> The entire Freenet mechanism depends upon the "path compression" effect
> which you get when data is requested, however (as was pointed out the last
> time this was suggested) with this mechanism this path compression would
> not occur.
Freenet does not rely on path compression. Path compression optimizes
Freenet by making it closer to being fully connected. Inside the cluster
it's fully connected anyway. Outside of the cluster, path compression
happens between normal nodes and cluster gateways. A cluster appears just
like any other node. Nothing bad happens to the network topology just
because path compression doesn't happen between nodes inside and outside
of a cluster! If a file is retrieved from a file inside the cluster, the
DataSource will be set to the gateway. This is fine. The gateway might
cache it anyway. If not, then it will add only 1 to the necessary HTL
since the gateway is one hop away from all of the nodes in the cluster.
Clusters work fine with path compression. There is not a problem. You also
have the option of having a fully private network (no gateway) in which
case you don't talk to the public network, so there is still no problem.
The problem which Scott pointed out is that a message sent into a cluster
will bounce around in the cluster, absorbing a lot of HTL. While this
won't be a problem unless there are a lot of clusters bunched together,
which probably won't happen. However, even so, a slight tweaking is
probably possible to eliminate this problem entirely. The particulars
would need to be worked out of course, but basically if you could tweak
the routing for messages coming into a cluster so that it would only ask
one node in the cluster and the pop back out into the public network. Then
a cluster would act exactly like a node, a very large node run on multiple
computers.
> suppose we should look at the general idea here. To make it concrete - we
> are looking for ways to make it more difficult to locate Freenet nodes.
> Replacing inform.php is the first obvious way to do this. Discouraging
This doesn't help at all since MediaEnforcer scans blocks of IP addresses
and therefore doesn't use inform.php in the first place.
> nodes from using the 19114 default is another. Changing over to a public
This doesn't stop them because they can port scan.
> key encryption mechanism rather than DH key-exchanges is another.
This doesn't make any kind of difference at all.
> I think that it will always be possible to "fish" for IP addresses
> (ie. build up a list of Freenet nodes but not in any directed
> manner), but the likelihood that for any given IP address it will be
> possible to shut it down is slim. It would need to be on an ISP which is:
Let's say you're the Chinese government instead. The chance of shutting
down a Freenet node if you find one would be 100% if you decided that
Freenet nodes were bad.
> b) Using a mechanism where it is possible to tie IP addresses to customers
> (ie. not cable)
Except if you can't tie a user to an IP address, of course, but you can in
many schemes. For instance if you keep logs of your DHCP transactions then
it's not a big deal, even on cable.
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