[p2p-hackers] p2p in some place or other

[Lally Singh]

>On 12/12/05, Matthew Kaufman <matthew at matthew.at> wrote:
>  I'll admit that maybe I'm just obsessing over this point for purely
>academic reasons; maybe the majority of users simply accept the system
>defaults and innocently engage in altruistic behavior that ends up
>optimizing global performance.  Maybe they all just turn their caches
>on because it is 'the right thing to do.'  Maybe no one writes
>malicious software that takes advantage of [for example] a proactive
>cache.  Maybe we shouldn't worry about it at all.
>
>  But, isn't it more interesting to think about building systems that
>have some fairness guarantees than building ones that don't?  Building
>a proactive cache that isn't susceptible to these abuses might require
>a trust/reputation sytem, which in turn requires a strong identity
>system, etc. -- but isn't that where the real fun is anyway? :)

It's not hard to imagine an ISP shipping some software to disable
caching on P2P network clients to all their clients (say with the installer
of free anti-spyware or anti-virus software), without the clients
ever having the chance to be altruistic.

IMHO, anonymity's pretty important to keep.  If there's going to
be an identity system, let's make sure it doesn't attach to real
people directly.  Ebay user IDs, which you can burn at any time,
but become valuable due to good feedback, are nice.

-- 
H. Lally Singh
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
Virginia Tech