[p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko at zooko.com)

[Steve Schear]

At 03:42 AM 3/11/2005, Eugen Leitl wrote:

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>On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:48:12PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
>
> > >Why? BT is designed with zero privacy in mind.
> >
> > And this was a profound error, IMHO.  One of the epiphanies from my 
> work at
>
>It was a deliberate decision on Bram Cohen's part. BT is a very useful medium
>to deliver software updates, movies und most for what there are currently
>broadcast media for.


I didn't say that Bram didn't do this on purpose, I just think it was a 
mistake in judgement.


>If you want to be invisible to lawyers, you have to use something else.

or run BT-like apps within something else.  For BT clients its 
straightforward to run most  (e.g., Azureus) via a proxy that keeps no logs 
(e.g., Metropipe).  For Trackers its more difficult.  All I am saying is 
that Brahm should have paid a bit more attention to tracker protection.


>(Or at least run BT on a large zombie cloud, so you have plausible
>deniability).


Like TOR/I2P.


> > MN was that a secrecy-oriented proxy network development and successful
> > deployment needed to precede P2P file sharing if such networks were to
> > survive determined technical and legal challenges.  End users often care
>
>If a network has been declared illegal, and you're a part of that network,
>and somebody receives packets from you which are part of IP-protected binary
>blob, and your ISP rats on you, your ass is grass with the right kind of IP
>nazi legislation.
>
>Obvously, the only way to prevent that from happening is not be part of that
>network, not make your ISP rat on you -- or, much better, do not let that
>legislation happen at all.

Its quite unlikely, at least in the U.S. that networks (e.g., those 
operated in a truly distributed fashion) will be declared illegal.  Its 
even less likely that such networks will enable ISPs to capture anything 
significant about your activities.

> > But trackers must still be widely accessible by the general population of
> > BT users and can you offer the content or obtain it without likely
> > identification?
>
>Web pages have static addresses in DNS. Search on P2P in dynamic IP is much
>more ephemeral, and requires ISPs to keep track of (customer IPv4 time_period)
>tuples long enough so that their logs can be subpoenaed.

Using DNS to resolve the addresses of future trackers is probably a fools 
errand.

Steve