PlanetLab peers ? « OneSwarm Forum

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PlanetLab peers ?

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Started 5 months ago by Rafa
Latest reply from Olive

Rafa
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Heya Devs,

It seems that there is more and more PlanetLab peers in the network.
Many people here are seeing this badly.

The last Oneswarm user that talked us about these peers as more PlanetLab peers than real peers !! ("humanly" operated)

So we have to ask you some questions :

1) How many PlanetLab machines do you have exactly injected in the network ?

2) Do you *really need* so many douzens of big nodes for observe the network or the 'load balancing' ?
(many users have too many PL peers for expect any anonimity !)

3) Can you give us the exact IP of all the machine you used to monitor the network ?
(Some of us want to block them for give back some anonimity to the whole network users ...)

Regards,
Rafa

Posted 5 months ago #
cronborg
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I've already done that.
However, I keep some of them but not all of them. In fact 3 or 4 among 20 connected are planetlabs'. They are very efficient. I exchange most of my data with them. They all have awesome names. You know who they are before you test their ip.

Copy their IP once connected and paste it to seek for information. You have plenty of ways to know who you're connected with.
Here is one :
http://www.ipcountry.org/index.php

Once you know who he is and from which country, you can block that "friend".
You SHOULD block him so you are not offered again to connect to him the next time you ask the servers for new connections.

By the way this is crude. I already asked the devs if they could implement every friends data at a glance with icons or whatever. They asked in return if one could provide them with an up-to-date database that would help implement those features.
In fact they are and to some extent are already implemented if you use the filtering method implemented in Azureus/Vuze and kept into Oneswarm. You could for instance gather all the planetlab IPs all over the world and then filter them out, forever.
The same about a country, the media companies etc etc.
My point was more about having a bunch of each instead of none of some of them and that would mean I can see who they are and I chose to keep the balance for every kind of friend.

Posted 5 months ago #
cronborg
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In fact nobody cares. They take anonymity is granted.

Imagine all this is a set up. NSA, CIA or simply Piatek's grand father, I mean the CEO of Warner Universal, and manager of MPAA, is behind all this. 1S is simply under some secured p2p cover granting full access to all the connected computers in search for useful data. They'll also have the keys and logs to plenty of other systems. This is huge. And Planetlab working with the DARPA is relaying all the network. Wow !

They won't tell you, and as long as it goes, you all are their pawns.
But whatever we do, we already know that. Don't we ?

Posted 5 months ago #
alpahc
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LMAO
I get it most of us are paranoid freaks but if 1S were really malicious it would have been discovered long ago and nobody would use it anymore.
That is, unless Piatek wrote the most sophisticated rootkit ever, one that's able to conceal itself from it's own source code (GL with that) I reaaaaally doubt it...
(Now technically, it is possible they intentionally coded a weak function that one would be able to exploit by a buffer overflow or something... But let's stop the speculations here... It would be an insult regarding the great job they did overall)

But I agree there should be more friend management stuff. (countrywise filters, providers maybe... )

Posted 5 months ago #
1SMaster
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Hi,
I am OneSwarm french forum's administrator (www.1s-fr.net).

The debate about peers PlanetLab becomes more and more intense and as we didn't receive any answer to Rafa's questions, we are more and more worried.

Could you answer him before our reputation would be called into question and before our members would start to leave.

Thanks
1SMaster

Posted 5 months ago #
piatek
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We keep some planetlab peers running so there's always a large set of peers online that aren't being NATs. Currently, they subscribe to the French community server, but we could drop it if you like. Let me know.

Posted 5 months ago #
Rafa
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Hi Piatek,

Yes. Please remove all these PL peers from our Community Server.
But here, the "some planetlab peers" seems to be *389 peers* if we believe the CoDeeN statistics page (http://comon.cs.princeton.edu/status/) : we are near Sybil attacks.

More silence about their role is going to be scary ...

Regards

Posted 5 months ago #
piatek
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We aren't using all of them -- so it's far short of 389. Nevertheless, I'll take them off.

Posted 5 months ago #
Rafa
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Please, confirm when it will be done.

Posted 5 months ago #
cronborg
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@Raf and Piatek.
In fact there is no point in doing that unless people connect to new members automatically. I doubt this should be the default setting even if it is so when you subscribe to a new server.

I only subscribe to new members when I feel my connected friends list is getting low, about less than 15. Then I'm choosing those that I find their name interesting. After that, I block them depending on the data I get from their IP and my mood. Very few pass the test.

Also I must admit Rafa is right about the number.
I already count 23 potential friends from planetlab on my list of more than 250, considering there's been some time now that I can sniff them by their name to avoid them.

Posted 5 months ago #
Rafa
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The PlanetLab peers are still here on our Community Server.
You failed.

Do we need to close our server ?

Posted 4 months ago #
piatek
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We did an update which should have removed them. But, perhaps there are stragglers. If you send me a PM with the ones that are still on there I'll remove them manually.

Posted 4 months ago #
cronborg
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@Rafa : if you want, you can simply block them by their IP. A firewall is meant for that.
This won't harm the other clients/friends. No need to make a fuss of that.

Posted 4 months ago #
jolavillette
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@Cronborg
The best solution would still be that no bots like PlanetLab peers subscribe to the oneswarm-fr.net public CS, which was clearly asked by the admins. Hundreds of real users trust this CS to get real limited friends.
Beside that, I personnally would feel better about PlanetLab peers if I knew precisely what they do and who they report to.
Jo

Posted 4 months ago #
cronborg
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I am quite sure that normal peers you get in France are far less trustworthy than Planetlabs'.
The most evil and high tech spying companies for MPXX and SACEM (french MPXX) are based in France and are in fact French companies. Furthermore the French police and army has among the biggest spying system on internet employing more people than any other free country who are mostly used to let justice and private companies, not administration to take care of their problems. France is also known to be one of the only countries to harbour a huge division that spies on phone calls with hundreds of thousands of people recorded per year. This has been revealed in the 1990s and there has been no change since then.
If you would dare to compare to China, I am quite sure that China has less government spies per internet connection than France.
My bet is if you want to be safer, just get rid of all the french IP.
If you also consider that France is at the center point of all the nodes connections of the European internet your next move should be to extend all your filters to any European IP.
Now seriously, if you think your activities are so evil that Planetlab servers might be used to get you caught, I suggest you don't use Oneswarm at all. The developers already told you it's not that safe to take that risk.

Posted 4 months ago #
Olive
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Indeed, maybe we’d rather make sure that Trident Media Guard IPs are filtered out, rather than the very probably harmless Planetlab peers setup by the OneSwarm team...

(Not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned with a big number of peers belonging to a single entity though.)

Posted 4 months ago #

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