From: AARG!Anonymous <remailer@aarg.net>

An article on Salon this morning (also being discussed on slashdot), http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/08/gnutella_developers/print.html, discusses how the file-trading network Gnutella is being threatened by misbehaving clients. In response, the developers are looking at limiting the network to only authorized clients:

They intend to do this using digital signatures, and there is precedent for this in past situations where there have been problems:

...

Alan Cox, .... "Years and years ago this came up with a game

If only there were a technology in which clients could verify and yes,

Be sure and send a note to the Gnutella people reminding them of all you're doing for them, okay, Lucky?

Now that is resorting to silly accusation. My copy of "Peer to Peer" (Oram, O'Reilly) is out on loan but I think Freenet and Mojo use protocols that require new users to be contributors before they become consumers. (Leaving aside that Gnutella seems doomed on scalability grounds.) Likewise the WAN shooter games have (partially) defended against cheats by making the client hold no authoritative data and by disqualifying those that send impossible traffic. (Excluding wireframe graphics cards is another matter.) If I were a serious gamer I'd want 2 communities - one for plain clients to match gaming skills and another for "cheat all you like" contests to match both gaming and programming skills. If the Gnuts need to rework the protocol they should do so. My objection to this TCPA/palladium thing is that it looks aimed at ending ordinary computing. If the legal scene were radically different this wouldn't be causing nearly so much fuss. Imagine: - a DoJ that can enforce monopoly law - copyright that expires in reasonable time (5 years for s/w ? 15 years for books,films,music... ?) - fair use and first sale are retained - no concept of indirect infringement (e.g. selling marker pens) - criminal and civil liability for incorrectly barring access in DRM - hacking is equally illegal for everybody - no restriction on making and distributing/selling any h/w,s/w If Anonymous presents Gnutella for serious comparison with the above issues I say he's looking in the wrong end of his telescope. -- ############################################################## # Antonomasia ant notatla.demon.co.uk # # See http://www.notatla.demon.co.uk/ # ############################################################## --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@wasabisystems.com