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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."
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.
Microsoft's argument for a long time was that Java's security model was overly complicated. ASP, by contrast, had a simplified security model. Either an ASP executes scripts locally, or it doesn't. Thus ASP does have a simple security model.
Now... which security model will be suitable for your projects? Which security model is potentially better for the client browsers?
I am extremely familiar with freenet and I can tell you that the current security model is very *robust* yet I feel that it is very streamlined. By contrast, napster's security model was simple. So Mr. MP3 Pirate, which security model would you prefer? Do you want to continue to enjoy music or would you rather get nasty letters from the MPAA/RIAA and get your cablemodem shut off.
Keeping
Why do I feel the need to defend java on slashdot? Here I go again:
Java is slower than C, yet less powerful than C++.
Yeah, that's a testable statement. Most of java's use is network-bound programming, where pure speed isn't an issue, but it's excellent networking library is a benefit. No one is coding an OS in java.Add to this the fact that java 1.4 is on part (except for GUIs) with C++, and you have no speed issue.
Java is portible but so is C#, C, C++.
Java is binary portable which is a huge advantage. I can take compiled code from one architecture, and run it on another. Do that in C or C++. Hell, you can't even run a complete C# program in solaris now, so much for the common run time.
Java currently doesnt seem to be a match for C#
Is that why C# is an almost exact syntatic copy of java? Is that why the architectures and security models are almost the same? Which language has more users now? Which actually has deployed code running in production?
Java is ok, but i have yet to see a successful project written in java.
Have you heard of Tomcat? That's a moderately successful java project. Also, many real businesses use java on the web layers. I guess those don't count as 'successful projects', but they should count for something. The fact that there are relatively few java projects has more to do with the open source community being stand-offish regarding java, and not with language faults.Just posted on slashdot a couple of weeks ago: Root Node Live, which is a java project (brought to you by konspire) helps people trade jam-band music.
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
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.