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Why Freenet is Complicated (or not)

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-think-about dept.

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."

2 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I agree by bnenning · · Score: 3, Insightful
    C would have been the language of choice simply because more people know C than java, porting would have been faster.


    It's much easier to write network applications in Java than C, and cross-platform compatibility is far better. Performance is another matter, but apparently they would rather make it work first and then make it work faster, which is entirely reasonable.


    While I konw C, i dont know java.


    There's your problem :) I know both, and in my opinion Java is a much better choice for what Freenet is trying to do.

    --
    How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
  2. Re:Java sucks and I'll prove it. by wurp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Java is ok, but i have yet to see a successful project written in java.


    Wow, rarely have I seen such a ridiculous statement. J2EE is incredibly widely used for internet businesses of all kinds. In this time of declining job options for programmers, java (well, J2EE, anyway) programmers are still somewhat in demand.

    I have worked on many successful java projects. Xtra Online, Marconi Communications, and PDX, are just a few of the companies at which I have worked on successful java projects.

    Business software is generally about reliability. Computers are easily fast enough to do any kind of business calculation blindingly fast in virtually any language, and Java is fairly speedy. Java has great reliability (no buffer overflows, no uninitialized pointers, no stack overflows, no doubly-deleted pointers, etc, etc).

    If you think java is too slow for business applications, the game we are working on over at http://www.cosmgame.com is all in java. I get 50-100 frames per second in full screen 3d mode, all running under java. I shit you not. We will be showing it at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco March 20-23rd at Sun's booth.

    Virtually no business application has anything vaguely close to the kind of performance requirements we have, and we run just fine.

    See you at the GDC! ;)