NotCon 04 Freenet - Ian Clarke
Emergent systems, simple things put together exhibit complicated behaviour. Very decentralised, fault tolerant systems.
Believes that freedom is speech is an absolute requirement for democracy.
So built a layer on top of the interweb to allow people to share information freely. Which means they should be able to do it anonymously. And must be completely decentralised, so noone can sabotage it.
Investigated a study on mail in the US. Relied on local knowledge. Nodes never more than 5 deep. Freenet based on these prinicples too. Caches data all over the network in very clever ways. Encrypts stuff, document verification plus more.
Question:
How do you guarantee anonymity? (IC) Only talks to local nodes (vast simplification!)
[Lots of clever stuff said by Ian that I had to listen to but couldn't type] Nodes can find out new nodes to talk to.
eg. Linux is building something that has been built before. Freenet had nothing to copy. Hybrid between open source release early/often project and a research project where they are trying out ideas. eg. Freenet stopped working a while ago because the free net nodes are very eager, and overusing freenet in an non environmentally friendly way. Spent 6 months trying to understand the overloading problem. Needed to rethink how the nodes responded to think a bit longer term. (very cool). Defined what a good load balancing algorithm was and then implemented it as rate limiting. A node will try and use 100% of its least available resource by talking to other nodes and telling them to space apart the requests....
I need to read more on this, all very clever P2P stuff but got a bit lost.
