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This is why it is absolutely critical that we continue to support and develop projects like IIP and Freenet.

There's a great need of more users and particularly more content, so I guess that means the 'net is not as dead as you think. But if the companies keeps it up, I can really see Freenet growing.

making it really secure?

Or just take your disk around with you.

It is quite likely that at some point the music industry will end up making more money out of Internet distribution of their music than they do out of selling CDs. It is also entirely likely that they will continue fighting against P2P tooth and nail until they have exhausted all possible options.

The problem is that right now the lawyers are making the decisions. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you are a laywer - you often assume that all problems can be solved with a law suit. This mentality will likely continue to persist until it is absolutely obvious, even to the lawyers, that it can't work.

What does this mean? Well, for one it means that we should fully expect legal attacks against users of P2P networks to continue. This will simply serve to encourage greater use of Freenet and other future systems which protect user anonymity (Freenet still needs work to make it well suited to this task - but if there is a demand, someone will create a suitable third-party app which uses Freenet as a back end).

After Freenet or its successors have finally demonstrated the futility of trying to use the law to halt progress in communications technology - the music industry may eventually accept that it needs to adapt, but don't hold your breath for it to happen any time soon.

It's advisable to download this using Freenet, rather than BitTorrent, as Freenet has a more robust, permanent network, and has many hundreds of nodes that might have never seen this file, but will automatically begin to share it, if it becomes popular.

That means faster download speeds. The RedHat 9 ISO files were downloading at over 120KB/sec on Freenet.

There is also the advantage that the link does not go down, when the people close their download windows ;)

You can Download a copy of Freenet here, and donate Here

I had just uploaded it, but apparently the direct links in the story were wrong, so I've re-uploaded Episode 1 of the Animatrix. I'll try to provide a freenet link again soon, but I suspect it will be too late for most people ;)

-Colin

It's advisable to download this using Freenet, rather than BitTorrent, as Freenet has a more robust, permanent network, and has many hundreds of nodes that might have never seen this file, but will automatically begin to share it, if it becomes popular.

That means faster download speeds. The RedHat 9 ISO files were downloading at over 120KB/sec on Freenet.

There is also the advantage that the link does not go down, when the people close their download windows ;)

You can Download a copy of Freenet here, and donate Here

I had just uploaded it, but apparently the direct links in the story were wrong, so I've re-uploaded Episode 1 of the Animatrix. I'll try to provide a freenet link again soon, but I suspect it will be too late for most people ;)

-Colin

It's advisable to download this using Freenet, rather than BitTorrent, as Freenet has a more robust, permanent network, and has many hundreds of nodes that might have never seen this file, but will automatically begin to share it, if it becomes popular.

That means faster download speeds. The RedHat 9 ISO files were downloading at over 120KB/sec on Freenet.

There is also the advantage that the link does not go down, when the people close their download windows ;)

You can Download a copy of Freenet here, and donate Here

I had just uploaded it, but apparently the direct links in the story were wrong, so I've re-uploaded Episode 1 of the Animatrix. I'll try to provide a freenet link again soon, but I suspect it will be too late for most people ;)

-Colin

If you want to stop RIAA intervention...good luck. At our university, there is an internal sharing hub set up (blocks outside IPs), but people still manage to get caught, for better or for worse.

I've been pushing FreeNet a lot lately, since it is starting to become a useful P2P application that is so secure, it is impossible to trace the origin and destination of all content. If students were set up several large nodes, and then maintain a set of Freenet-internal content catalogs (or use the companion application Frost, you might see a drop in RIAA intervention.

Freenet is an anonymous, completely free (free speech and free beer) Internet world. It's nearly impossible for monster mega-corporations or oppressive governments to find out your IP address.

...people should be donating to Freenet right now - it is the only P2P application that provides protection for its users.

...people should be donating to Freenet right now - it is the only P2P application that provides protection for its users.

CHK@fWoX96ph98S3fw6xnuA8PMcKgQwPAwI,iOLxdUpeRNRr0m uzkg17zA/maxpaynehero.zip (you need freenet for this link to work)

If there's one good thing about downloading from freenet, it's that it's more fun than waiting in line at FilePlanet after a /.ing. :P

Unfortunately, so far Freenet remains slow, crash-prone, and written in Java (at least, in my experience). Hopefully, some of these deficiencies will be fixed soon, though.

And for anonymous chat, there is always the Invisible IRC Proxy. That one actually works pretty well.

