-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Matthew Toseland wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 02:41:14PM +0200, TLorD wrote:
>>toad at amphibian.dyndns.org wrote:
> (note that traffic
> flow analysis is rather expensive at present and tends to produce false
> positives)

AFAIK that's quite correct. But consider this scenario: computers are divided
in two groups, servers and private users, possibly on different networks or IP
space. Now, all traffic user-to-user is likely P2P of some sort (and possibly
DCC, internet games and a couple of others, but that'd be at best sporadic
traffic). The number of P2P applications is rather small and methods of
recognizing them are known. How hard and expensive would it be to log all
"strange looking" traffic in that scenario? My guess is that it'd be far less
hard and expensive than the Great Firewall of China.
I'd also argue that false positives aren't that much of an issue in state 
regimes.

>>Secondly, why do you think the network would become a small world? (a FAQ or
>>paper link would be enough)
> There are some papers indicating that social networks are small world,
> however it is by no means certain at present.

While I tend do agree that usual social networks are small worlds, I'm not
convinced this specific darknet would become a small world by itself.

>>darknet, in which case I suspect the gentle users on the our side ot the wall
>>would quickly get blacklisted, once again cutting out chinese users (and
>>paying them a visit for connecting to a forbidden address)
> 
> Depends. If we connect to 500 chinese users, probably; if we advertise
> it on the web, probably. OTOH, if I personally know a chinese person I
> want to give bandwidth to, it might well work. Even if I meet people on
> IRC and connect them by DCC chat, it might still work.

Agreed. But I feel that would be a bit too few. (I however agree that 5 users
is better than 0)

> Studies suggest small world networks are reasonably robust; we will see.

That's correct. This is still assuming that freenet 0.7 will be one. Mind you,
I for one would be very happy if my conjecture (tree or very weak graph
coverage) was proven wrong and yours proven true, but this is something which
might eventually be empirically proven when 0.7 will be up and working.
I also wonder if there's a way to draw the topology of the network in a safe
(anonymous, untraceable) way: unless there effectively is one, all you can do
is hope/guess that the network is shaped like you (or I or anyone) want.

> It will surely be less efficient in some ways in terms of more data
> duplication; that is inevitable with any constrained-links topology.

That's what I meant with lower efficiency (that's a tradeoff after all: speed
for security)

> I wouldn't say it was a failure as such; people still use it. But 0.7
> will be better.

(rather) A failure in the sense of something that the product offered worse
performance than other programs (in this case I2P) for some metric (in my
case, the reasons why I switched over to I2P as mentioned in the other post).
Useless? Definitely not. The distributed storage is still a good thing which
is not (yet) on I2P, if that's what you need; the freenet experiments brought
up some interesting questions, and without freenet I doubt there'd be an I2P
to start with. I'm not going to say it was wasted time for the simple fact I
don't believe it was.
(rather) A failure also because, if the need for a redo from 0 was felt, it's
because something went wrong (isn't that the definition of a failure?).
I don't either believe a failure is something intrinsecally bad. In fact, most
good things come from failures and retries and learning and retrying even 
harder.
Fact is, I *DO* look forward to freenet 0.7 and the empirical results gathered
from releasing the hare into the wild.

> As for I2P over freenet... we will have more services in 0.7 (e.g. irc),
> but they will be severely limited on bandwidth. If they don't work,
> we'll find a way to make them work, or we'll disable them. :)

Lol then first get 0.7 out, then see how (if!) interactive stuff works (irc
and such) and only then will be the I2P over freenet worth thinking about :D
Also, think carefully how things would work in the no-free-bandwidth situation
you are sure to meet very soon (freenet 0.5 was, I2P will probably soon be, I
don't really expect freenet 0.7 to be safe from that issue).


So spoke I. And I might be wrong :D

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFDQ+DuMiWEUf7YMGERAglqAKCnTUENRIwP12zvhpUlAOZMHKra8QCg5/xD
uHW3OSJNMedyiEygjXwRte8=
=tFf+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Reply via email to