Re: [Help-gnunet] A couple ease of use suggestions

[Tracy R Reed]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 02:01:13PM -0500, Christian Grothoff spake thusly:
> People are probably using all their bandwidth to catch up with the rate at 
> which CVS updates are being commited :-)

I look forward to checking out the new release!

> > I was thinking about the stale search results problem. Perhaps we could
> > timestamp the search results when they are inserted into the network and
> > clients could be configured to ignore any info older than a certain amount
> > of time?
> 
> That will not help. Malicious parties could always just manipulate 
> timestamps, 
> very old content could be extremely available (can you say 'GPL'?) and very 
> recent content may not be there at all (node goes off-line). 

I am afraid that eventually 99% of all of the search results will be for
content that is no longer available which will render searching useless.
There will always be a huge amount of transient nodes with unique files.
Often mp3's get corrupted during transfer which results in different mp3's
each of which gets an entry in the search results but that file is
probably unique to that host which probably won't be online for more than
a few hours. It seems like this would make it very hard to successfully
retrieve content. Do you not forsee this happening? It seems like it is
already happening on our tiny ~20 node network.

Also, freenet has a very good idea with freesites and fproxy. GNUnet
really needs some way for an individual to secure his own section of the
keyspace before anyone can write a GNUnet proxy. Will it ever be possible
to give the network itself a concept of public and private keys?

-- 
Tracy Reed      http://www.ultraviolet.org
"Our products just aren't engineered for security." - Brian Valentine, 
senior VP in charge of Microsoft's Windows development 5 Sept 2002

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