BitTorrentVsFreenet
t | http://freenet.sourceforge.net/] is meant for reducing censorship. Its main purpose is to keep files available and to have communication encrypted. This is something bittorrent could do, encrypt all of its network data.
No it couldn't. Freenet was designed from the ground-up to prevent censorship, trying to make BitTorrent do the same would be like trying to turn a bicycle into a space shuttle. Freenet isn't as easy to get going as BitTorrent, but it has a number of advantages:
- It is totally decentralized, no reliance on centralized .torrent indexes
- It dynamically caches data, meaning that even if a file's popularity suddenly increases, Freenet can handle it
- It affords total anonymity to uploaders and downloaders of data
- Uploaders don't need anyone to host their upload - they just push it into Freenet and can then forget about it (it will stay in Freenet for as long as people are still downloading it)
-- don't you think rarest piece first is better than random piece?
rarest piece or random piece first does not depend on the protocol but the client implementation.
there is no way to know which is the rarest piece before you try to download it.
rarest piece becomes increasingly less effecient than random when the number of peers rise, bittorrent intelligently changes behaviour to account for this
On the other hand, Freenet, last I saw, still hadn't bothered to take any steps to improve individual download performance -- you could easily end up having to download the entire file from the island of Naura just becaues of the way the content addressing happens to be arranged. Chopping up files so that multiple portions could be downloaded at once from multiple source was proposed years ago, but, to my knowledge, still hasn't been implemented.
- This is incorrect. Files in Freenet are split up using Forward Error Correction".
Freenet encryption is probably overrated, too -- last I saw, it was only link encryption, not content encryption.
- This is incorrect. All data is encrypted prior to insertion into Freenet.
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Last edit: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 13:40:40 -0700 (WikiWord) Revisions: 21