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An introduction to GNUnet

An introduction to GNUnet

Posted Dec 1, 2005 16:30 UTC (Thu) by droundy (subscriber, #4559)
Parent article: An introduction to GNUnet

Much like other systems designed to promote anonymous speech, some of which were described in an LWN article two years ago, GNUnet suffers from a very slow user experience. Keyword searches can take many minutes to return results and downloading the content often takes a huge amount of time.

It seems like this is a major flaw in any p2p system designed to provide anonymous speech with plausible deniability. If they want to disguise traffic patterns, there has to be "innocent" traffic going on the network, but as long as anonymity is preserved at the cost of useability, that's not likely to happen. (Speaking as someone who put some time and thought into getting darcs to work over gnunet a while back, and came to the conclusion that it isn't really designed to be used.)


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An introduction to GNUnet

Posted Dec 2, 2005 4:09 UTC (Fri) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

... it isn't really designed to be used

My experience with Freenet agrees. It just doesn't work, essentially. Freenet saturated the bandwidth I gave to it, ate up the disk I allocated to it and after a week or so of 24/7 uptime most searches still failed. Even when browsing worked I got the impression that there was little or no real content on the network.

I support the goals and motivations of the projects, but they should be looked at only as proof of concept at this point.

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