Announcing FURIAA

[TankGirl]

Hi SA_Dave and thanks for your good post!

Originally posted by SA_Dave
Now if that isn't the understatement of the century!

LOL ok ok… I admit putting it intentionally in a bit provocative way and am glad that somebody caught it so that we can discuss this interesting issue in more depth!

Originally posted by SA_Dave
In order for this to work, you'd need a server/server-farm to maintain this or each superpeer, or at least a dependable group which will be disadvantaged in that every supernode would be as dependant on them as on a central server, would have to maintain an index of every client (as not every superpeer will be always-on & not every system can be guaranteed to be permanent or stable, this would provide a RAID structure to the database.) This would entail massive amounts of hdd space & bandwidth being used just for this purpose alone.

What you are describing above is centralized infrastructure doing centralized identity management. Before we can draw conclusions about horsepower needed we need to analyse closer what is really included in a decentralized identity system with related hotlist and messaging services.

To start off, there is no need for any single peer to keep a complete index of all identities in the network. In fact this is impossible in a decentralized network where new identities appear and old ones disappear in an unpredictable way in different parts of the network. We don’t need to know and memorize the identities of a million peers that form the network but rather the identities of a few dozen peers that are on our hotlist and ignore list. In addition we might want to memorize the identities of say 1000 of our last file transfer contacts (so that we could reward sharers and restrict leeches). Instead of having a fully connected PxP identity matrix (P being the population) we are having a sparsely connected network of P nodes, not unlike the brain where each neuron is connected only to a very small fraction of the entire neuron population. The technological challenge is to develop an architecture that implements this in the decentralized environment.

Originally posted by SA_Dave
Furthermore, each client would require some sort of unique encrypted key or fingerprint.

Precisely. The public key from an asymmetric crypto key pair would make a nice public identity – easy to make unique, ready to be used for protected communications and always verifiable by the owner of the private key.

Originally posted by SA_Dave
How can you guarantee that this won't be lost in a format etc.?

By saving the identity info (key pairs, nicks, avatars etc.) into a floppy or a CD. The same media could be used to move peer identities from computer to computer.

Originally posted by SA_Dave
Personally, I think that an app with a built-in web community (eg. bitzi comments, hashlinks & forums) is the best solution right now. If people could easily find ways around fakers, viruses etc. ,while learning about their favourite client, their computer & their fellow netizens, it would encourage them to become better members themselves. This would have a beneficial ripple-effect on all the communities/networks they participate in.

All true. The various group and community tools are very useful and beneficial for any p2p network.

Identity management is a separate question but has an important impact on community tools and activities as the quality of identities determines whether trust mechanisms can be implemented in the groups or not.

Originally posted by SA_Dave
When I first started using FT clients, I was only interested in the content. It didn't occur to me that a community even existed! This is why it should be easily accessable from the client-side.

Ditto!

Originally posted by SA_Dave
Plus, many clients with strict anti-leeching policies are failures. I suggest reading this article posted by naz yesterday.

Also, you shouldn't neglect the fact that many people enjoy multiple accounts & the anonymity that today's p2p clients offer. This does cause problems as far as fakers, virus sharers & spammers are concerned. However, it does attract many decent citizens who might not otherwise participate out of concerns for the snooping phenomenon.

I agree. Access to the community should be easy, and everybody should get some good stuff easily even from behind total anonymity. It is important that newbies get good first impressions of the network and do not get knocked down by any over-efficient anti-leech mechanisms. And it is much better to use reward mechanisms which begin to enhance your life in the network as soon as you start successfully sharing your stuff.

- tg