David E. Weekly wrote:
> If Freenet is carrying too much traffic (movies, MP3s, Quake III, etc.),
> then it would seem to me quite easy to spot a Freenet node, even if one
> was using an HTTPs / SSH pseudo-tunnel to mask the actual content and
> mechanism. The sheer quantity of traffic would give it away. So (and this
> may seem terribly heretical) wouldn't it seem wise to restrict Freenet to
> textual documents only? I'm preparing to be flamed for this, but please,
> hear me out for a second:
> 
> Free speech has been best expressed in text. It's unlikely for this to
> change.

Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, I don't think it can be
done.  Usenet is supposed to be text only, but I suspect that 90% of the
storage space is used for uuencoded binary data.  It's fairly easy for
software to tell the difference between text and a uuencoded binary, but
if we start doing this, people will find some other means to post binary
data.  

Also, what about people who wish to post text as Postscript, PDF, or Word
document?  What about compressed documents?  And the biggest question of
all:  what about encrypted data?  With documents being encrypted such that
nodes can't read them, how is a node to differentiate between text and
binary?  

I don't believe knowledge (free speach) only exists in text form.

Chris.



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