[Mnet-devel] newbie mnet questions...

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

I'm going to reply but send my reply to the p2p-hackers mailing list. 
--Z

On 2004, Sep 26, , at 02:38, seberino at spawar.navy.mil wrote:

>> 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?
>