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bluesky - Re: User Anonymity

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: hal AT finney.org
  • To: bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: User Anonymity
  • Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 22:05:59 -0800


Wei writes:
> However if we do want to hide the server in order to take advantage of the
> DMCA exemption, I think a good way to do it would be through rendezvous
> servers. The ultimate server connects to a rendezvous server through an
> anonymous communications channel. The rendezvous server then advertises
> everything stored by the ultimate server as its own, and passes requests
> and data between the ultimate server and clients.

That seems like a good idea, in general. I think you mean it as an add-on
to a P2P system rather than something built into the P2P protocol itself.

However if we imagine implementing this for something like Napster,
there would be problems. Almost all users are sharing data that they
could get in trouble for. So there would have to be rendezvous servers
with enough bandwidth to mirror all the data for everyone. It would be
hard to create millions of these.

I think you'd want to design the system so that everyone was a rendezvous
server for someone else. In this way finding a rendezvous peer would be
done in an automated way as part of the P2P system. I think building it
into the P2P will be necessary to make it transparent and widely useful.

> This way we don't impose costs on parts of the system that don't require
> anonymity, and we don't have to change the system if the DMCA loophole is
> closed and server anonymity is no longer useful.

That would be good, but I don't see that it will work to build the
rendezvous system as a completely separate product from the P2P.
You can't require people to download and install two separate programs.

Maybe you could design the system internally so that the rendezvous
part was logically separate, but bundle it together with the core P2P
application. Then users wouldn't have to be aware of the internal
structure. And if at some point it became legal to share data, they could
turn off the use of rendezvous hiding.

Hal




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