On 12/2/05, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
... Indeed, his focus on P2P architectures would imply that he's largely unaware of May's Crypto Anarchy manifesto, wherein the term "Blacknet" was defined to include information (as this guy seems to understand it) as a mere subset. A blacknet allows for completely anonymous transactions of any form, including monetary.
blacknets don't solve the hard problems related to large scale anonymous digital cash, mainly identity management and strong reputation metrics. (s/digital cash/non trivial resource exchange/g) darknets, as the abused term appears to be currently employed, place an emphasis on friendship as a trust/reputation metric and associate that trusted channel with copyrighted content distribution. (even though, as zooko pointed out, the original microsoft paper describing darknets put more emphasis on the opaque nature of the overlay / private traffic and gave little attention to the friend to friend aspect of introduction / networking)
This knucklehead seems to want to define "black" and "dark" in terms of some perceived scale of illegality, whereas even in Microsoft's case the term "darknet" was not developed for that purpose.* A "darknet" may include the possibility of no anomymity between pairs or groups of transactors, though the identities (as well as the transactions) are effecitvely "black" to the outside world. The term "darknet" is therefore often equated with P2P/F2F architectures, but those are obviously only one set of instantiations of a "darknet".
agreed. i'm even more convinced these terms are essentially worthless as anything more descriptive than "a private network of some type".
*: Am I wrong in assuming that Microsoft's own usage of the term "darknet" derives largely from the term "blacknet" which may had coined?
embrace and extend the namespace!