Entropy Project Closes Up Shop

k0fcc writes "In a disappointing move to privacy enthusiasts, the Entropy Project's creator has released a statement that the project is shutting down. Entropy was a very popular, and some say faster, alternative to Freenet which supported a number of different cryptographic protocols. The creator alluded to the possibility that the project could continue if a new owner could be found."

Well, was it open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's open source, there's no problem. If it's open source yet the project still dies at that point, then that just means there genuinely wasn't interest in it succeeding.

If it ISN'T open source, well then, that's just that much more proof that projects of public importance such as this one should always be open source, so that something that potentially people come to depend on does not wind up with a single developer or development team as a single point of failure...

Re:Ironic

[Barto]

Considering irony is [princeton.edu] "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs", ironic would be a project named Entropy staying together. A project named Entropy coming apart perfectly congruous IMHO. So there.

Yeah, entropy ain't what it used to be.

[cool_st_elizabeth]

Now it's official.

mmm really?

[eldacan]

GNUnet is written in C. One buffer overflow exploit could compromise the whole network.

Not quite true IMHO: it's obviously not sufficient to compromise one client/server to compromise the whole network. If it was, it would be a piece of cake to take the existing source code and use it to build this "compromised" client/server.

If you want to compromise the whole network with one buffer overflow exploit, I guess you will have to find an exploit that works with all versions of GNUnet, and you will have to run it against all (ok, most) clients/servers on the network (most of the traffic seen by one computer on the network doesn't make sense for it, it just relays the packets to other computers).

And there is also a Java implementation [ovmj.org] under development.

Re:Erm

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

Bittorrent doesn't have a built in search engine, but it's probably the most mainstream (if one considers appearance of legitimacy rather than strict popularity) of all the P2P protocols/clients.

I don't think it has to do with being ivory tower--it's just that anonymity comes with a bandwidth/convenience cost, and at this time most people don't consider it worth paying. As computer resources increase, or political reality changes, anonymity might start to grow in relative importance.

You don't know what you are talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

Freenet seems to me to be one of those ivory tower projects that has little relation to the real world.

Thats a pretty bold statement for someone who has clearly never tried it. Freedom of speech may not bear much relation to your reality, but you will probably get a different view from someone from some other [freenet-china.org] countries I can think of.

Its a research project, and they are solving hard problems. Yes its not as easy to use as it could be, but either was Linux for a long time, and in many ways Freenet is much more complicated.