[zooko at zooko.com: Re: [p2p-hackers] darknet ~= (blacknet, f2f net)]

[coderman]

On 12/2/05, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com> wrote:
> ... Indeed, his focus on P2P architectures would imply that he's
> largely unaware of May's Crypto Anarchy manifesto, wherein the term
> "Blacknet" was defined to include information (as this guy seems to
> understand it) as a mere subset. A blacknet allows for completely anonymous
> transactions of any form, including monetary.

blacknets don't solve the hard problems related to large scale
anonymous digital cash, mainly identity management and strong
reputation metrics. (s/digital cash/non trivial resource exchange/g)

darknets, as the abused term appears to be currently employed, place
an emphasis on friendship as a trust/reputation metric and associate
that trusted channel with copyrighted content distribution. (even
though, as zooko pointed out, the original microsoft paper describing
darknets put more emphasis on the opaque nature of the overlay /
private traffic and gave little attention to the friend to friend
aspect of introduction / networking)


> This knucklehead seems to want to define "black" and "dark" in terms of some
> perceived scale of illegality, whereas even in Microsoft's case the term
> "darknet" was not developed for that purpose.* A "darknet" may include the
> possibility of no anomymity between pairs or groups of transactors, though
> the identities (as well as the transactions) are effecitvely "black" to the
> outside world. The term "darknet" is therefore often equated with P2P/F2F
> architectures, but those are obviously only one set of instantiations of a
> "darknet".

agreed. i'm even more convinced these terms are essentially worthless
as anything more descriptive than "a private network of some type".


> *: Am I wrong in assuming that Microsoft's own usage of the term "darknet"
> derives largely from the term "blacknet" which may had coined?

embrace and extend the namespace!