> Good question. Because you can have a thriving network inside of a
> cluster that exists partially independently from the public network. You
> can do a good bit of file sharing without having to reach out into the
> public network at all. This limits visibility. If you just use a bunch of
> clients connected to a central trusted node, you have a central point of
> failure and a bottleneck. If you have a cluster with a gateway you only
> need to go through the gateway to get things not in the cluster (and the
> cluster might be large). If the gateway goes away, you are not totally cut
> off. You have the contents of the cluster. A new gateway by a single node
> and instantly everyone in the cluster has access to the information in the
> public network again. And of course you could have multiple gateways
> connected to by various nodes (splits trust that way. I don't have to
> trust the node you gateway to, I just have to trust you).
This proposal is broken. Who gets to be the gateway and why do your
concerns not apply to it? How do people find a significant number of
nodes through out-of-band means where there is no likelyhood that an
unauthorised person could obtain one of those node addresses? Think about
someone downloading Freenet for the first time and getting a message "All
you need to do is find someone already running a Freenet node who knows
for a fact that you are not a government agent, and who you know for a
fact not to be a government agent". Most people would find this task
nearly impossible.
> The point of bringing up China is that the most scrutiny comes when things
> are passing over the firewall. If there is a large internal Chinese
> Freenet then if *one* person can get a piece of information across the
> firewall, it is now available to the entire Chinese Freenet.
Er, much better that encrypted traffic passing over the firewall becomes a
regular occurance to reduce suspicion of any individual.
> Nobody was afraid to use Napster! This is entirely different! There was no
> threat when using Napster.
There was the prospect of a threat - which is exactly the case with
Freenet in the US with the DMCA.
> > If someone wants to create such a system then they should write some
> > software which uses steganography to allow the transmission of hidden
> > encrypted messages through phone conversations which is resistent to
> > third-world quality phone-lines, and with precautions against
> > Tempest-style monitoring etc etc.
>
> Or I could add 10-20 lines of code to Freenet.
And achieve nothing.
> > My second answer is that there is safety in numbers. Widely deploying
> > Freenet all over the world is the best defence against this.
>
> Wide deployment requires protection of operators.
No, protection of operators requires wide deployment, and your paranoia
only works against this.
> I'm not worried so much about people loosing Internet access. The
> MediaEnforcer thing is just a wake up call to an serious flaw in our
> system which we need to patch up.
Wrong. You are saying that Freenet is "flawed" because it does not
achieve something which it was never intended to, nor claimed to,
achieve.
Ian.
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