Ian, p2p-hackers: It's not my goal to quibble about etymology (except inasmuch as it is useful to preserve the historical record). My goals are: 1. Avoid ambiguity -- where some people think that word X denotes concept 1, and others think that word X denotes concept 2. Especially if concepts 1 and 2 are related but not identical. Especially if one of them is politically incendiary. 2. Make sure we have names for our useful concepts. However, before I get to that I am going to go through the history one last time in order to cast light on the current problem. I turned up some interesting details. Let's start with a Venn diagram: _______ _______ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \/ \ / /\ \ / / \ \ | | | | | 1 |1^2 | 2 | | | | | | | | | \ \ / / \ \/ / \ /\ / \ / \ / \_______/ \_______/ Let 1 be the set of networks which are used for illegal transmission of information, and 2 be the set of networks which are built on f2f connections, and 1^2 be the intersection -- the set of networks which are used for illegal transmission of information and which are built on f2f connections. [bepw2002] introduces "darknet" to mean concept 1. In their words darknet is "a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content", and they use it consistently within that meaning. They refer to concept 2, starting in section 2.1, using the term "small-world nets", and they clearly distinguish between what they call "small-world darknets" and "non-small-world darknets". However nowadays some people in the mass media seem to think that a "darknet" means primarily a network which is "invitation-only", i.e. a "small-world" or "f2f" net [globe]. When did the meaning shift? Ooh -- how interesting to examine the evolution of this word on [wikipedia]! The original definition on wikipedia was written on 2004-09-30. It read in full: "Darknet is a broad term to denote the networks and technologies that enable users to copy and share digital material. The term was coined in a paper from four Microsoft Research authors.". The next change was that two months later someone redirected the "Darknet" page to just be a link to the "Filesharing page", with the comment "Just another word for filesharing". The next change was that on 2005-04-14 someone from IP 81.178.83.245 wrote a definition beginning with this sentence: "A Darknet is a private file sharing network where users only connect to people they trust.". By the way, I should point out that I have a personal interest in this history because between 2001 and 2003 I tried to promulgate concept 2, using Lucas Gonze's coinage: "friendnet" [zooko2001, zooko2002, zooko2003, gonze2002]. I would like to know for my own satisfaction if my ideas were a direct inspiration for some of this modern stuff, such as the Freenet v0.7 design. So much for etymology. Now the problem is that in the current parlance of the media, the word "darknet" is used to mean vaguely 1 or 2 or 1^2. The reason that this is a problem isn't that it breaks with some etymological tradition, but that it is ambiguous and that it deprives us of useful words to refer to 1 or 2 specifically. The ambiguity has nasty political consequences -- see for example these f2f network operators struggling to persuade newspaper readers that they are not primarily for illegal purposes: [globe]. My proposal to rectify the lack-of-words problem is to use "blacknet" to refer to 1 specifically and "f2f net" to refer to 2 specifically. I don't know if there is any way to rectify the ambiguity problem. Ian wrote:
... defining the term "darknet" as a f2f network that is designed to conceal the activities of its participants (this being, so far as I have seen, one of the main motivations for building an f2f network),
So you think of "darknet" as meaning 1^2. That's an interesting remark -- that you regard concealment as one of the main motivations. I personally regard concealment as one of the lesser motivations -- I'm more interested in attack resistance (resisting attacks such as subversion or denial-of-service, rather than attacks such as surveillance), scalability, and other properties. Although I'm interested in the concealment properties as well. Regards, Zooko P.S. Here's some obligatory link juice for Gonze's latest sly neologism: lightnet! [bepw2002] "The darknet and the future of content distribution" Biddle, England, Peinado, Willman (Microsoft Corporation) http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc http://www.dklevine.com/archive/darknet.pdf (The .doc version crashes my OpenOffice.org app when I try to read it. Does this mean something? The .pdf version has screwed up images when I view it in evince.) [wikipedia] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet [zooko2001] "Attack Resistant Sharing of Metadata" Zooko and Raph Levien presentation, First O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference, 2001 http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/p2p2001/view/e_sess/1200 [zooko2002] http://zooko.com/log-2002-12.html#d2002-12-14-the_human_context_and_the_futu... e_of_Mnet [zooko2003] http://www.zooko.com/log-2003-01.html#d2003-01-23-trust_is_just_another_topo... ogy [gonze2002] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2428 [globe] "Darknets: The invitation-only Internet" globeandmail.com 2005-11-24 http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051007.gtdar knetoct7/BNStory/Technology/ [lightnet] http://gonze.com/weblog/story/lightnet _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@zgp.org http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]