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However what if the infrastructure was put in place and such a service was to move to say... ...Russia? There is no way Corporate America could get to that unless a) sabotage was an option or b) the U.S. Government was to issue sanctions against such a country.

See freenet.

Nice to know that I have so much of your attention, but that wasn't me.

BTW, you never did get back to me regarding my Freenet FIQ like you said you would. Guess you got "too busy" eh?

Generalisation of Adaptive Network for data processing
A longer term and more ambitious goal would be to determine whether a distributed decentralised data processing system could be constructed using the information distribution Adaptive Network [Freenet] as a starting point. Such a development would allow the creation of a complete distributed decentralised computer

Guess there is nothing new under the sun.

Generalisation of Adaptive Network for data processing
A longer term and more ambitious goal would be to determine whether a distributed decentralised data processing system could be constructed using the information distribution Adaptive Network [Freenet] as a starting point. Such a development would allow the creation of a complete distributed decentralised computer

Guess there is nothing new under the sun.

Yeah, but "a little signal triangulation" won't help you if the computer you requested it from didn't have the data and is simply relaying it for you. Welcome to the wonderful, legal side-stepping realm of Freenet.

The idea behind Freenet is that of relaying a request for some other node transparently -- so, say the FBI operative attempts to retrieve some kiddy porn and contacts some unsuspecting node. Well, great. The request returns (carrying data), and the FBI goes after the node operator. However:

1. There is no way to prove that the node was carrying the data before the request, thus, the FBI agent was responsible for spreading the offending material
2. There is no way for the node operator to know what his node contains, and thus, no way to prevent the data from passing through
3. Even if the data did reside on that node, there is no way to prove that it got there by the node operator requesting it

So, you see, "a little signal triangulation" wouldn't help if a system like Freenet was implemented wirelessly.

See also: The Slashdot Brigade.

(Yeah, OK, so it was proposed a year ago. We just really need people to get the job done.)

Small list of open-source Java projects:

• Jakarta - the Apache Software Foundation's primary Java development site. Most notable are their Tomcat and Ant projects.
• Xerces - a pure-Java XML parser (there's a C++ version too) - also by the Apache Software Foundation.
• jEdit - pure Java text editor. Very powerful and easily extensible with Java plugins.
• Over 4000 projects at SourceForge.
• Freenet - the idea behind the network has gotten a lot of publicity, it's client is written in Java.

There's quite a community based around Java - I would suggest people start looking at those aspects of its cover.

The idea that Gnutella is more scalable than Freenet is laughable. Gnutella employs a broadcast search meaning that every time you search for content in a proper Gnutella network your request can hit thousands of other peers in the network, in Freenet each request will hit at most 25 other nodes.

If you genuinely believe the drivel you have spouted here, I strongly suggest that you do some research before you demonstrate your stupidity again.

Requires you to download a newer JVM. Not a big deal.

Hard as hell to get connected to another client, because there's no central server.

It's not turnkey. You must search and find peers to put in your hosts file. It doesn't work 'out of the box'.

There's no way to search for files.

Download speeds are poor, due to encryption and other factors relating to anonymity, I believe

Frequently, files will download partially or with zero length, but have their correct name, implying it is complete. (Morpheus/KaZaA use temp names until a file completes, which is nice.)

Freenet runs a small web server for configuration and retrieval. The web interface is 'programmer friendly', but not user friendly.

Files must be 'inserted' into the network. This is a pain if you're trying to share 40gb of mp3 files, or change what is shared daily.

Small excerpt from their About page:

Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:

• Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
• Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
• Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
• Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.

Current 0.4 version of Freenet is working fine and 0.5 will be released soon, which should be considered as stable for production use.

OS advocatists take note: Freenet has been written with pure Java, so if you can get a Java interpreter for your OS, you can run Freenet. And in this particular case, using Java doesn't always mean the software will run slow. It's all about the implementation.

There are a number of Free alternatives, like Gnutella, Freenet or the FastTrack-Clone giFT. Use them. Make them work. Make them get big. Donate billions of dollars for advertising :)

This is just another case, where the Freenet Project could help, in the future.

Besides being an anonymous (but authentic) information storage, it is also higly distributed.
In this case, that would mean there would be no "bottleneck", instead, the kernel tar.gz would be distributed, in small blocks.

Too bad it's yet under development, but it's getting better and better.

Your thinking of something else... KaZaa has a curses based ui.

I guess I was thinking of eDonkey and Freenet.

Won't it be nice when things like giFT and freenet are standards and we won't have to worry about the man keeping us down?

