On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 01:39:28PM +0100, Michael Rogers wrote: > >We could really > >do with some local and semi-local stuff e.g. instant messaging (as an > >extra incentive for people to add their friends, for example). > > The more I've thought about f2f networks the more important local > communication has seemed. Global search and routing are problems from > "light" networks that are not only harder to implement in "dark" > networks, but make less sense there. Rather than taking the internet or > traditional p2p networks as our model, I think we should be looking at > im, irc, livejournal and myspace. "Friend management" and communication > with friends are a significant part of these systems; browsing and > searching are relatively unimportant.
Well, should we be adding people from seeing their blogs? That is precisely how LiveJournal works, but it is dangerous from a darknet perspective... > > Friend management seems to have at least three aspects: presence, > visibility, and introductions. Presence means being able to see when > your friends are online; fproxy already offers that. Visibility means > being able to see who your friends are friends with, and to choose which > friends are visible to which others. At the moment freenet takes the > most secure but least social approach: friends are invisible to one > another. But in order to encourage the third aspect of friend > management, introductions, it might be useful to allow people to make > selected friends visible to selected other friends. Well, introductions are probably the better way to do this. Send somebody a message "you might want to connect to X; connect to him if you know him". > > Introductions are important for a friend-to-friend network because they > allow people to make new connections without out-of-band communication. > The introducer must be trusted not to perform a man-in-the-middle > attack, but by definition the introducer is someone the other two > parties already trust. (For extra security, the new friends should be > encouraged to confirm one another's keys out-of-band at the earliest > opportunity.) Yeah, we should allow introductions, but we should put some careful warnings in... > > How do we make introductions as painless as possible? > > 1) Allow users to make selected friends visible to selected other > friends, and make it easy to browse your friends' friends, possibly by > hosting myspace-style profile pages for your friends. Not a good idea IMHO. Allow users to introduce a specific friend to a specific friend. > > 2) Provide a link on the profile page for requesting an introduction to > a friend's friend - the friend's friend will be sent a request, and if > the request is approved, the introducer will give each friend the other > friend's ref (including the public key). No. We should not encourage people to expose their friends to their friends, except by way of specific introductions. > > 3) Automatically confirm your friends' public keys through other mutual > friends, to make MITM attacks more difficult. For example if Bob > introduces Alice to Carol, and Alice and Carol subsequently discover > that they both know Dave, they should automatically exchange refs > through Dave as well, making it harder for Bob to perform a MITM attack. I don't get it. Bob could have made up a new node with a new key. We have to do some sort of out of band verification... if only by asking people to confirm introductions out of band. > > 4) Provide a "web of trust" page showing whose ref was obtained or > confirmed through whom, and which refs have been verified face-to-face. > > 5) Allow users to host local blogs and chatrooms that are only > accessible to their friends. Again, provide an easy interface for > friends to request and approve introductions. That's a good idea. > > Anyway I'm sorry if this sounds like a long list of feature requests. > This is the sort of interface I've been planning for my own vapourware > f2f network and I thought some of the ideas might also apply to freenet. > Any thoughts? > > Michael -- Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/tech/attachments/20060404/ad4aa147/attachment.pgp>
