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I thought after 4chan, 7chan, 420chan, 12chan, 2chan.ru, etc. were taken down, you fuckers were going to design a P2P-chan à la freenet; or were you full of shit?

If they become that concerned about the site being shut down, they could just run the website on freenet.

...and here are some more softwares and guides related to privacy, pseudo/ano-nymity and security:

tor.eff.orgonion routing anonymizer
www.i2p.netsecure/anonymous interactive network
freenetproject.orgsecure/anonymous distributed file system
www.turtle4privacy.orgf2f peer network
gnunet.orgsecure p2p infrastructure
www.cspace.insecure p2p infrastructure
www.openswan.orgVPN with opportunistic encryption
silcnet.orgsecure internet live chat
ihu.sourceforge.netp2p VoIP with crypto

wiki.noreply.orgHow to give anonymous talks
azureus.sourceforge.netazureus over p2p
cryptnet.netguerrilla software development how to

If the blocking is in effort to help transparently "remove" content like child porn from online, what good does it truly do out on the open web? Perhaps Canada will block out a handful of sickos from accessing their favorite sites, but the majority of things probably opperate on VPNs and anonymous networks like Freenet that are de-centralized and encrypted.

should we start moving to freenet now?

This is basically a decent idea, and similar to the private VPNs used by e.g. top-level warez release groups. However, it seems to have the obvious weaknesses of arbitrary unknown people being able to join the net (hence it isn't really dark), and presumably is trivially detectable by session byte inspection, though you wouldn't know if it was just a 'normal' VPN or not. Presumably it's also susceptible to flow analysis, but every anonymous network is to some extent.

Personally I prefer the approach of Freenet 0.7, it's good to have multiple anonymous / psuedononymous networks out there for different purposes though.

On a similar note, many home broadband providers have blocked port 80 for consumer broadband. Simple google searches for how Verizon and Comcast spell out how they approached the matter (blocking port 80 across the board, but not actually telling anyone about it). This seems to be the case for many US broadband providers, whether or not you've paid for business-class service (which many businesses find out the hard way while trying to save money) -- and let's not even talk about reliability, off-site redundancy, etc. For most people, buying hosting from a data center is slightly cheaper than buying a t1 for yourself.

The only innovations that could possibly support this kind of prediction are p2p nets, such as Freenet. Let me know how reliable you think that is.

It's called Freenet. And it's sloooooooooow.

And of course there's http://freenetproject.org/ which added with 0.7 darknet mode - a network supposed to be based on an already existing social network, which automatically awards tokens to connections based on their behaviour, which controls their bandwidth and frequency of requests.

There's so many prior art examples of this it's just silly.

Yes, this is similar to Freenet. And almost exactly what FreenetFS does.

And then next level of anonynimity would be Freenet.

Although the latest version is stupid to get hooked up. You have to find a trusted node to connect through which is a pain in the ass (how do you know who to trust?).

Plus, at least the last time I looked, it is saturated with kiddie porn and other crap I don't want to see or have anything to do with. I know it's all in the name of freedom, but your freedom stops where other people's rights begin and abusing children is just wrong.

Overall, although Freenet provides "good"(*) anonynimity it's pretty much a flop. I'm not convinced the authors know what they are doing with the slow code development and rewrites.

(*) I work in the security industry but I have never actually looked into how Freenet works. I don't really trust that the authors know what they are doing. Security is hard and very few people do it well.

I've never seen anyone use it though.

...and you'll find all sorts of interesting stuff there, if you look. It might take a few hours for a new Freenet node to get integrated into the network, at which point response time will improve. Don't ever expect it to have fast interactive-surfing response times, though. Get used to opening a bunch of links in new tabs, and coming back to check them in a few minutes.

Freenet's currently got four "summer of code" projects under way, plus their full-time coder. I'm not sure I like the network changes in 0.7 but I'm trusting that the developers know the critical points better than I do.

