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Originally posted by lurker701
Interesting idea. It could very well work, but it could also crash and burn.
What troubles me is that you're asking these high-bandwidth machines to essentially act as shields for the rest of the gnutella network. The policing you're refering to doesn't even need to occur to bring the network down. Simply pay your employees a few bucks an hour to pull stuff down on gnutella through these proxies. Wham. You now have a situation where the proxy machines either have to ban every single person who's using their machine to share copyrighted data, or be disconnected by their isp through the typical complaint-and-ban process. |
In my last post I was firstly trying to address the issue of whether good anonymity was possible over a P2P network, and in terms of strict possibility bandwidth isn't relevent. But, I'm glad to see you agree that it is at least possible. Even with the state of bandwidth as it is today, though, I still think it could be implemented. Just put a bandwidth cap on the proxy at say 20% of the machine's total bandwidth. The main incentive for doing this, in my mind, is not to allow illegal distributing of copyrighted materials (not that I favor copyright), but to allow people censored by their governments access to content they can't view directly. Simple web page downloading is not an enormous hit on most hosts, and if some people want to download or share music and video through proxies, they will have to trade bandwidth for anonymity (but the network in general shouldn't suffer). Also, the mere fact that the network allows proxies offers protection in itself since it would be difficult to prove that a particular person is sharing illicit material and not a person proxying through him/her, even though it may seem very obvious.
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Certainly, it's quite easy to determine who your proxy is, even if it's not apparent in the gnutella interface itself. A simple netstat will be enough to determine that much. The encryption isn't an issue because the policing machines *are* the machines recieving the public key. And now you've made the network more centralized, with a handfull of high-bandwidth proxies to go after instead of thousands of users. Even if the proxy machines aren't sharing any files themselves, if they aid in the distribution of copyrighted material, they can be shut down if they persist in that behavior.
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The assumption is that most people won't dump their TCP stream (either because they lack the sophistication or they just don't care). And encryption *is* still then an issue. You can't decrypt public-key encrpyted data without the *private* key. Even the person who does the encryption can't decrypt without the private key. The public key encrypts, the private key decrypts. The public key might be returned with the query so if the proxy computer is just for file transfers the proxy computer wouldn't see it. But, presumably, it could just ask for it. It still then has to crack the encryption to know the content. You could have system that disposes of each public/private key pair after each use, which might prevent the proxy from even getting a public key.
As for whether you could be shut down for proxying, the DMCA isn't quite clear and it might depend on the exact implementation. For it to be contributory infrigment there has to be financial benefit in letting the transfer procede (as there was with Napster). For it to be vicarious infrigement there has to be knowledge of the violation, and if the data is encrypted no one should be expected to decrypt it to find out. And there are substantial legitiment uses of the technology (such as giving censored peoples access to the free world, whistle blowing, etc.). Let me refer you to
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/Napster/20...ite_paper.html
and you can judge for yourself.
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So, yeah, I guess you can provide anonymity for a good number of users, but only by putting a smaller, and therefore more vulnerable, group of users at greater risk. Under those conditions, I wonder who would be willing to act as a proxy in the first place. |
As I said, cap the proxy bandwidth at 20% and only let high bandwidth hosts proxy. Those who want anonymity will have to sacrifice bandwidth, but those who don't care shouldn't be affected.