After this scenario, I think file-sharing gets pushed to a technology which effectively hides the content being transferred and who it's being transferred to. Unfortunately, this implies significant proxying. The ideal design would take all sharable content, break it up into encrypted blocks, and distribute them at random amongst all nodes. The files you're sharing would be discrete from the files you have on your machine (and hard drives are getting cheap enough this is feasible). When you requested a block, it would talk to a random peer, who would then proxy from 0 or more other peers.

I'm not sure on all the technical details, but what you describe sounds remarkably similar, at least in intent, to the Freenet project. And you're right, from what I've heard, it's quite slow at the moment (although it's expected to improve somewhat with more users and newer versions of the software).

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)

We do. We have several.
- FreeNet, and similar projects (Publius, FreeHaven) for distributing anonymous files
- The Invisible IRC Project for anonymous, deniable instant messaging
- InvisiBlog for blogging
- MixMaster and Hushmail for email
- Anonymizer and Peek-a-booty for browsing

Anyone care to add to this list? I've only put the ones that immediately spring to mind, but I know there are more distributed anonymous deniable chaffed encrypted file-share programs that I've not tried.

What, like this?

They are right, of course. Which is precisely why you should all use Freenet which IS anonymous, totally distributed, and has a much better distribution model in that popular content is automatically cached all over the net and all downloads are automatically "swarmed" so you don't get stuck downloading Madonna's music off of someones 56k modem. Using 60 download threads I can consistantly get 90k/s on recently inserted files, no matter what the connection speed of the person who made them available.

-completely anonymous users, file transfers, hosts, etc.

Freenet is still suseptable to a man-in-the-middle attack. Your ISP could log everything you insert. Also, it won't protect you from your own software. For example if you publish a word document with your name and LAN address embedded in it, you've pretty much given up your privacy.

Ah, Freenet (http://freenetproject.org/) was mentioned in another comment. That's one of the projects I was thinking of. It seems to have grown a lot since I last checked.

• Most people aren't running Freenet nodes yet.
  
• Freenet routing isn't even close to perfect yet; documents inserted into the network are not always retrievable at a reasonable HTL.
  
• Insertion takes a while, and you can't publish the Freenet key of your mirror until you've finished the insertion. (Warning: this is a simplification!)
  
• Whoever intends to insert the site into Freenet must first be able to retrieve a copy of it himself. The only reasonable way to ensure that this will happen would be for the story submitter to mirror it himself first, before submitting the story. I say this because the Slashdot editorial staff does not appear to be willing or able to perform this duty themselves. (In a perfect universe, the Slashdot crew would already be doing something like this.)
  

The freenet project may be of interest then...

I have mirrored the PDF in Freenet here, you must be running Freenet for it to work, but it has the advantage that the file will open up inside your browser if you want it to.

I didnt think I'd see the day where we'd all be forced into using freenet, but if these assholes think they can destroy the internet just to protect some fucking music files, we have to defend the internet in the only way possible.

Is it worth it to see the whole internet destroyed just because a few music companies want to make money? I MEAN THE WHOLE INTERNET?!

The music companies arent important enough to be allowed to ruin and destroy the internet

So if you want to support true annonymous connections, support freenet.

http://freenetproject.org/qcms/

It needs donations, I say if they dont want to let us use the real internet, we use an encrypted internet, what they will do is simply help freenet develop faster because they more they ruin the net, the faster freenet will gain support.

Just put your blog on the Freenet...

Nick

Beat that...

To a certain degree, this already exists. Freenet is supposed to be an anonymous system. All it really needs is a good indexing engine to help you find interesting things that people have inserted that are on the system, but without knowing the key, are unavailable to download.

Why not publish your blog on Freenet instead ? That way, you can not only publish your blog anonymously, but you can also be sure that there is no single, centralized server where it is stored that could be taken out or attacked. Besides, freenet can always use new nodes!

I could see a lot of people interested in a very high capacity distributed filesystem which could make use of hundreds of trojan'd PCs out on the internet to store information which you didn't want found on your own computer.
Make it highly redundant, self healing, replicating data as the "servers" go offline to make sure the information remains available. Hell, I could use something like that here at work.

Better put that on Freenet as soon as you have a chance...

Better yet, is there an encrypted, routed "internet" I can plug into at will when I'm online, just to obfuscate my traffic a bit? Or is that what Freenet is about?

Freenet itself can't obfuscate your normal traffic. Freenet is more about uncensorable anonymous publishing and smart caching.

