Morgwen, please remove the unecessary flooding of Sephiroth quoting the entire post of Phantom81. Sephiroth, this type of deliberate obfuscation of the forum is what gets people the name of 'troll'. If you behave like one, people will call you one. Why don't you edit your post and remove the 30 lines of quote before Morgwen has to? The original post is immediately above your post, you should not quote the whole thing AGAIN immediately below your post.

I hate 'the' GDF and I've only read two messages there. I hate it because it is 'behind closed doors' - they do not promote it's existence, it is not listed in Yahoo - I found two or three other P2P discussion groups there, but not 'the' gdf.

Accept firstly that there is no 'the' gdf. There will never be a 'the' gdf. There are already too many other gdfs .. these need to be consolidated if other developers want to get anywhere. Make it someplace open and friendly. Don't go with this idea of having restricted members, expelling people etc. That is just childish.

The one criteria for whether something is considered is whether it makes sense. Post references and background information so people can understand your suggestions, and they will be considered if they make sense. If people post nonsense, contentless propoganda, just ignore them.

I make the above observations because I think that an open protocol should be developed in the open - it seems the only way. And so a culture needs to be adopted which is defensive of important information and ideas, and which reduces the flooding we see so much of in this forum.

By all means people should be able to give their opinions, but when it becomes repetition of things previously stated, please at most give a link to where it was previously stated.

In response to the question of how do you enforce well behaved clients in an open network, for the answer lets look at the internet in general. It is an open network - the only requirement for participation is to speak TCP/IP or your packets won't get routed onto the network.

So why is it that people aren't able to just bombard servers, send wrong packets etc? Well, they can, but the servers and all good network software which interfaces with the network are built defensively. They sanity check packets before passing or accepting them. A lot of time goes into this, and gnutella it seems is too young to have developed a lot of this, so 'exploits' such as passing encrypted packets are tolerated by the clients, when in fact they should not be.

Then there is the 'organised defensive response' technique - how does the internet deal with spammers? Well, in fact people who adminsiter mail gateways put a lot of time and effort into protecting you from spam, believe it or not. There is a forum news.admin.net-abuse on usenet with many subbranches for particular protocols. One of these deals with email spam. People who ALLOW the use of their email gateways for a significant amount of spam, find that mail coming from their gateway is blocked. This makes it annoying if they host people other than spammerss as well, eg if ibm allowed spammers to relay through their gateway, all the ibm staff would be up in arms because their business emails would not be answered or would bounce.

I hope you see the analogy I am trying to make here, Sephiroth - gnutella is growing up and needs to learn to start to behave itself, or it will die. Sad fact of life. There are plenty of competing protocols now with the same idea. The only thing gnutella has going for it (believe me!) is the large number of open source clients. If these guys die, then you have two or three big commercial clients, and that is no different to say fast-track - except fast-track was designed properly from the beginning, and works. There are lots of fast-tracks. There is only one gnutella.

So when the open source clients die, gnutella will be eaten by fast-track or something similar, and then you will be back to square one - lots of small clients trying to build a protocol from scraps of opensource software.

Make yourself a shortcut - go with the opensource software now and build on it sensibly, not higgledy piggledy two-weeks-thinking-before-we-implement-something-fashion.

For people eager to get 'things underway' there are plenty of things that can still be worked on while other things are being thrashed out.

I think LimeWire were unconsionable in bringing out SuperDuperPeers the way they did - effectively blocking older clients from 98% of their clients overnight. They should have phased it in gradually until other clients had accepted that the implementation they had chosen of ultrapeers was the right one and had started to build compatible clients, then reduce the number of connections to non-ultrapeer clients.

Yes, this results in less 'benefit' to the limewire clients who have done "ooh so much work" to 'improve the gnutella network'. But it is polite. Sorry, you may respond 'but this is business' - I respond 'b*ll*&%'. The most successful business people are also the most polite people you will meet. Having an eye for an opportunity is not the same thing as trying to bend the world to your will and pulling the wool over the eyes of your customers. That is very common, but by no means necassary for success.

Spamware IS evil. Spyware IS evil. In current implementations, the two are the same. Advertisers want to 'target' their ads, so the customer is spied on. Sorry, but it is a fact. So far this has been happening for too short a time to see the consequences. And like most computer crime, the consequences will be under-reported even in the rare cases that they are detected, because they are embarrassing.

A network free of commercial clients seems the only response at the moment, to all these problems. We are fighting a <B>threats</B>. It is not that the network is completely screwed right now, it is the fact that it looks like it is getting screwed, and if we don't do anything it will be screwed. It is not that people are completely spied on but it is the threat that they will be endlessly watched and marketed to in return for the priveledge of communication.

As you said, most people don't care. Most people don't care when they buy petrol that the environment is being screwed for profit. But luckily some do, and I'm thankful for it. The less that ordinary people care, the more extreme those who do care have to become when the threat is real and dire.

Nos