Re: [Mldonkey-users] Now that Filenexus, Sharereactor and Jigle are gone

[Curtis Magyar]

On Sat, 2004-03-20 at 14:02 +0200, mithrandi wrote:

> Freenet is primarily concerned with distributing content in a secure and
> anonymous fashion; no attempt is made to track the authenticity and
> validity of that content. Also, most people find the overhead incurred
> in various forms by the transport-level security of Freenet to be
> unacceptable. A Freenet plugin for mldonkey might well be useful to some
> people, but I don't think Freenet could be a substitute for the software
> I'm hacking on.

If I'm not mistaken, freenet does guarantee the authenticity of the
documents:

Strong Security
Freenet has long-supported the concept of "Content Hash Keys" which
guarantee the integrity of retrieved data. This approach has since been
adopted by other architectures. Freenet also supports "Signed Subspace
Keys" which allow content to be digitally signed. This also allows
content integrity to be guaranteed, but is more flexible than CHKs.
  - http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=content

I'm thinking of freenet only in the context of distributing a
Sharereactor like page, with what Freenet calls a DBR or Date Based
Redirect, where a new edition could be published daily with new
releases.

> If you're suggesting that I use Freenet as the transport layer for my
> software, then that is a possibility to consider; however, Freenet is
> very complex compared to, say, a simple Kademlia implementation. Also, I
> don't think there is any merit in protecting the communication of
> "indexing" information better than the actual data transfers itself.
> Sure, Freenet would make it extremely hard to find out who is
> distributing release information, but that's pretty pointless when it's
> trivial to see who is actually sharing the files referred to in the
> releases.
> 
> If I've missed something here, please point it out ;)

My message wasn't so much about your application, as a response to the
thread in general.  I think it would be a good idea to utilize existing
technology rather than re-invent the wheel.

I've always looked at the indexing webpages of the edonkey network as
its greatest strength.  If that system is being jeopardized, then maybe
the time has come for anonymous indexing.

--
Curtis Magyar