Editing Nexus P2P trust network (section)

=== How can I know that the network node I'm currently connected to delivers authentic information? ===
The Nexus network is a swarm of interconnected computers. Anyone who can run a java program on their computer can become a node in the network if they have even one IP address of another live node. The could get this in a number of ways:
* from the saved list of nodes from the last session
* someone gives them a live node address via email, chat, web page, etc.
* automatically from a range of dyndns.com domain names with a predetermined pattern like nexus-001.dyndns.com, nexus-002.dyndns.com, etc. that the Nexus software can automatically scan. Some members of the network would have to set up one of the domains for the benefit of the whole network. But this measure would only be needed for first contact or after a long absence.

One of the unique features of Nexus is that the hash codes of its DHT (Dynamic Hash Table) are computed from the IP addresses of the nodes. This is a protection against manipulation of the network, such as introducing a split in the node grid.

But the data itself can always be verified by making use of the public encryption keys and digital signatures that are part of each identity or reference record.

The network could allow for access through an XML-RPC port on nodes with known domain names (such as from dyndns.com), but they would not be peers in the network, and could probably be tricked by an impostor. But in the end the data acquired would not stand up to validity checks. 

I'm not sure it's a good idea to allow such access to the network. An individual node might be overwhelmed with requests (unless the requests were automatically dished off to other nodes). I would rather have all users of Nexus also be peer nodes. Since the Nexus platform is Java, the big hospex websites could participate in Nexus by embedding a Java applet in one of their web pages (making each of their users a node of Nexus) (this is another reason to keep Nexus very lightweight), or else by creating a PHP version of Nexus to run on their server, or at least making it available to download.