----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Jeffers" <jeffersgary@hotmail.com>
I still think that scanners would be effective. Here's why:
A scan enabled Gnutella would be a much harder target than a central service provided Gnutella. The scan enabled version would be much harder to shut down due to various kinds of expenses - legal, administ- rative, politics, etc.. Not impossible to shut down - just harder, slower, and with various expenses we would like the oppressors to pick up :-)
A scan enabled Gnutella would reveal itself immediately to a somewhat intelligent legal team who would simply set up a cheap system that would recieve the pings, making the users _easier_ to locate instead of your assumed harder, since the legal team would not even necessarily have to ping the world themselves.
As far as Joseph Ashwood's claim that the Internet overhead would be too much. Is his point exaggerated? Would it be possible to write low overhead scanners? I do not have the "skill set" to say. Maybe he is right, maybe not. Anybody got something definitive to say on this?
It's a fairly simple problem, under IPv4 there are 2^32 ip addresses. A fast ping is a few milliseconds each ping, and can be mounted from a large connection at a large number simultaneously, so lets say 8192 attempts per second. A fast ping machine will take 2^32/8192 seconds which comes out to 524288 seconds or about 4 days. So the ping set itself would take too long. The internet clogging comes from the quantity of these pings. Let's say there are 1 million Gnutella pingers, they all of course first hit AOL because it's a prime candidate for pretty much anything. AOL has let's say 65536 addresses, receiving 1 million pings per second (approximately) which will fully occupy several T1 lines which means that the ping messages will be blocked at every router disabling the scan portion of gnutella putting us back where we are now, but with more time, more code, and more bloat dedicated to it. So we'd slow down every major network until they all block the gnutella ping messages some how, costing everyone more time, more money, more hassle, more headaches. Like it or not, the ping idea for Gnutella is a very bad idea. Joe