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

> Reality disagrees with you.  The Chinese government has arrested,
> brutalised, even murdered many more than three people

For using Freenet?

> Yeah, because the Chinese really need us to tell them how to build
> walkie-talkies.

And the Chinese really need us to tell them how to communicate?

The idea that I am somehow not sympathetic to their needs is 
preposterous.  I am, however, human, and have limitations on what I
can do.  Winning the battle in the 'west' is going to take a whole 
lot of work, and I'm of the opinion that we should solve our own
problems before going to fight other people's battles.

> > square pegs don't fit in round holes.  Tech
> > that makes sense in the west does not inherently make sense elsewhere.
>
> We can all string together truisms, I don't see the relevance to this
> discussion.

Distributed data stores are useful for two things - flash floods, and
high latency comm (high latency comm means the time between 
transmission and reception is high, not that the time between attempted
reception and actual reception is high).

Yes, you can use a distributed data store for low latency comm, but a
packet (or, yes, circuit) switched network fits that need much better.
Email over UUCP made sense when we didn't have internet connections,
but there's a reason why we very rarely use UUCP today.

You've missed the economics of scale issue again entirely.  If 
Freenet achieves what it sounds like it is trying to achieve in China
(etc), it would be seen as a threat and actual resources would be 
expended to stop it.  They're not expending actual resources now, as
it hasn't broken the threshold for them to bother.  Once it does,
depending upon what they do, users will be *less secure* than they
are with techniques that have not yet broken that threshold.

I don't mean to dissuade the Freenet folks from trying to help those
in such regimes, but merely to keep a perspective on things.  The
distributed data store behind Freenet has been repurposed enough
over the years that it makes sense to step back and ask whether its
the right tool for the task at hand, or whether there are more
appropriate ones for the given concrete use cases.

=jr
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFDRrnkWYfZ3rPnHH0RAmsZAJsFO3ijBY2XF+ra+R09wOitz9JGEQCeO86n
Bjw9NdFKZ/GOR31MY5Qq6NY=
=Xv5m
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Reply via email to