Re: [Ring] Important information about the project

[Greg Troxel]

Adrien Béraud <address@hidden> writes:

> Regarding your second question, 
> Last year we introduced a DHT proxy feature, allowing to hide your device IP 
> from the distributed network. 
>
> You can use the free proxy that we provide (dhtproxy.jami.net), or configure 
> your own. 
> https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/opendht/wiki/Running-a-node-with-dhtnode 

Thanks; I think that didn't really sink in to my brain.

So I guess you can either

  hide your IP with a proxy, or

  participate in the distributed system without relying on a specific
  node

but I guess that is the fundamental nature of centralized registration
vs DHTs.

I think one could use the proxy normally, and be able to register
directly if the proxy is unreachable, giving up IP anonymity for
functionality at that time only.  Perhaps that is the best that can be
done (without getting into a blend of DHT and onion routing).


But, it would be good for the text to be clearer so that users
understand this issue.  Currently ring.cx says:

  Ring is a free and universal communication platform which preserves the
  users' privacy and freedoms.

which is a bit oversimplifiied and overpromised.  (I certainly get it
that the underlying realilty is more challenging, and I don't think ring
is doing anything wrong or even suboptimal.)