The stuff you find on Freenet ranges from the obligatory porn and anarchy junk, to weird conspiracy theory stuff, fairly sane political expression, DeCSS and similar technical content, and lots of "flogs", the name of which is yours to absorb.

Frost is a Usenet-like messaging system that uses Freenet as its back-end message store. It also takes a while to get going; after starting your Frost instance you might want to come back in 20 minutes to get the updated boards list, add a bunch of new boards, and give it another 20 minutes to pull messages in those boards. Once your Frost is up and running, you'll start to appreciate what Freenet's really capable of. Search the available files, or participate in a few discussions. Realize that the message transport latency might be anywhere from a few minutes to many hours, so correspondence will be reminiscent of Fidonet speeds.

Seriously, you owe it to yourself to check this stuff out. Don't claim to know internet anonymity without giving Freenet a few days' effort.

PLZ EVERYONE LOCK DOWN UR SHIT!!

Yep, unfortunately it turns out that building a strongly anonymous and attack-resistant yet usable p2p network is *very hard* so it's taking a while. IMO the most promising darknet project is currently Freenet 0.7 (see background info on the wiki.)

It's still in alpha however so it doesn't provide the intended level of anonymity or usability/performance yet. The goal for v1.0 is essentially for it to be safe enough for Chinese political dissidents and the like to use, who require rather stronger protection than Johnny McWarezTrader.

Yep, unfortunately it turns out that building a strongly anonymous and attack-resistant yet usable p2p network is *very hard* so it's taking a while. IMO the most promising darknet project is currently Freenet 0.7 (see background info on the wiki.)

It's still in alpha however so it doesn't provide the intended level of anonymity or usability/performance yet. The goal for v1.0 is essentially for it to be safe enough for Chinese political dissidents and the like to use, who require rather stronger protection than Johnny McWarezTrader.

:j

The Freenet project is also looking for students, please take a look here for more information. Our new Freenet Client Protocol spec makes it very easy to build applications on top of the new Freenet 0.7 "darknet" architecture.

The Freenet project is also looking for students, please take a look here for more information. Our new Freenet Client Protocol spec makes it very easy to build applications on top of the new Freenet 0.7 "darknet" architecture.

The Freenet project is also looking for students, please take a look here for more information. Our new Freenet Client Protocol spec makes it very easy to build applications on top of the new Freenet 0.7 "darknet" architecture.

If our "representatives" don't represent us anymore but base their decisions on their bribes from the recording industry it's time to move on to better methods such as encrypted and anonymized filesharing and streaming. Systems like Freenet(see: http://freenetproject.org/ have already improved quite a bit and are gaining strong popularity. End the corruption. Long live true democracy.

1. Take a look at Frost (see here)
2. Not sure what this means, even at this early stage Freenet 0.7 is pretty anonymous compared to the competition
3. You can change Freenet's port very easily in the freenet config file, the initial port is selected randomly
4. This would probably be overkill for the monitoring mechanisms in existence today
5. Not sure what this means
6. This either

I'm not a member or involved in the freenet project but if you have paypal or whatever, drop by the freenet project website and donate a few dollars. Mathew Toseland (toad_ on freenode irc) has been slaving away on the project for a long time now, he's poured so much energy into making freenet a reality, kudos to him and a few of the other coders that have spent a lot of energy on the next generation freenet (nextgens/cyberdo/etc.)

Not related to freenet but in the definitely in the same sphere of anonymous networking is I2P. For anybody that interested in that kind of technology should check that out... it's a fairly well functioning network ATM but the main coder is putting off any big announcements until he's sure it's ready.

No offence, but if all the people who posted comments like this were helping with / donating to projects like Freenet 0.7 and i2p we would probably have fairly robust and usable strong anonymity / censorship resistance networks by now.

Fight against this authoritarian bullshit sure, but we badly need to prepare for the preservation of freedom in a 'soft' police state, because that's where we're heading right now.

