-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 15/01/13 06:27, Sean Lynch wrote:

Hi, Michael. You're right, it does implement pretty much everything I was talking about, though its UI is a mess. As others have said, pasting or otherwise having to get one's hands dirty with the key is pretty much a nonstarter. Also, it's a little annoying that you can't do anything with it at all before getting your friends involved, unless I just need to wait longer before forums and chat lobbies start to show up.

Yes, that seems to be an adoption barrier for darknets in general - they're hard to try out on a casual basis.

The main things I would change would be:

1. Use Ed25519 keys, and have them always be URIs. They should not ever be visible to the user except when it's unavoidable, like sending contact info via email.

I agree that replacing keys with short strings would be an improvement, but I'm not sure it would require switching to Ed25519 (or elliptic curves generally). RetroShare has a DHT, so the key could be referred to by its hash, which would be used to retrieve the full key from the DHT. (I believe you can join the DHT before adding any contacts - but I could be wrong about that.)

2. Hide any settings or stats related to the network. People should either be connected or not.

If the P2P connections could be made to work seamlessly then I'd agree. But my experience with (IPv4-based) P2P connections is that an informed user can generally make them work better than an uninformed user, by forwarding ports, setting up dynamic DNS, etc. So exposing some of the networking details may be a reasonable pragmatic compromise with the godawful state of the internet. In general I'm quite pessimistic about the possibility of creating IPv4-based darknets that work well for uninformed users.

3. Use a modern UI paradigm not decended from the old all-in-one internet browsers like Netcruiser and AOL.

Agreed! The abundance of (overlapping?) features is the thing I find most off-putting about RetroShare. By the way, I've just found out that the RetroShare team has a fantastic development blog: https://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/ Cheers, Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQ9WhKAAoJEBEET9GfxSfMw2cH/3MfrtiM8UQlGnb6VUTbek9h c+1s21HeD7A9qyUZ2xE4YenBJii1BK59CRjqfwCn8w6IEfzzzYJve0srMD/rSQKj 8E6yUVrXd3d4WCBEqHSAQJsGZJmkFSLcaKoyzspU1P5CE3U/n6MW5SYWzLoHqi7U 54mmbclHtxZlGcjZTqAoTG03BStjgEUMYHYvh2wKXeuLWqjkuRR+CWBkxrpW7bsP 3JinsQupM8QiJbEMeUp5QY9hN3xgp1lKERikBtuhRRbuiH2mlFDQBo0HKk9tA7lT o3RxlphfHqOJmZAOaanuww8yIyvMjRNmuku3uDymQfC0aoRf5aocAu2pQLArSbw= =tgAB -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE