[ NNSquad ] Re: New P2P Privacy System from Univ. of Washington

[Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>]

Actually, I think a conventional private tracker will do this for you 
with BitTorrent - you don't need to jump through all kinds of hoops to 
rewrite IP addresses unless you're doing something fairly nefarious. And 
yes, I do understand that the definition of "nefarious" varies by 
jurisdiction. The problem that these darknets have is that it's easy for 
a government to cut off access to their front door, and many do.

So you're left with a system that only provides anonymity to people who 
don't really need it. I realize there are people who believe the US is a 
police state (I got some private e-mail to that effect) because we 
occasionally elect Republican politicians, and I can't say much to 
assuage their fears other than to point to the current resident of the 
White House.

RB

Kee Hinckley wrote:
> On Feb 24, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:
> > I think there's a big difference between technologies that can be 
> > "abused by evil people" and those that are *meant to be used by 
> > criminals in the commission of crime*. There's no legitimate reason 
> > to mask the identities of the members of a P2P swarm in any free and 
> > democratic country, and no chance of doing so anywhere else. This 
> > research, which is funded by taxpayer dollars, is  not even 
> > interesting as an academic exercise as the straight-up piracy 
> > community has already moved beyond it. So "One Swarm" represents the 
> > worst of two worlds: a purely derivative research activity with no 
> > legitimate purpose.
>
> I have to disagree. My first thought on seeing the announcement, 
> particularly WRT browser integration and automatic viewing of images 
> and video, was that I finally had a way to securely share personal 
> pictures with my family and friends that they might actually find easy 
> to use. And before you claim that YouTube, Flickr or the dozens of 
> other similar sites provide this functionality, try actually using 
> them to upload and share video/images with *just* the people you want 
> to share with. I have trouble even finding the *upload* button on 
> YouTube, let alone figuring out how how to limit sharing.
>
> Right now we have a lots of ways of sharing things with everybody, and 
> we have email for everything else. If this application (and I have 
> only just downloaded it, so I don't know for sure) provides a middle 
> path, then I think that's excellent.
>
> Do I need all that privacy protection for an application like that? 
> That depends. If I'm sharing pictures of my kids with the 
> grandparents, then probably not. If I'm sharing personal pictures with 
> a few close friends, and I'd really rather they weren't the next big 
> thing on XTube, then some tight privacy protections would be really nice.

--
Richard Bennett