On 29/11/05, zooko@zooko.com <zooko@zooko.com> wrote:

However, the media seems to have started using the word "Darknet" to mean a friend-to-friend net and/or a blacknet [7, 8], thus simultaneously making it harder for people to think about blacknets which are based on other than friend-to-friend architectures and making it harder for people to think about friend-to-friend networks which are used for other than illegal information sharing.

I place some of the blame for this development on the Freenet folks, who may be the first to promulgate this munging, and if they aren't the first they're certainly the most effective.

As Michael Rogers pointed out, I am not sure this is as clear-cut as you suggest, the goal for Freenet 0.7 is very close to the idea outlined in the caption for Fig. 3 of the Microsoft Darknet paper, which is a friend-to-friend network. That paper may be the first common usage of the term "darknet", but so far as I can see, it contains no concise definition of what a "darknet" is. I would therefore say that there is no authorative basis on which to invalidate any particular definition of the term that is broadly within the area of P2P networks which conceal user activity. As such, 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), is as valid a definition as any other I have seen (and more useful than most). As a side-point, I think it is somewhat pejorative to say that any technology is "designed" for illegal usage, just because it conceals user activity and therefore may be capable of illegal usage. There are many legal reasons why people might wish to preserve their anonymity and privacy. Ian. _______________________________________________ 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]