[Psi-Devel] QT Messenger Join Venture

[Andreas Ntaflos]

On Tuesday 23 October 2007 15:08:00 Remko Tronçon wrote:
> > A DHT is much better than DYNDNS or forholding the IP, which may
> > dynamically. So lets talk about the serverless implementation into PSI.
> > Why not a DHT?
>
> What is DHT? And DynDns is indeed useless, since requires a central
> (DNS) server, so you're no longer 'serverless'.

DHT means, as far as I know, Distributed Hash Table and can be used by 
peers/nodes in a distributed system to talk to each other without a central 
authority/server managing the communication. Trackerless Bittorrent is a 
popular use case for this I think.

> Why do you think serverless messaging is so interesting? The only
> interesting thing about serverless messaging is when you are in a
> network without any connection to the internet. This is what
> link-local messaging is about, and this is what we will design in psi.
> This is what we will implement.

I think it has more to do with valid "paranoia". Serverless IM probably allows 
more secure communication between two people as there is no server in-between 
them that could have a malicious admin who likes to eavesdrop or do a 
man-in-the-middle-attack. Of course using GnuPG for end-to-end encryption 
would effectively prevent such a scenario but knowing how most people think 
setting up GnuPG is too big of a hassle. 

Serverless IM presumably would feature encryption on the transport level 
somehow so it woud be easier and more secure "out of the box", without users 
having to set up end-to-end encryption manually.

Assuming, of course, I understood the concept correctly. It seems like much 
talk and little walk at the moment. :)

Andreas
-- 
Andreas "daff" Ntaflos
Vienna, Austria

GPG Fingerprint: 6234 2E8E 5C81 C6CB E5EC  7E65 397C E2A8 090C A9B4
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