Home > Friend-to-friend

1 Uses of F2F

• F2F prevents random people from proving that your IP address can effectively be used to get some controversial files (and as soon as you know all the IP addresses of your friends, you can even use a firewall to block all the other addresses from accessing your F2F port)

• F2F that use link encryption but no end-to-end encryption (Mute and Waste) allow you to control (using your favorite sniffer) what kind of files your friends exchange with your node, in order to stop them from exchanging files that you disapprove of. Stop them by removing their public keys or by using a firewall to slow or stop their connexion with your node. You can even give their IP to the police, but since they are your friends you should kindly warn them first. Maybe one of their own friends made them do that. Now they can warn this friend in turn. And so on.

• Far less security problems: since only your friends can connect to your node, no random cracker can try to break into your computer by connecting with your P2P node and then using a bug in the communication part of the software. Dangerous documents (i.e. with viruses, buffer overflow attacks...) could even be avoided using strong reputation based networks (see "Future uses" below)

2 Future uses of F2F

• Strong encrypted F2F networks will mainly use strong symmetric encryption (in particular, the provably secure one time pad) for every link. This can only be achieved in real F2F networks since when you communicate with someone you never met in person, you have to use asymmetric encryption (along with some serious man in the middle problems).

• A very strong digital reputationSimilar to the conventional concept of reputation, but achieved while in a pseudonymous state. A digital reputation can be useful in situations where credibility must be established, but exposure of one's real life identity is undesireable or possibly haz based network could be built using a strong encrypted F2F network: each document on this network would be certified as being true by all of the nodes that forward them, and if a document appeared to be false then you could decrease the reputation of the friend that sent it to you and block this document from being exchanged again).

• Such a strong reputation network could be safely used to exchange electronic moneyElectronic money (or digital money) refers to cash and transactions using electronic means, encompassing the use of computer networks (such as the Internet) and digital stored value systems. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) is an example of electronic mone with fewer greed and corruption: altruists.org

3 What F2F is not

• a F2F is more powerful than an encrypted private FTP server. Your F2F node can forward a file (or a request for a file) anonymously between two of your friends (when forwarding a file or a request between them, your node doesn't tell any of them who is the other and what is the other address). Then those friends'nodes can in turn forward anonymously this same file (or request) to several of their own friends. And so on.

• a F2F is different from a private DirectConnectFile sharing Direct Connect is (originally) a peer-to-peer file sharing application written by NeoModus, and today is the general type of application used in a Direct Connect network. The Direct Connect network is not as de-centralised as Gnutella or Fast hub, since inside a DC hub everyone can know and use all the IP addresses of all the users (even when the address is from a friend from a friend from a friend..., someone you may never know)

• GNUnetGNUnet is a framework for decentralized, peer-to-peer networking. The framework offers link-level encryption, peer discovery and resource allocation. The primary application at this point is anonymous, censorship-resistant file-sharing, allowing users to and Freenet are not F2F because for efficiency reasons (path shortening) they allow some random nodes to connect directly to your node, thus knowing your IP and which files you can provide.