Greetings. I've joined the freenet mailing list moved by curiosity and by some will of helping. Please forgive me if I'm talking about already-discussed issues, and ignore me in such case. In the last few years I've been hearing about freenet every once in a while. I've tried it but yet I have no use for it nor could give my spare bandwidth and disk space to the community so my support is limited to thinking and suggesting features. My doubts about the spreading of freenet are about the searching issues and the (im)possibility of using a google-like search engine. I understand the implications of a search engine that could reveal what kind of documents are on your machine; but what about metadata as a form of searching tool? Let me give an example: a user pushes some data into the freenet, being it the darknet or the lightnet. Along with the data a user should be able to push metadata, such as any kind of information about the content it has been posted. Information and metadata should go along together but should be two separate entities; metadata should also be "signed" or tied to the data by way of crypto signatures and such. A freenet-search engine should search only into the metadata, and give the results under the form of hashes or document keys. Once a user has a key he/she can ask for the appropriate document via the freenet.
Let me give an example: if I publish sensitive information about how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China, and I live in China, probably I won't be able to tell the key of the document directly to friends or to post it on the web. I'd be traced and killed very soon. But if I can publish the data anonymously and tie metadata such as "firewalling/China/circumvention" to the document, any search engine can see it and make it findable by anyone. Even more: the metadata should be encrypted with one or more search engines public keys. If my publishing net is connected with the search engine, my job is done. Nobody can be sure that the networking I'm publishing in is really connected to the "main" freenet network, but that's another issue. Encrypting metadata and giving it more priority into the net can make also impossible for a user to understand what's on their machine by looking at the metadata that is going along. Problems could be: if a user searches for the key they can find what's the document about. I don't see a solution to this, so I think metadata should not be mandatory. this is just an idea; as I said before, please forgive me if such issues have already been discussed or are already implemented in freenet; the only thing I've been reading are the faqs and some archives of this mailing list. best regards, lorenzo g. -- :lorenzo a. grespan --- GNU/Linux User Group Mantova - Italy GPG Key fingerprint = 5372 1B49 9E61 747C FB9A 4DAE 5D2A A9A0 74B4 8F1A
