Re: [Help-gnunet] GNUnet's Survival

[Christian Grothoff]

On Tuesday 13 January 2004 00:31, Alexander Winston wrote:
> What happens to GNUnet in the event that
> <http://www.ovmj.org/GNUnet/download/hostlist> is unreachable? Are
> people that are new to the network unable to find others to connect to?

At the moment, yes -- unless they get some initial host-files from somewhere 
else.  Note that it is easy for anyone running a GNUnet node to put up a 
hostlist (cat data/hosts/* > hostlist), so there is hope that at some point 
there will be more than one public initial hostlist.

Now, if you talk about the problem that there may not be *any* hostlist 
accessible due to strong censorship, the only other technical possibility 
would be to essentially scan random Internet IPs trying to find other peers.  
Of course, with less than 100 GNUnet peers online, the chances of finding one 
this way are less than one in a million attempts, but that's pretty much the 
only mechanism out there that would not rely on some "well-known" initial 
point of contact.

Does this answer your question?

Christian