Peek-a-Booty is supposed to be an anonymizing proxy network for Web traffic. Peek-a-Booty uses SSL to communicate between nodes, so it shouldn't stand out from normal traffic too much. Unfortunately, there hasn't been any new releases lately. The latest version is dated June 14th 2002. It's one of those great ideas that nobody bothered to implement properly..

However, if you don't like Freenet's large size and resource consumption, you should try Entropy which is basically the same as Freenet but it is written in C instead of Java.

Both projects are GPLed.

Someone (not me, I have things to do) needs to set up a website tracking this type of event, which allows people to enter their zipcodes and email addresses to be alerted when a lobbying opportunity arises in their area. I would be the first to sign up for Southern California.

If you feel you are up to the task - email me at ian[@]locut.us and I will do what I can to help, within the time contraints of my other projects.

I think the freenet link above is wrong. It's
http://freenetproject.org/

Before I installed, I needed a credibility check. I found it on one of the O'Reilly Network sites:
ian.html
maybe uprizer is what the author above meant.

I would look at the technologies similar to the one wich is used by Freenet: distributed cryptographicaly anonymised file storage and access systems.

Who will you sue if your stolen file is nowhere and everywhere (on 100.000 computers) at the same time? And there is no way to determine on which computer connected into this file sharing system this file is stored and on which not.

Well that's really scary for the Media industry if there is even no physical posibility to identify the person they want to take to court. Who would they try to prosecute if the DVD decryption code would be let into wild through such a system, and how to censor this code later on?

So no wonder there is a initiative to create such legislation.

I know this is probably not what you really want, but what about Freenet? Freenet might be slow right now, but that's just because you aren't on it ;o)

I've been discussing this with another /. user. Perhaps if wget fired up and did a recursive web-suck on all articles that are linked to in the abstract, tar'd and gzip'd each one, and then mirrored them with BitTorrent? That way the OSDN doesn't have to pay for the bandwidth.

The other solution I've heard is posting the articles to FreeNet and linking to the key. More convenient (you don't have to de-tar the articles) but much slower.

I tried BitTorrent, it was really slow, and while people say that it speeds up over time, I was still getting 10k/sec after 2 hours. I tried the mirrors - they were also dead slow. Eventually, I tried Shareaza, that P2P app which tried to hijack the "Gnutella" brand, and I actually got really good download speeds. I plan to upload to Freenet once I get the files (hopefully within 24 hours). If anyone with a really fast connection has the files, please consider uploading them to Freenet and letting us know what the keys are.

If you aren't already running a Freenet node, you should be, and if you can - make a donation.

If you aren't already running a Freenet node, you should be, and if you can - make a donation.

Three things, in combination, really bother me about this. The first one if that the spesifics of the blocking are kept secret for stupid reasons ("disseminating pornography", indeed. I'll disseminate pornography!). The second reason is that the secret blocked sites are being chosen by the state government, which I wouldn't trust at all, especially if you think of all the underhanded things people have done to get elected. Finally, I'm just against censoring the internet for anybody other than yourself.

1. Sure, but only if you know the hash of the file you want.
2. No, that's what Freenet is for.

He could, and then start praying for the link not to be posted on slashdot for the first week.

First off, it's very cool that you released your book as such. I saw a link off of BoingBoing saying that you released your book for free and reaction seemed very favorable. That said, next time (assuming there is a next time) you should release your book on a P2P network (such as Freenet) and direct everyone to search the network for your book. The more people who download it, the more available it will be. Encourage people to mirror it on their own servers for WWW access and you can save yourself a world of hurt.

Maybe you could make back some of that $15,000 by writing about how to release something for free to the audience and the publisher...

The movie is cool, but if everyone grabs it from the web server, I doubt it will last long, so please grab it from Freenet rather than getting them from the website. I have mirrored it here (install and run Freenet before clicking on the link):

The movie is cool, but if everyone grabs it from the web server, I doubt it will last long, so please grab it from Freenet rather than getting them from the website. I have mirrored it here (install and run Freenet before clicking on the link):

Just mirrored the file on Freenet, you can grab it here.

You could run an internal freenet.

"My motivation from the technical side was, firstly, really, I was fascinated by the idea of complex systems, which are formed from simple individual entities all cooperating. An example would be an ant's nest, whereby all of these ants are following relatively simple rules, yet they all work together to make this effectively a kind of meta-organism, which is the ant's nest, which can feed itself and reproduce and defend itself. So I was fascinated by that idea, and I was very interested in trying to apply that to a computer system. And by combining [this idea with my idealogical motivations], I essentially came up with Freenet."

Come on,
We all knew this would happen. Didn't we?