Sure, lots of people use Fasttrack, and the network is fairly decent (in that it sort of works sometimes), unlike Gnutella, Open Napster, and Direct Connect. But now that Fasttrack implemented a cryptographic challenge (such that no open source client can enter the network easily without cracking the code) they have shot themselves in the foot since it's easier to shut down with only one company licensing the technology. I wouldn't download Kazaa anyways, since it's loaded with sypware, 3rd party programs, and the like. Morpheus is another Fasttrack program, and it is pretty decent, although it does have ads that popup through Internet Explorer (!) and they even often have sound or shockwave, or take up the whole screen! Your best bet is to use Freenet once version 0.5 is released (really soon now) with Frost. All those who know the old, non-working Freenet will be impressed by 0.5, as it works incredibly well now.

One other thing worth mentioning: Kazaa wants you to use it so that it can make money off your processing cycles, memory, and network connection. That's right; Kazaa plans to introduce technology to allow businesses to use the Kazaa network to burden the load of distributing large quantities of data.

A good analogy might be a detective trying to find a suspect for a crime. The Gnutella approach is akin to going on TV and asking everyone in the area to let you know if they know who did it. It may work once, but the more you do it, the less effective it is. Freenet works as detectives do normally, they gradually home in on their suspect by gathering information, and using that information to refine their search.

Some say that Freenet only achieves this scalability because it doesn't do the type of "fuzzy" search Gnutella does. You need to know exactly what you are looking for in Freenet to find it. This isn't true, the Freenet searching algorithm can be generalised to allow fuzzy searching. While this has not yet been demonstrated in practice, it is definitely possible in theory.

It always amazes me that people continue to lament flaws in many current P2P architectures when Freenet has incorporated solutions to those problems almost from its inception.

Disclaimer: I am Freenet's architect and project coordinator, so you could be forgiven for thinking I am biased, but you are free to review our papers and research to decide for yourself.

One of the noblest moments in human history was when settlers in the new America rose up to assert and defend their independence from the religious oppression that was endemic throughout Europe.

We now face a similar threat to freedom, with governments around the world asserting power to stifle free speech originating from other countries.

However, this time, guns simply won't work.

The call to arms that I espouse is for all internet users to adopt the weapons of anonymity and encryption.

For the sake of basic online human rights, I call on all netizens to familiarise themselves with all anonymising technologies, and for all people with development skills to create and improve such technologies.

One basic weapon is the anonymising proxy server. This allows people to use the web to publish opinions that cannot be traced to them personally (assuming of course the operator of the proxy server don't keep logs and make them available to various authorities worldwide).

But an even more potent weapon is the Free Network project at www.freenetproject.org. Freenet provides technology that allows freesites (similar to websites) to be published. The advantage of freesites is that they can't be traced to their author, since they are distributed at several points around the network. In fact, any attempt to locate the source of the information, or delete it, results in such information proliferating further around the net.

However, Freenet is just a taste of things to come. There's a whole new generation of stealth technologies emerging which will wrest the power of the internet out of the hands of governments and restore it to the common citizen. One such technology is the Invisible Internet Project (formerly called Invisible IRC Proxy), which will provide secure IP-level tunnelling, anonymising and encryption features.

People, please don't take these threats to your freedom lying down. If enough of us start using these new liberating technologies, we'll be too large a market for ISPs and governments to block us.

One of the noblest moments in human history was when settlers in the new America rose up to assert and defend their independence from the religious oppression that was endemic throughout Europe.

We now face a similar threat to freedom, with governments around the world asserting power to stifle free speech originating from other countries.

However, this time, guns simply won't work.

The call to arms that I espouse is for all internet users to adopt the weapons of anonymity and encryption.

For the sake of basic online human rights, I call on all netizens to familiarise themselves with all anonymising technologies, and for all people with development skills to create and improve such technologies.

One basic weapon is the anonymising proxy server. This allows people to use the web to publish opinions that cannot be traced to them personally (assuming of course the operator of the proxy server don't keep logs and make them available to various authorities worldwide).

But an even more potent weapon is the Free Network project at www.freenetproject.org. Freenet provides technology that allows freesites (similar to websites) to be published. The advantage of freesites is that they can't be traced to their author, since they are distributed at several points around the network. In fact, any attempt to locate the source of the information, or delete it, results in such information proliferating further around the net.

However, Freenet is just a taste of things to come. There's a whole new generation of stealth technologies emerging which will wrest the power of the internet out of the hands of governments and restore it to the common citizen. One such technology is the Invisible Internet Project (formerly called Invisible IRC Proxy), which will provide secure IP-level tunnelling, anonymising and encryption features.

