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The Czar is acting fast! The FreeNet Website is already offline!

Quote from the site: "(Freenet contains NO spyware or adware , it's Free Software! The source code is publicly available for review)" so if you're interested you can go to Freenet.org.

This sort of thing is definately the future, just like BT suddenly arrived on the scene I'm sure Freenet (or it's principles, anyway) will arrive within the next 2 years, what are the RIAA etc going to do THEN?

It's like boxing, a sport that could never be banned, and if it was, it would just go underground, nothing is achieved.

P2P UDP is actually a very good solution.

I'm tired of the quasi-judeo-christian belief that client/server is the only way to implement networking systems.

1. No feedback on message delivery.
Of course you can have feedback on message delivery. What a silly comment.
2. Bandwidth overhead introduced by error correction/checking (UDP is the wrong protocol).
UDP has error correction (it doesnt have error correction). TCP uses UDP uses IP. There is nothing that TCP does that a system built using UDP cant. Conversely, a purpose-built protocol over UDP can be more efficient than the lazy approach of just using TCP for everything.
3. Central server still needed to record IP addresses to pass to clients.
You thik this is a good thing? In any case, ID's can be virtualised. Heard of Freenet?
4. Massive bandwidth outlay on connection. (Modem user has to send buddy image to all 100 buddies online).
Caching and distributed resource delivery.
5. t wouldnt work throught a NAT firewall.
It could work fine through a NAT. The NIC doesnt care how you architect your software.
6. You wouldnt know if you had become disconnected.
Keepalives.
7. You couldnt log on from any machine (ala msn, icq), because no central server to give you your contacts list
User ID's and passwords, encrypted distributed storage

If you want to consider more intelligent message delivery system, move past client/server with TCP.

-Christian

FreeNet was sold on a bunch of users for just that but quite simply no one is willing to dump hard drive space to random users out there.
However, I would use this sort of thing on an internal network because I directly control how much space is availible and I'd be able to, with adoption, access video from one of my three computers from a set-top-box in the living room and manage it as a single library. That's the sort of thing we need to be looking at, but unfortunately very few companies are officially designing network-aware set-top-boxes with DiVX decoding and hackers are left to design such things themselves. I had a similar tool for the PS2, but it was unusually flaky when it came to sending the decoded video over the network (since the PS2 could never decode the video itself, the application on my computer had to do it before hand).

What if the next version uses something more flexible... like a Google search on some particular string? Spend a few months sprinkling links to the download on servers around the world, with pages containing some unique string (call it "foo123"). When the next virus activates, it does a Google search for "foo123 [google.com]", and downloads its replacement. As fast as hosts are removed, more can be created and indexed.

OK, let's see how you would do it...

The payload of the original virus would be a encrypted peer-to-peer daemon somewhat like Freenet, except that it would only allow uploads signed with a particular digital signature. The client would of course have to include the public key of that signature, but not the private key.

Once infected a machine would open a listening port and attempt to connect to machines chosen randomly but with a bias to its local class C (as with CodeRed). Once contact has been established the machines would exchange IPs so that each could recontact the other. Each machine would continue to probe for peers until it had found a certain number - say twenty - and then it would remain quiescent, just listening. Periodically (say weekly) it would handshake again with its known peers, and if any failed to handshake twice successively it would seek others until it had again reached quota.

Once the virus was widespread the author would send a signed file to one infected machine. The name of the file would be a unique string (for simplicity of exposition say a serial number, although any systematically unique string would do) so the first file the virus author injected might be 0001, the next 0002 and so on. The machine would accept the file as genuine because it could decrypt it with its local copy of the public key, and would pass it on unchanged to all the other infected nodes it knew about. If a machine had already received 0001 and was offered 0001 by a peer it would refuse it to save time and network congestion - not to be nice to other users, but because if the thing blocked up network bandwidth completely, it wouldn't be able to do it's own dirty work.

The signed files could contain

1. a list of targets and a date/time. When the action date/time in the file was reached, the virus would mount a DDoS attack on the hosts listed in that file for twenty four hours and then delete the file.
2. the URL of a file to load and then spam out in the same way the virus itself originally spread. Because this file doesn't have to be put up before the virus is launched it could be put up on any defaced site anywhere and need not be tracable back to the author.
3. a hotfix patch to the virus itself, which would immediately be installed and run.

