Re: Re: Creating a Query for a SHA-1 Hash

Am Montag 05 Januar 2009 17:13:48 schrieb Aaron Walkhouse:
> As things stand right now that point will not occur for many years.
> Gnutella is pretty much settled in it's basic structure and the
> enhancements in the works now won't radically change the basic
> protocol enough to leave BearShare out.

The DHT for hash searches is such a radical change, and one which has been 
proposed for more than 5 years, but which only recently became feasible with 
the development of the Kademlia network structure (a network structured by 
sha1 hashes of the NodeIDs, so it can find sha1 hashes very easily). 

That was a case of developments in the lab going right into real life p2p 
filesharing networks and working well. 

> Open-source elitism doesn't really support your argument.  
> BearShare is still the fastest and most powerful gnutella node
> precisely because of the concentrated effort of a single
> well-coordinated company using a toolset optimized for Windows.

Firstoff: The correct term for software under the GNU Public License is 
"Free Software". 
Open source is a term invented by marketing people to avoid the implications 
of freedom and reduce free software to just a development model. 

And free software is not about "elitism", but about freedom, for example the 
freedom to keep improving the program even though the original programmers 
stopped. You gave up that freedom for convenience, so don't wine now that your 
convenience begins to bite you in the foot. 

Besides that, I see it as unethical to use unfree software where you aren't 
forced to use it. Every piece of unfree software takes away freedom from 
computer users. You can get the history of free software and some of the 
reasons for sticking to it in very easy to digest song-format at
- http://infinite-hands.draketo.de

Free Software is not always better than unfree software in terms of 
performance, but it is almost always better in terms of ethics. 

> The simple fact that closed-source [and in this case, well-protected]
> code is much more difficult for the spammers and anti-P2P to decipher
> and exploit means that BearShare users are still the ones best
> equipped to cut through the crap and find the files they really want,
> even when somebody is trying very hard to take over searches with
> their own decoys and spam.

That's "security by obscurity" crap. It's trivial to use bearshares for 
serving fake files, as it is with every client. 

The network specification is public, there's nothing any vendor can do to 
block out others, except using proprietary extensions to the protocol which 
shut out the rest of the network. And Bearshare had its share of those. 

> Yet several years later, keyword queries still consume more than
> thirty times as much bandwidth.  Go figure.  :P

=> Most people don't use hashes regularly. 

> Look at the whole network again, and this time as a whole and not as a
> snapshot of a theoretical cross-section at the time of a single
> search.  How much bandwidth has gone into hash queries, really?  A

Give me the math for the impact of a single search on the network. After that 
I'll follow your thought. 

> To start
> cherrypicking features and incrementally making your own software less
> compatible before anyone else does will only hurt you and your users,
> especially when the majority are not going along with you at the same
> rate of progress.  

Broadcasted hash queries have been taken as deprecated for years, even though 
some clients obviously kept them instead of working on a better alternative. 

Best wishes, 
Arne


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