Gnutella scanning instead of service providers.

[Joseph Ashwood]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Jeffers" <jeffersgary at 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