Re: GUIs and Servers and GNUnet, Oh My! (was [GNUnet-developers] Freenet 0.5)

[Krista Bennett]

Jan Marco Alkema hath spoken thusly on Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 10:33:17AM -0800:

First off, please read Tracy's response... he makes several valid points 
in response to your e-mail. :)

> May be a good suggestion to make the gnunet core code Windows compatible.

That's the point of the Windows port. It's just time-consuming.

I'm going to, for discussion purposes, clarify Jan Marco's earlier e-mails
to the list as I understand them from private communication; I know this
has been covered in conversations with Christian and quite likely
mentioned in some version of one of the papers, but this may clear up some
confusion as to what was (and is) intended:

Jan Marco's point about the GUI and copyright has to do with the idea of
the GUI and the gnunet server running on different machines, or running
your own GUI interface to your server that is publically accessible.  
That is to say, Christian (for example) sets up a publically-available
server, and I run something on my machine which uses his to download the
files, or perhaps he gives me access directly to his GNUnet server through
some application he is running.

Jan Marco's point about copyright, then, is an obvious conclusion from the
papers;  if the above system is set up such that I just send Christian's
server plaintext queries, and I'm provided with a download mechanism
through his server, it opens both of us up to liability. (Forgive me for
explaining in detail, but I want to clear up what the discussion here is
about) I, of course, have two problems; one is easy: if I'm not talking to
Christian over an encrypted channel, anyone can see that I'm asking for a
copy of that pesky Bill of Rights and furthermore that I've received it.  
Additionally, if Christian is working for some anonymous government agency
working to stamp out card-carrying members of the ACLU, he knows exactly
what I've requested and received. This also creates a problem for
Christian because now that he's seen what I want and has had the ability
to stop me from getting it, he can perhaps be held liable for giving it to
me. (Although if he doesn't claim to exercize editorial control, he might
not; this is up for debate) This is really just the centralized server
problem.

So what I think he was trying to say is that if you were developing a 
client on another separate server, you have these issues to consider. This 
we already knew; there are liabilities involved for any node that sends 
plaintext queries and receives unencrypted replies, or for a node that 
receives plaintext queries and downloads and decrypts files from them and 
delivers them. 

So this is what he's getting at in talking about a GUI. Correct?

> 1) Porting Cdfoon Java GUI to gnunet;

I'm going to depend on Blake or Igor to kick my butt for the rest of the
mail if I lie or something, because I'm talking through a heavy lack of
sleep here.

I'm not really sure if your intent is to have a separate request app
running on the client's machine which transmits requests to the remote
server, or to have the server running a publically accessible client (on a
web page or something). There are some issues you'd have to address with
both.

I suppose I could say more here, but I think I'll leave it til I find out 
what you mean. I can think of all sorts of issues in all sorts of 
scenarios, but there's no point in trying to explain them on 4 hours of 
sleep unless there's a reason to :)

If all you're looking to do is have a Java GUI instead of gtk on your own
server, look at the gtkui code and see how it uses calls to the textui
stuff. Doing that through JNI should probably be sufficient, although not
having ever touched the GUI code maybe there's something else going on
that I don't know about.

The best I can say is that if you're just meaning to open up a webpage
through which people can submit direct plaintext requests to your GNUnet
server and get files back, you're right, you open your server and the
client client up to various levels of liability depending on your
adversary model.

> 2) Porting Megafoon Windows API and Megafoon Windows installer to gnunet;

You might be getting a little bit ahead of things here...

> 3) (Automatically) Software distribution;

???

> 4) Install the banking perl routines of Peter Kaas.
> 
> Ad 4) Peter Kaas made perl routines to Interface to a Dutch Bank (Postbank).
> See also http://sourceforge.net/projects/girotel-gto/ I mine opinion bank
> transactions can be a coordination means for the sequence and allocation of
> the scarce gnunet resources (CPU, Disk space, network capacity, etc.) of the
> file up/downloading proccesses. (password = empty. first row is to log in,
> last two rows is for downloading the source code(logout process)).

As Tracy said, there is already an economic model implemented in GNUnet.  
See http://www.ovmj.org/gnunet/download/ebe.ps

- K

-- 
***********************************************************************
Krista Bennett                               address@hidden
Graduate Student
Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics
Purdue University

         If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit.         
             There's no use being a damn fool about it.
                           -- W.C. Fields