On 7 Oct 2005, at 19:44, jrandom at i2p.net wrote: >>> 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. > >> So what's your point? That there are things the Chinese government >> can do to counter Freenet? We don't disagree. The point is that >> there are things the Chinese government can do to counter the >> primitive tools being used *today* by Chinese dissidents, giving them >> a better, if imperfect, option is a very worthwhile endeavour. > > No, my point is that the anonymity offered by an attacked Freenet is > less than the anonymity offered by small scale "primitive" tools.
So the anonymity offered by something nobody is attacking is greater than the anonymity offered by something that people are attacking? That is rather circular, something isn't secure if its security depends on nobody attacking it. The question is what tool offers the most resistance given equal amounts of effort being expended to attack them. In the case of non- darknet approaches, the answer is that they offer significantly less resistance to attack than a darknet approach. This doesn't mean that a darknet is *impossible* to attack, just that it is significantly more difficult. > I have yet to see any discussion of that tradeoff in Freenet's > design. Then look harder, we discuss it all the time. > Any statements regarding the anonymity of Freenet when it > isn't under attack are meaningless, if not misleading. Who is making such a statement? The effectiveness of any "privacy" system is the cost required to obtain information about users that the users don't want to be revealed. The cost of revealing that a user is part of a darknet like Freenet 0.7 will be far higher than the cost required to reveal that a user is part of "opennets" like I2P or today's Freenet, therefore in this regard, Freenet 0.7 will provide superior privacy. Ian.