• Tor: Onion-based routing that acts as a proxy layer between the client computer and the Tor network. http://tor.eff.org/

• I2P: Also known as the Invisible Internet Project. The network is regarded as a message based system. http://www.i2p.net/

• FreeNet: is a distributed information and storage retrieval system designed to address the concerns of privacy. Freenet is designed to be anonymous and totally peer to peer. http://freenetproject.org/

• GNUnet: is a P2P network that can support many different forms of peer-to-peer applications. http://gnunet.org/

There are other programs and if you do not want your "private details" known then you would be wise to use them. In addition, anyone who thinks their private data that is held by organisations and government departments is safe whether there is a "Data Protection Act" or not then they should think twice for example the "National Security Agency eavesdropping on Americans incident". This is not the first time nor will it be the last time that such incidents will occur. Without being anonymous, we can never have true freedom of speech.

2. Is it possible to completely diversify the Internet away from IP-based hosting to a new swarm-network of anonymous users all hosting little pieces of various forms of information? 2b. Is anyone working on this swarm idea?

IIRC, but this was the concept behind Freenet. At least I think it was Freenet. I remember playing with a very early version of a peer-to-peer system that was at least in theory quite secure, and allowed anybody to publish information up onto the network, and then distributed and retained that information based on popularity. It was quite neat, but this being back when I had a 56k modem, also dead slow. I'm not sure if it's still going on or not. Plus, most people just saw it as a Napster replacement, and it had never been set up to host or share a lot of MP3 files.

Let's face it, the ratio of people who want to share porn/music/movies to people who want to distribute the "smoking gun" photo of Chinese government oppression or the giant corporate dumping activity is huge. So any system that you're going to set up with the latter type of user in mind, is in the short run going to have to tolerate a lot of the former (unless you yourself as the operator want to selectively censor different types of usage).

I just did some research and I think the system I tried was defintely Freenet. It seems it's still alive, although quite cash-strapped and seeking donations. Perhaps now that broadband has become more popular it's easier to use than it was before.
http://freenetproject.org/index.php?page=faq

Although it is a little out of date now, there is an interesting discussion of anonymous peer-to-peer networks in the O'Reilly book "Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies"; it's a collection of essays about different networks which various people all thought were going to be the 'next big thing' circa 2001. There is defintely a chapter on Freenet in there, and several others besides.

don't know freenet?

Freenet: Version 0.7 of Freenet aims to create a scalable darknet, where users only connect directly to other users they know and (at least marginally) trust. The core innovation in Freenet 0.7 will be to allow a globally scalable darknet, capable of supporting millions of users. (DEFCON 13 presentation by Ian Clarke and Oskar Sandberg)

Tor: Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

I'm the "Anonymous Reader" who submitted this "article". I'm from Germany, so my command of the English language is limited at its best (it's impressive how many comments bitch about that billion/million typo ... my apologies to the /. editors).

My request was a serious one, answers as The Moon http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14261341/ are funny to some extend, but not very helpful. Bugmaster asked http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14262445/ which solutions there are. Moving out is one, keeping a low profile another, also encryption keeps bubbling up. Encryption is not much of a help if the connection data, who spoke to whom, is stored (but I use it anyway). On the other hand, I know about tools/services like the Freenet Project http://www.freenetproject.org/, TOR http://tor.eff.org/, JAP http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html/ and GnuPG http://www.gnupg.org/ -- but most of my peers do not. If asked, their answer is similar to this one http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14262263/, which, in my eyes, IS crazy. In addition, if more and more people start to use these services, any estimate much time it will take to outlaw encryption technologies as such?
So, keeping a low profile is sort of an option, but not calling grandma for her 90th anniversary is HARD to explain, don't you think?
Last solution, move along. As said, my request was serious, not intended as anti-european flamewar http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14261813/, nor as troll http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14261813/.

