Re: [Help-gnunet] question about namespaces and sporadic updates

[Igor Wronsky]

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, David Roundy wrote:

> It seems (just from experiment) that -rb doesn't actually work like I would
> think.  It seems that it only adds the contents of the directory to the
> "directory" files, but not to the namespace, as far as I can tell.  So to
> get the file "foo/bar/baz/hello" you'd need to fetch the directory listings
> of "foo" then "foo/bar" then "foo/bar/baz" and then you'd be able to find
> the file "foo/bar/baz/hello", but then maybe I just wasn't phrasing my
> search right when I tried to locate "foo/bar/baz/hello".

The namespace actually contains nothing but a pointer to the
directory. The directory and its contents are immutable,
and 'certified' transitively. If you wish to allow an user
to download something from the bottom of a directory hierarchy
without descending the hierarchy, you need to provide the
user with the AFS URI of the file, instead of its path.

> When I say alternative to http, scp, ftp, etc, it means I already support
> all of the above, but was thinking of users who don't have access to a nice
> server.  Basically I was thinking of gnunet as a replacement for something
> like bittorrent or napster, i.e. a reasonable way for people who don't have
> much bandwidth or don't have an entirely stable internet connection to
> share files with a large number of people by taking advantage of the
> bandwidth of their downloaders.  But I guess perhaps it's not that either.

Bittorrent is probably your best choice for that currently.

> But seriously, I don't see how you can provide much plausibility to the
> deniability if noone uses gnunet for non-subversive purposes.

We already have scripts that transmit perfectly good and
honest /dev/rand data around. With a few nodes running
those, I suspect GNUnet has about the same

  good_traffic/(good_traffic+naughty_traffic)

-ratio as the internet has.


Igor