People, please don't take these threats to your freedom lying down. If enough of us start using these new liberating technologies, we'll be too large a market for ISPs and governments to block us.

People disgruntled with their current or former employers should consider using Freenet to espress their grievances.
With Freenet, strong encryption and sophisticated routing ensures the near-impossibility of determining the actual author of anything published.
Also, with the growing number of websites with public Freenet gateway pages, it's almost as good as publishing on the web anyway.

Does any file sharing program available today encrypt the actual files transmitted? Just wondering.

IT's Freenet, the N in Net is not capatalized. And you forgot the link.

HTTP headers exist for explicitly requesting access to a resource in a certain language (though I dont know of any site that actually makes use of them)

Well, here are some examples: Debian's page comes up in user-specified language (Finnish, in my case), and another example would be Freenet site (Hey wow, they now have a Finnish version of the site too! Cool... =)

Freenet has been taking donations for a while, and has already used some of these funds to hire two developers to work full-time on the project for two months each (for less money than they could earn at Starbucks). The project is nearing its next major release, 0.5, and could really use your help financially to allow more developers to devote more of their time to the project.

Freenet has been taking donations for a while, and has already used some of these funds to hire two developers to work full-time on the project for two months each (for less money than they could earn at Starbucks). The project is nearing its next major release, 0.5, and could really use your help financially to allow more developers to devote more of their time to the project.

In the future, I imagine most peer to peer systems will use node discovery systems like ALPINE to discover nodes listening on any port and possibly even using any of the major layer 4 protocols.

Essentially the problem with Jxta is that it is built on the assumption that P2P needs a communication standard above the TCP/IP level, and I am unconvinced that it does. The range of applications that call themselves P2P are sufficiently diverse that they each have different (and often mutually-exclusive) requirements of the communication layer that sits above TCP/IP, yet this is exactly the layer that JXTA tries to mandate.

As an example, Freenet has very strict requirements about how encryption is implemented at a low level, most other P2P architectures have no such requirement (and, in fact, would fail if such a requirement was forced upon them). Freenet, Fastrack, Mojo Nation and other systems also have very different ideas about how peer discovery is achieved, yet again, JXTA tries to mandate this too (adopting a Gnutella-inspired approach).

Standards are useful in some circumstances, but for P2P, TCP/IP is probably the highest-level standard we need.

There are some other services like IRC now that are secure and highly available, and have some features that usenet and irc don't have.

Freenet 0.4 is shaping up; expect the final 0.5 release shortly. Try downloading the newest nightly to get on. For those who aren't in the know, freenet is a peer-to-peer encrypted datastore. Each node shares part of that datastore, and freenet efficiently routes and stores data that you insert. Also it is anonymous as you can not easily tell who inserts data and who requests it

Now build on top of that is a program, Frost , that acts like Napster and a message board, a la Usenet. There are different message boards, and all messages are send & recieved anonymously.

Now both of these programs are in beta, but they do work, although large files tend to get lost in Freenet as of yet.

The final project is IIP, or Invisible Irc Project, available at http://www.invisiblenet.net/.

Also available there is a nifty program called "Psst" which allows for encrypted instant messaging. You can use it in conjunction with your normal IM program, and it's really easy to use and install.

One final note is that all of these program are cross-platform, open source, and binaries are available for windows & linux.

The current 0.4 snapshots are very impressive, and once a few final bugs are resolved 0.5 will be released.

Freenet already does all this, and in addition, provides for complete anonymity and encryption. It can also be tunneled over just about any other protocol (instead of being limited to HTTP like uServ). It is still under heavy development, but already contains a wealth of information. This is one of the few truly great open-source projects in development today.

How about Freenet? Can be (ab)used for piracy, of course, but neither is that its purpose, nor does it seem its current main use.

the development of the freenet project is making progress, and is just ahead of a breakthrough release. some people already work on an anonymous messaging and email service.

if they get the 0.5 release done well, it would allow many kinds of anonymous communications services which no one could ever close down!

None of these work with systems like Freenet.

Music piracy on Freenet is sparse, I should note, and Freenet was created with much higher political causes in mind than pirating music.

For more information on Freenet, see http://www.freenetproject.org/

If they ever get it to work properly, Freenet distributes the hosting of web sites in a way that is un-slashdotable, and more popular content works faster. It could be used quite effectively by news networks, but advertising could be problematic.

There is also Freenet you can try which is totally unstoppable.

From the "What is freenet?" page:

----

Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:

* Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
* Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
* Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
* Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.

---

Project info here.

Donate money here.

--Greg

From the "What is freenet?" page:

----

Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:

* Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
* Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
* Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
* Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.

---

Project info here.

Donate money here.

