[liberationtech] GNU Free Call Announced

[Michael Rogers]

Hi Moritz,

This sounds like a very exciting project - thanks for the announcement!

On 18/03/11 18:51, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> Initially we will extend sipwitch to become aware of peer nodes by
> supporting host caches, and then support publishing of routes to
> connected peers. This work builds upon the already existing routing
> foundation in sipwitch itself. The use of host caches is a mechanism
> used in older p2p networks, it is generally well understood, it would
> meet the initial goals of establishing a self organized mesh network,
> and it is rather easy to initially implement to fully demonstrate the
> potential of sipwitch as a mesh calling system. More advanced
> methodologies can then be added later on.

I spent a while looking after LimeWire's Gnutella host caches. One of
the issues we ran into was that spammers and malware spreaders were able
to ensure that their nodes were over-represented in the caches, and thus
disproportionately likely to be discovered by new nodes joining the
network. People with an interest in blocking or monitoring SIP traffic
might presumably be motivated to try similar tricks against GNU Free
Call's host caches. I'm sure you can come up with a solution, but I just
thought it was worth flagging the issue.

Cheers,
Michael