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Why Freenet is Complicated (or not)
JohnBE writes "'This article is primarily a friendly rebuttal to Steven Hazel's CodeCon 2002 talk entitled "libfreenet: a case study in horrors incomprehensible to the mind of man, and other secure protocol design mistakes". Hazel presents the Freenet protocol as an overly complicated, self designed crypto layer. In fact, though somewhat complicated, literally every step in the protocol was carefully thought out to resist certain attacks and to increase certain properties desirable for Freenet operators and the network as a whole.' Interesting in light of Peek-a-booty, this article covers many of the issues involved with creating a anonymous P2P system."
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/2/17/203032/375
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Here's a quick overview of Freenet, if you need to get up to speed.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
This was also posted to another scoop site, kuro5hin :)
For those of you who care, Ian Clark also commented on the story himself(1 2 3 4 5)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I beleive the paragraph I submitted was the original article, the Kuro5hin article was posted later on. If that wasn't the case it was submitted simeltaneosly to two different sites. Big deal. Does it matter as long as we get the beef?
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I did supply single quotes for cosmetic reasons and to denote that it wasn't written by me. Hence the link to the article with full author attribution. I have no control over the time it was posted, or if it was seperately posted at Kuro5hin.
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If you wish to read about well-designed anonymous P2P systems, look at Crowds (similar design to Pick-a-Booty, years earlier).
Anonymity has many more uses: censorship resistant systems often use anonymity. See, for example Free Haven or the following article on a new design
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~aas23/Anon_p2p2.ps
I can't really comment on mojonation as last time i checked they didn't have any real documenation on how it actually worked, but Gnutella is way simpler then Freenet.
I wrote a gnutella client in one night, when gnutella first hit the net people had already figured out the protocol and we're writing clients for it within days. There are only about 5 different commands in Gnutella, i have no idea how many freenet is. But i have attempted to understand more then just a high level concept and found the details to be confusing as all hell.
anyway,
-Jon
this is my sig.
The purpose of GPG is either to encrypt data specifically for one person, certify exactly who created/encrypted said data, or both. Freenet was designed to encrypt data for anyone while guaranteeing anonymity of the submitter.
Yes, you could use GPG to encrypt with a symmetric key and just not sign it, but you'd still need to build an infrastructure around it. Freenet wants "plausible deniability" for the hosting server, making it impossible for anyone to decrypt the data as its stored on the disk. A symmetric key with GPG would be immediately decryptable.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Not only can you NOT search anything on Freenet, it's sloooowwwww.
I gave it a spin a while back (a week ago), and even pulling down the pages from the proxy home page (which are presumably quite popular, ie the site of good and site of evil, etc) took a good few minutes. I gave the thing a couple of hours to get some connections established, and, well, no improvement. My machine certainly had no lack of cpu power, or diskspace, or bandwidth. Pathetic.
Speaking of disk space, I initially allocated 10gb to my node, and boy, is that a mistake! I now know why the default is 100kb! Because it takes roughly half hour to initialize the storage for 1gb I ended up giving it. Hey, no one said Java was an IO champ...