On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Matthew Toseland <toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote: > On Saturday 10 May 2008 17:33, Ian Clarke wrote: >> I see a simple scenario where a "sneakernet" would be useful is in a >> situation like Burma or Tibet where stuff is happening, possibly a >> political crack-down, and the authorities are actively trying to >> prevent information from getting out. > > You are assuming a short term emergency, right?
In this scenario, yes - although I think similar issues arise in aggressively repressive regimes such as Burma and North Korea. > This is what happens now, except that the determination of what is most > important is made individually. If there is no filtering, it will of course > be flooded with garbage. Well, its kinda what happens now, except this proposal would be faster, lower risk, and much more convenient. Flooding is a danger, but I'm sure it could be mitigated. > Manual filtering will work better, if stuff is of universal relevance. Any > broadcast system will be flooded. Manual filtering would require transmission in the clear, and would require far more human intervention. Some kind of web-of-trust for authors may be more appropriate. >> 1. The platform for this type of thing is a small mobile device, >> getting Freenet to work well on an iPhone would be a world of pain - >> and doesn't buy anything for us > > No, to do that requires a massive amount of short range bandwidth. Phones do > not have this. What you want is to swap actual memory sticks, at least until > PDAs with UWB (maybe wireless USB) are available. iPhones support 802.11n, which apparently operates at up to 70Mbps at ranges up to 300m. That seems plenty fast enough to me. > Furthermore, with the currently planned changes IMHO Freenet 0.7.1 will be > able to run in a 64MB memory limit. Running it on a low end device is not so > far away, and would have some massive advantages (e.g. being able to ship it > on one of the fanless boxes they currently ship for overnight bittorrent > downloads). It would be nice if Freenet could run on an iPhone, but I'm not holding my breath. >> 2. Most or all Freenet apps assume a few seconds latency on requests >> (Frost, Fproxy, etc), yet the latency with the sneakernet would be >> measured in days. Freenet's existing apps would be useless here. > > Not true IMHO. A lot of existing Freenet apps deal with long term requests, > which would work very nicely with sneakernet. Such as? FMS is pretty slow even with multi-second requests, do you really think it would be useful with multi-day requests? I can't think of a single Freenet app that would be useful over a transport with multi-day latencies, it would be insane. > I see it more as a long term, attack resistant, scalable solution for general > communication in places where Freenet-over-UDP doesn't work. Agreed. > What is wrong with this vision? Technically speaking, this might be best > post-0.8, but I do think that there is a certain synergy here. Two things having "a certain synergy" is way way way below the bar needed to justify incorporating the functionality into the same app. Ian. -- Email: ian at uprizer.com Cell: +1 512 422 3588 Skype: sanity
