Grapevine Technical Overview

Zooko Zooko <zooko@zooko.com>
Thu, 23 May 2002 09:58:58 -0700



 Oskar Sandberg wrote:
>
> The implementation is a lot more than just the routing algorithm. I
> would argue that the routing is not being tested one way or the other
> "in the real world" at the moment, because other parts of the
> implementation have failed to give it a chance.

I would love to hear more about how Freenet is currently failing.

I wrote a document about various ways that Mojo Nation failed:

http://zooko.com/IPTPS02.pdf

(Note: this focusses on the networking aspect of Mojo Nation and completely 
ignores Mojo, marketing, economics, user interface, and other stuff.  Also 
note that the non-scalability of Mojo Nation's basic routing algorithm never 
gets mentioned since it never caused a failure.  ;-))

In January of this year I created a project named Mnet (mnet.sf.net).  It is 
the open-source spawn of Mojo Nation.  Work on Mnet slowed down (but did not 
stop) recently when the two most prolific contributors got busy in Real Life.

The current state is that Mnet still has the same architectural flaws that are 
described in that paper (centralized (but redundant) introduction, publishing 
data onto highly unreliable nodes).

Improvements over Mojo Nation that are currently implemented in Mnet include a 
whole new GUI, a zillion bugfixes and code cleanups, and, uh, that's all that 
I can think of at the moment.

Future directions for Mnet in descending order of probability/priority/schedule 
include interoperating with other code and other networks (we already have 
part of the Tristero API implemented), fixing the aforementioned architectural 
flaws, using uber-sophisticated new algorithms like Chord/Kademlia, exporting 
a nice programmable API (similar or identical to Tristero), and uh, one 
zillion other nifty improvements.

Regards,

Zooko

-------
Secure Distributed Systems Consulting -- http://zooko.com/
-------