Re: [Help-gnunet] user feedback

[Christian Grothoff]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Monday 30 September 2002 12:03 pm, Darren wrote:
> Let me briefly say that this system appears to have a lot of promise.

Well, thanks. :-)

> I have read all the whitepapers, and have been running a node for several
> days now.
>
> My experience with Fastrack (Kazaa, the former Morpheus...) & Gnutella tell
> me that, as is the case with many p2p designs, spam will be one major
> problem with this design unless a user feedback system is put in place. 
> This is briefly discussed at the end of the paper on economics.
>
> Spammers will hijack all the most popular keywords and flood the network
> with their (probably irrellevant) content.  Unfortunatly, they will gain
> rank for sending proper replies for the content they propose to offer,
> since it is not possible to know the contents until it has been obtained.

Well, unlike in other systems, the popular keywords are not obvious from the 
network traffic. Suppose you see that 
A2D0761D5DC601C74E98386CDDC360FDF130B48F is a popular query
on the network. What is the keyword? You need to produce 
53E2DC6BE6927110E0DE04087B88C46C5F829623 in order to send a reply. If you 
figure out a way to do this in the general case, you can hijack these 
keywords; if you can not, it will be fairly difficult...

> On the other hand, were a user feedback system put into place, great care
> must be taken...since technically this is just censorship, no?

Potentially, yes. A careful balance between spam detection/prevention and 
censorship must be the goal. 

>  Perhaps a
> 'spam' ranking can be attached to the content somehow.  This spam ranking
> can be increased by trusted nodes that download content.  A high enough
> ranking would certainly deter unknowing people from downloading false
> content.  But safeguards are necessary here also, to prevent legitimate
> content from being falsely flagged.

So far we agree. If you have some cryptographic sugar to add or some code you 
would like to contribute to do it, I would suggest to move the discussion to 
gnunet-developers.

> Another thing I'm not quite clear on, along similar lines.  Does content
> (particularly unpopular content) disappear over time, as is the case with
> freenet?  I'm sure that was discussed in one of the white papers, and I
> somehow missed it.

Unpopular content will not be replicated by foreign nodes (why should they, it 
could be a malicious node publishing garbage). The node where the user 
inserted/indexed the content is likely to keep it forever -- see priority 
option to gnunet-insert.

Christian
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE9mJoK9tNtMeXQLkIRAklOAJ9ZpiZ73D7NOG0m6TkCv3S4l6U/8wCeLSZd
Hf0h55wq050F9jQpYpZQPXk=
=x33/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----