This would be incredibly difficult to defend against because

• in DDoS mode the hosts to be attacked wouldn't be known until the attack file began to propagate - and it could propagate very, very fast indeed, since the peer-to-peer network has connected itself in advance.
• It would be impossible to introduce 'white' payloads into the network because only the author would have the necessary private key.
• Because of the upgrade facility, as defences against the virus became available the author could inject into the network 'hot fixes' which would work around these defences.
• Because the author could inject new signed files into any infected node, it would be very difficult to track down where they were being injected.

Furthermore, the network could be used to launch several sequential attacks, which would not even need to have been planned at the time the virus was written. The author could, in effect, sell use of a flexible, massively distributed mass-UCE/DDoS attack engine to the highest bidder...

Hang on, hang on... just wait until I get a patent on that idea!

So, it would seem that we need a peer-to-peer service that is built with the following attributes:

-completely anonymous users, file transfers, hosts, etc.
-reliable and stable structure
-decentralized topology
-efficient data management
-and complete deniability (I didn't host that file, or I didn't download that file, as member's cant control content on the network)

Well, I don't work for FreeNet, or their developers, but I did have to read a paper on FreeNet for school, and FreeNet does do all that.

I guess it's time to make the switch to FreeNet.

Me and a fellow developer worked on a Java client application using netbeans, I would say netbeans is fair in performance, compared to IBM's VisualAge which sucks real bad to the point of discouraging development, but generally all Swing IDEs are slow and unrepsonsive, because Swing is based on AWT, so it is layers and layers of bloat, So far I think the only think Java is good for is server side not desktop applications, imagine developing something like Adobe photoshop using Swing, and netbeans required a hefty 512Mb (my first PC had 640Kb which is suppose to be enough for anyone), I gave up on Java for the desktop long ago until I recently installed the latest version of freenet now those people have totally different concept, launch a local server and use it from the browser and let the browser do all the dirty UI rendering stuff, maybe this is far more limited than the usual felxiable approach of a standalone desktop application but i was impressed by the concept itself.

Already here. Heard of Freenet? Check it out

Any volunteers to set up an central fund for collecting and distributing the donations? You could probably host it here.

Actually, freenet does exactly that. When you use freenet, you store someone else's data on your computer. However, it's encrypted so you never have any idea what you're storing. And you also don't have the only copy of it, so if you delete all your partial encrypted data, it doesn't cease to exist.

Freenet is a bad name for obvious already taken name reasons and that it is really a "cheap community net"

As someone else pointed out, "Free-net" is apparently a registered trademark. And of course there's Freenet (potential problem with Free-net's TM?).

Anyone have any good ideas? (none below are good...)

• ccnet (cheap community net)
• ComNet (community net)
• CollabNet (collaboritive net)
• ChomNet (cheap community)
• VolNet (volunteer)
• ShareNet
• CoNet
• TagNet (Together we Are Greater) (TwagNet?)

TagNet's not so bad...

I note that the ricochet network is only guaranteed to the end of October. It shouldn't be that difficult to get a free network up and running to cover the site by then (even if it has to be powered by car batteries!).

Much cheaper than FTP bandwidth. plus even the slimiest southeast asian software bandit can't get her grubby paws on it.

-=-=-=-=-

What you ask looks, to me, a lot like the FreeNet Project, with 2 little differences: freenet was not done to be peer to peer, so it's done for "always available" information and the presence of a given file on the system does not depend on the supplier being on-line, but on how much people actually downloaded it (unused content will be the first to disappear).

To me, the main benefit of a digital camera is that because there's essentially no marginal cost to taking pictures, I take a lot more of them, which makes the digital camera more fun.

Current discounted street prices are around $450. FWIW, here's a buy.com link to the camera. I understand that Fuji has higher res models in this form factor now, but you'll naturally pay more.

Maybe I'm just showing my ago, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?

Here is part of the Detroit Freenet FAQ:

* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net is a free, public-access community computer system. Free-Nets can serve populations of any size, from large metropolitan areas to small cities and towns. They offer a wide spectrum of on-line information services to the public, including community and government databases and worldwide electronic messaging. They don't charge for their services, so everything on them is free. Free-Nets also have an interactive aspect, in that users can dialogue with information providers. While there are many Free-Nets around the world, each Free-Net is tailored to meet the needs of the local community, so no two Free-Nets are identical.

Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.