Message Banning Security and GUI Bug
 

Excellent program, but two things:

1) When using it, I had "taste in men" automatically added to my search blocking criteria. How on earth did that happen? If that's the result of a planned hack, that has some pretty powerful potential in it...

2) If you use "sort" on the search menu, and you keep getting results, the GUI seems to go nuts (scrolls by itself, leaves old windows on screen, etc.) That's not a fatal error by any means, but a bug nonetheless.

Other than that, great program! But the message filtering flaw really bothers me -- how can I assume the rest of the client is safe?

Earlier, I had been watching "porn for pyros" spam itself over a fifteen minute period over many variations. Because it had been spammed rapidly in sequence, it got entered into many banned lists and thus anyone searching for it would end up with nought.

Something like this could be stopped by having two sets of banned items. One list is manually entered and it either never expires or expires after a period of time. Another list contains the automatically picked up list of banned words and those terms expire after a randomly determined time between 4 to 7 minutes. Why the random variation? Well, that is to prevent lockstep engaging/disengaging of banned terms across the entire gnutella network. One day, we will all have +500mhz CPU with cable/dsl connects; in that scenario, we could have a lockstep propagation...

Oops, that was my bad earlier -- I didn't know it had the auto blocking programmed in yet...

But, I do agree that it needs to disengage after a random time. Mine had "nin" blocked, odd considering what a nine inch nails fan I am. I didn't see any more floods for it, so the ban just hurt legitimate users. For a question, how many times does it need to see a search before banning it?

When I read these posts, I get the feeling that there's a misconception about how much it actually means. Banning a search term negligibly affects the network, because the same search is sent to many other hosts. Keep that in mind. Also: it's not really a matter of how many times something is searched for before it is banned, but a matter of how many times it was search for in any given period of time. To get a precise measurement you'd have to ask Shaun. Really, talking about this feature is getting pretty old.

-Yytrium-

Heres the scoop on banning and the gui bug.

GUI bug:
I am aware of it and do not know of any fix currently.

Search Bans
The next version will have two lists, a temporary banlist and a permanent banlist. The temp list will not be remembered between sessions and will ultimately have a timer to refresh it. Searches analyzed as floods will default to this list. The permanent list will be just that, it will be saved between sessions. Searches double clicked in the monitor window will default to this list. You will also be able to move searches from one list to the other. Sound good?

>> The next version will have two lists, a temporary banlist and a permanent banlist.

This feature is very much appreciated! I was getting tired of having to manually clear my banned items list all the time in order to allow propagation of useful terms.