[Blocks-development] RIAA busts student

[Blat F. <pet...@ho...>]

I read the following...

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2783386.html?tag=st.ne.1002.tgif.ni

it tells the story of a student who gets his dorm room door
kicked in by the police and his computer equipment confiscated
due to him operating an FTP server full copyrighted
MP3s and movies.

Now, although you might ask yourself "I wonder what would have
happened if he'd been running a Blocks server?", this has
obviously nothing to do with Blocks because people who
run Blocks servers are responsibile individuals who would
never get involved in activity like this.

Still, it seems obvious that the outcome of this sort of
activity will result in administrative behaviour which
may affect people who would like to run Blocks servers,
for example blocking incoming connections, or filtering
all traffic through proxy servers and firewalls.

You can already run a Blocks server and connect to a
Blocknet with the listening port disabled, which should
allow you to run a Blocks node on networks which
disallow public servers, but proxy servers would seem
to pose a larger challenge.

Having done some investigation, this doesnt look to
be an issue. Tunnelling Blocks traffic over HTTP doesnt
look like to big a challenge, though it would take some
time to integrate and would be a bit bandwidth
inefficient.

I was considering the recent requests to allow
advertisement of 'out of cache' files, so that people
could advertise files in a similar fashion to FTP or
Napster, but I think that although Blocks is currently
a little ahead of its time and disk space is still an
issue, there will be need for secure anonymous file
distribution that covers the seisure of equipment.
So, at this point in time, I dont intend to start
adding useability features that might encourage
comprimising the original design.

All comments welcome :-)

ttfn

PG.

PS yes, bugs will be fixed soon.



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