user, where as your proposal would require a degree of effort on the > part of the user in terms of obtaining the addresses of trusted nodes Yes, it takes effort. For those who care to make the effort. It's not as if I'm suggesting that everyone do this to set up a node. > which even I would be reluctant to do (just think how difficult it > would be to do this living under an oppressive reigeme (in a pub: > "hey mate, you run a freenet node?..."). Repressed people everywhere have social trust networks. That's how things like resistance movements and revolutions work. _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
