[Mnet-devel] newbie mnet questions...

[seberino at spawar.navy.mil]

> Personally, I think that the basic Freenet concept of achieving
> anonymity by combining forwarding with routing (with the filesystem) is
> flawed.  In my opinion, even if Freenet's latest design (NGrouting with
> erasure coding) can be made to perform well, the anonymity achieved
> will still be minimal -- i.e. it will provide anonymity only against
> very limited attackers.
>
> Mnet does not attempt to provide anonymity.  As I've said, I think it
> would be a mistake to attempt to do that in the same layer as routing
> and the filesystem.  It could be provided in a lower layer in one of
> two ways:
>
> 1.  The "one-hop privacy" approach, which means implementing an
> anonymous routing system in EGTP (Mnet's communications layer).
>
> 2.  Using an anonymous routing system that someone else has developed,
> such as MixMinion or Tor:

Zooko

I've been thinking more about p2p systems and our conversation.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like Freenet is
the only project I know of that is doing the
original job of trying to provide a censor proof/attack proof/
anonymous p2p system.

I agree with your idea that MixMinion is potentially
a great way to add anonymity to a p2p system.  However, I think
Freenet goes a few steps farther in that in addition to not knowing
who the authors are, they try to prevent you from even knowing *where*
something is stored.  Who cares? If a system *only* provided anonymity it would
still be censorable if someone could find out where objectionable
content was stored and attack it somehow.

In this sense, I'm thinking Freenet is in a class all it's own.
Everything else seems like "just another file sharing system".
I could be wrong but to me Freenet now is looking like the p2p system
to work on.  I would appreciate hearing your opinions on these matters.

Thoughts?