Friends via G2
Posted: 25 Aug 2009 23:06The idea to be able to find friends and keep updated lists of your online friends within Shareaza is probably as old as the application itself.
The challenge is of course to make the network users not more tracable than they are now, as much users won't like a reduction of their annonymity. What about generating a GUID-like randomly generated sha1 key for every user which is searchable like any other hash by the network users - with the limitation that it a) doesn't exist as a file and b) can only be given manually to other users (via a button in the integrated chat or via copy/paste). Like this even fake spy-Hubs cannot know which one of the many sha1 hashes promoted is the one the user uses to be tracable - if he uses one, because of course this should be disabled by default and only enabled if the user whishes a profile to be in touch with his friends.
In order to authenticate friends once their computer has found yours, we could instore an easy challenge system: On the first connection (when both users do 'accept *other_user* as a friend'), each computer generates and saves a specific challenge code for the opponent (e.g. multiply by 6, sustract 4 div 3 multiply by 120 mod 4 add 7). On reconnection, each computer generates a random number within certain predefined boundaries and challenges the other. Only if both computers answer correctly, a friend-friend connection is authorized (and online status, status details, personal information etc. is shown).
Another problem in this scenario is 'how does Shareaza finds friends back when they were offline for a while?'
For sure, saving the last known IP may help in some cases and it is surely a way to go, but it will not always work. At a first step, I'd like to suggest limiting the entire thing to people having a static web adress pointing to their dynamic IP (via services like DynDNS, for example) and people with static IP adresses. This saves us much network traffic (as each computer going online would issue a search query for each of his friend hashes, which would produce an enormeous waste of traffic) and limits the testing community for the system to a smaller group which can have positive side effects (as those will be mostly advanced computer users).
Now... sounds this idea (or this beginning of an idea) good? Any comments? (except the usual "we don't have a dev willing to do it and we have much more important things to fix"-reply )
mfg,
Old
PS.: I'll delete each comment with less than 4 sentences, in order to avoid pages of "I hate this thing; -1", "+1; nice idea" or "I don't have something to say but sitting here is boring so I think I'll write something nevertheless"
The challenge is of course to make the network users not more tracable than they are now, as much users won't like a reduction of their annonymity. What about generating a GUID-like randomly generated sha1 key for every user which is searchable like any other hash by the network users - with the limitation that it a) doesn't exist as a file and b) can only be given manually to other users (via a button in the integrated chat or via copy/paste). Like this even fake spy-Hubs cannot know which one of the many sha1 hashes promoted is the one the user uses to be tracable - if he uses one, because of course this should be disabled by default and only enabled if the user whishes a profile to be in touch with his friends.
In order to authenticate friends once their computer has found yours, we could instore an easy challenge system: On the first connection (when both users do 'accept *other_user* as a friend'), each computer generates and saves a specific challenge code for the opponent (e.g. multiply by 6, sustract 4 div 3 multiply by 120 mod 4 add 7). On reconnection, each computer generates a random number within certain predefined boundaries and challenges the other. Only if both computers answer correctly, a friend-friend connection is authorized (and online status, status details, personal information etc. is shown).
Another problem in this scenario is 'how does Shareaza finds friends back when they were offline for a while?'
For sure, saving the last known IP may help in some cases and it is surely a way to go, but it will not always work. At a first step, I'd like to suggest limiting the entire thing to people having a static web adress pointing to their dynamic IP (via services like DynDNS, for example) and people with static IP adresses. This saves us much network traffic (as each computer going online would issue a search query for each of his friend hashes, which would produce an enormeous waste of traffic) and limits the testing community for the system to a smaller group which can have positive side effects (as those will be mostly advanced computer users).
Now... sounds this idea (or this beginning of an idea) good? Any comments? (except the usual "we don't have a dev willing to do it and we have much more important things to fix"-reply )
mfg,
Old
PS.: I'll delete each comment with less than 4 sentences, in order to avoid pages of "I hate this thing; -1", "+1; nice idea" or "I don't have something to say but sitting here is boring so I think I'll write something nevertheless"