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Old June 28th, 2002
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Default Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Secure Channels: Disappointed.

And now tell me why the people should use your advertising client, if they can better clients for free - like Gnucleus, Shareaza or soon Xolox!

You shouldn't use anything, unless you want to; no one is forcing you. Like you said, their are other clients out there. Use the one you like and get on with your life (or get a life), instead of argueing about trivial things.

So you want to leech from the Gnutella net as long as possible and if the net is destroyed you switch to your private net...

BearShare can upload and connect to every other client, so it isn't leeching off of anything. The only difference is if the rest of gnutella dies, BearShare users would have something to fall back on.

Of course ssh, SSL, PGP and all good commonly used secure protocols or hashs are available as open source. So why security by obscurity?

Even though the source to generate the encrypted data is available (ssh, SSL, PGP), the encryption algorithms are soo strong that it would take a LONG time for anyone sniffing the traffic to figure out what the data is. By the time they could crack the encrypted data, the encryption system would probably be changed and they have to start all over. You would need the special key to decrypt the data immediately.

This is the problem faced on gnutella when using a key-pair (private/public key) system. If you have an open source client that contains the keys needed to decrypt/encrypt the data... anybody can take the source, rip the keys and then decrypt/encrypt whatever they want. This is where security through obscurity comes into play. If others don't know the keys, don't know how the security works... it will be hard for them to crack. Otherwise you just go on blocking hundreds of IPs, or develop a centralised control system. This is not good.

These secure channels aren't the best solution, nor are they an absolute form of protection... but it's something! Does anyone else (Morgwen, Moak) have a better (non-proprietary) solution that everyone could use? No? That's what I thought.
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