--Greg

* broadband

Freenet -- eazy way to distribute information

* Echelon

blowfish + 1024bit/kook krade keys

Freenet 0.4 will also support splitfiles/swarming. Eventually....

Freenet is doing this. Have a look: Freenet

Drawbacks: it's not a wide open touchy-feely instantly responsive searchable distributed repository like the current file-sharing offerings. Individual nodes might be suceptible to legal attack "on suspicion." But it's also much less likely to get you incarcerated in places where crypto is legal.

Wasn't there some article here the other day about some P2P network working better the more users were using it at once?

Are you looking for the Freenet Project? Each Freenet agent ("clerver" sounds clumsy to me, and "servent" should have passed away with the 13th Amendment) retrieves documents from the closest user on the net, so as more people grab the latest Linux kernel, the path between each user and Linux 2.4.x becomes shorter and sending each copy creates less long-haul traffic.

Wasn't there some article here the other day about some P2P network working better the more users were using it at once?

Are you looking for the Freenet Project? Each Freenet agent ("clerver" sounds clumsy to me, and "servent" should have passed away with the 13th Amendment) retrieves documents from the closest user on the net, so as more people grab the latest Linux kernel, the path between each user and Linux 2.4.x becomes shorter and sending each copy creates less long-haul traffic.

Now would be a good time to start using and donating to Freenet which provides anonymous communication and is immune to censorship.

• Non-conforming countries & territories: Sealand, China, Iraq, North Korea, Denmark. This is possibly the path of least resistance, at least initially.
• Gateways to PPTP or 802.X linked networks. This would be OK for a while, until the ISPs start blocking these "hacker" protocols.
• New, "stealthy" replacements for PPTP, perhaps something that builds upon the P2P protocols -- this would be difficult to trace or firewall.
• The Freenet project (http://www.freenetproject.org) The fact that people are working on a project like this means the "underground internet" concept is closer than you think.
• I think it's only a matter of time before one of the biggie ISPs decides to resurrect the "on-line service model", similar to pre-Internet CompuServe or Prodigy. They would create an "alternate internet universe", absent any rules whatsoever, loaded with disclaimers. Anonymity & encryption by design, using proprietary protocols that essentially shield the ISP from knowing whery anything is going -- therefore no real responsibility. "Have your modem dial this number, and whatever happens is your problem." Even before the Internet, online service providers have continuously searched for services where the customers would pay non-commodity prices for something that was "added value". If privacy is going to be in short supply, then we will surely have people trying to sell privacy as a product!

Well the idea is that each Freenet node is running on a random port. So its not just 'check port 19114' to see wether a server is running a node. However in the upcomming 0.5 release of Freenet it will be possible to change portnumbers and even IP addresses of established nodes. But if you are really interested in the technical details I invite you to visit the freenet website at www.freenetproject.org or join the freenet mailinglist(s) (see the website for details).

Software patents? Create an anonymous ID, digitally sign everything, build a reputation so people know they can trust your work, put any source code you want on the net. Crypto. RSA. One Click. Clients for Microsoft services. Lists of filtered words.

Parodies? Criticism? Secrets of the Co$? Whistle-blowing? Rabble rousing? Sedition? You name it. If anyone can make your life miserable for saying something, say it with Freenet.

According to their philosophy, Freenet is about freedom of speech. Anonymity is an aspect of this freedom and so is privacy. The option of anonymity is required for freedom of speech to exist (a more detailed explination is on their page). A person should also have the option to have their speech be kept private so only the indended recepient knows what is being said.

In case it's not clear, I am agreeing with you that Freenet is about anonymity, I'm just saying that privacy is also an important component to Freenet.

As for the differences between Freenet and privacy tools, they do have different end goals, but the same premise of free speech.

As would I.

Check out this example of what I see as a Bad Idea.

If the goal is to bring anonymous publication into the mainstream, example filenames like "Britney Spears Felch.jpg" are... well, unhelpful.

Funny as hell? Yes, to the author, and speaking as one with a sick sense of humor, I thought it was pretty damn funny too.

But is it the first thing you'd want your Congresscritter to see when he decides to find out "what this free net thing is all about?" after the local Fundie-sponsored lobby group complains that FreeNet has to be banned for the sake of the chilllldrun?

C'mon, folks, let's get real here.

milosevic-evidence.jpg - good
95_theses.txt - even better
britfelch.jpg - not bloody likely

Having said that, the usage guide you point to isn't actually the usage guide at all, the actual usage guide you are thinking of is at http://freenetproject.org/quickguide/ and has been for months, and AFAIK there are no references to "fools" anywhere - so I really don't understand what you are talking about.

--