Slashdot Mirror

The most visible movement is the weird "Freenet-china", which is actually a code fork made some years ago. I have no idea if it tracks the current code or what.

The devs have said that they are a bit insane though, since current Freenet has known weaknesses in that if it is illegal to run a node in the first place it isn't too hard to find them (e.g. the current protocol can be detected by layer 7 filters) given a well funded adversary. Hence the darknet stuff coming in 0.7, and later probably some steganography. It is not really ready for use yet in a truly hostile regime like China. Perhaps they think it's the best thing they have for the time being.

Those are some pretty big and mighty words there.

Since it's apparent that you don't understand how it works, I'll let you know that blocks that aren't requested don't propagate and are eventually dropped. I can run a freenet node fully content in the knowlege that unless the billion people in China are suddenly all pedophiles, the Chinese blocks are statistically more likely to exist than the child porn blocks.

So, what Chinese Blog have you hosted recently? What's that? You're not doing your part to clean freenet of child porn?

MMMMhmmmm...

When a self-absorbed "project leader" encounters a problem which is far beyond his skills.

The existing system is basically unworkable and was proven to be completely useless for its main stated purpose: protecting dissidents.

This project neeeds a serious theoretical discussion and research to determine if it is even feasible.

A solution needs to be found for finding .torrent files that are cryptographically authenticated to be from a certain trusted release group.

Unfortunately, such torrent files would all have to point to the same tracker; change the tracker, change the signature. Take down the tracker, invalidate all those torrent files.

Of course, you could leave the the tracker address out of the signature - but then the RIAA could simply spread torrent files with honeytrap tracker addresses.

A better solution might be to use Freenet as the distribution method. Sure, it's slow, but:

• It's perfectly possible to download even whole movies out of it.
• It should be resistant to the Slashdot effect - popular files get spread around the network caches, so they should stay available without slowdowns.
• It is propably the most anonymous of current networks. It was designed to make it impossible to know who's uploading and who's downloading. Of course, it's impossible to guarantee absolute security, but Freenet does put paranoia before efficiency.
• All content is cryptographically hashed (with SHA1) to produce the CHK key, which is used to request content (CHK is Freenet analogue to URL). Freenet also supports cryptographically signed keys (SSK), which allow content authors to proof that they authored some file, while still keeping their real-world identity secret. The de-facto Freenet communication tool, Frost, also supports crypted boards (with reading and posting requiring different keys), private (crypted) messages in-board, signed messages, and uploading files to the board, with a search function and signatures.
• Both the Freenet Daemon (Fred) and Frost are Java, so they should work in every machine. The batch upload tool FUQID is a Windows program, but works under Wine in Linux.
• All significant Freenet programs are open source, so the truly paranoid can check them by themselves, to make sure there isn't any nasty surprises.
• It works. It's slow, but it works right now. AFAIK a translated Freenet version is used by dissidents in China for communication, and even the RIAA is unlikely to be worse than the Chinese government ;) (but please note that I can't read chinese, so I don't really know what the linked page says, apart from it having in-Freenet links).

Learn chinese, then start here.

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

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.

...see here.

A few months ago a friend gave me a CD which contained a version of Linux that you could put in your CD drive, and reboot your computer, and when it came up your computer became a Freenet node, and you could surf Freenet. The main site was called "China News On Freenet" which is mirrored on the web here. Most stuff on Freenet is either pornography, or in English, but there is an increasing amount of Chinese information, some of which is of quite good quality. Freenet-China is a modified version of Freenet, but translated to Chinese. They also use an earlier version of Freenet since Freenet itself is still quite experimental and recent versions have been unreliable.

It is possible to use proxies to access information from outside China, but most people are fearful of these since you never really know whether you are being monitored. With Freenet-China at least you konw that the worst they can find is that you have a Freenet-China CD, which even in China isn't really enough to get you in trouble.

Software like Freenet-China is important because it gives a sense of comfort. Being able to access censored information is useful, but being able to access it without worrying about going to jail is important if is really going to have an impact.

Freenet addresses this problem in several ways:

• You only need to sign up to Freenet once, thereafter it handles the task of finding new Freenet nodes to talk to automatically
• Freenet is self-propogating, you can send a URL to your friend by email pointing to your computer, and they can download Freenet from you - no reliance on a centralized site
• Unlike this service, Freenet allows people within Iran to publish freely and anonymously without relying on an external website.

It is early days yet, but at least this demonstrates the type of things it can be useful for.