Somalia was mentioned http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14261597/ ... to be honest, I prefer not to be shot. Then, New Zealand http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14261456/ which seems to be sort of an option ... unfortunately this seems to be the one and only serious answer =(

One comment (sorry, no link) stated, that as long as one can purchase SIM cards without ID ... hey guy, here you can not! At least, neither in Germany nor in Switzerland ahref=http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/35261 /rel=url2html-19262http://www.heise.de/newsticker/ meldung/35261/> (sorry, German only). Admitted, Switzerland is not a member of the EU and I don't know about all other members, but I assume that it is not possible to purchase a prepaid card anonymously anywhere on the continent -- and no, in my eyes, privacy is NOT a luxury http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14261289/

Btw, I heavily agree with bmh129 ... how is this possible? http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171228&cid =14262340/.

Regards

About time the Freenet gets going!

1. Parents are presently concerned about kids accessing unwholesome stuff - in the absence of government/isp-level censoring, many parents are actually doing the unthinkable - Spending Time With Their Kids
2. Kids love breaking rules, so the possibility of accessing illicit material will become more attractive
3. Two new words will be added to kids' vocabularies: CGI and proxy
4. For every cgi web proxy the ISPs detect and block, two more will spring up in its place.
5. Meanwhile, parents and teachers will doze off in a false sense of security that Big Nanny State is keeping their kids safe, while the kids meanwhile are actually seeing stuff that's as bad as ever, maybe worse, with much less parental oversight and guidance than before.

BitTorrent is slow and does not provide much anonymity. There are other P2P systems which are MUCH better thought through such as Freenet: http://www.freenetproject.org/ which, with the new version coming up, has a good chance of becoming the successor of BitTorrent.

Now I go to Amazon.com and order a book over https; the packets are encrypted, nobody can get my credit card number, so what's the issue?

The issue is that your Corporate Overlords and their Political Henchmen want to keep an eye on you, and that is easier if all the data from and to your computer goes through a single wire. In a world full of public anonymous Wi-Fi access points, anyone could connect to anything from anywhere without giving away their own identity, allowing free exchange of information without fear of legal consequences, and making things impossible to censor (since it might be impossible to find the servers the data resides in, especially if the servers are running a P2P network like Freenet); it is Big Brothers and Big Businesses worst nightmare.

Freedom is the worst enemy of Power, so of course powers-that-be try to crush it. This law is just another attempt of forces of darkness to crush all opposition and bring about a Digital Dark Age.

Yeah, instead it'll be the "8,168,684,336 web pages and nothing good on" problem

Enter the new P2P-based content rating systems, complete with web of trust to prevent astroturfing/trolling and anonymity to prevent "five stars or DDOS" type scenarios.

You could propably use Freenet for something like this, assuming that the next generation will finally work well...

Decentralized networks (see Usenet or Freenet) are more or less immune to specialized (i.e. aimed at one location) DDoS attacks by nature; the only way to bring down a site is to bring down the entire network, and there is some work being done towards making even that impossible. Unfortunately, making dynamic content (e-mail, forums, more or less anything you'd be inclined to use a server-side language for) available through these sorts of networks ranges from painfully annoying to impossible.

What I'd like to see is a sort of Bittorrent-like system implemented for the web; people who access websites can then serve those sites to others in a somewhat-decentralized fashion. That would require quite a bit of work (and maybe some fundamental restructuring of the internet a la IPv6 or similar), though, to be at all feasible on a large scale.

This post can safely be ignored; it is nothing but the musings of a computer science student with no grounding in network programming.

is one for freenet:<uri> URLs.

A Firefox plugin for supponting such URLs would be a huge boost for freenet.

www.freenetproject.org

The Freenet Project is working towards the next major release of the Freenet software, hopefully this side of Christmas. Among the major new features will be:

• Trusted links, so that only your friends will know that you are part of the network
• Switch from TCP to UDP to support seamless firewall traversal
• Complete code rewrite and simplification
• Support for live broadcast of information, in addition to storage and retrieval (allowing everything from IRC over Freenet to "instant RSS")

The Freenet project requires $2,300 per month to pay for its full time developer, Matthew Toseland, but currently the project's reserves are very low, so if you can spare it (especially given the more immediate drains on people's generosity), your donation would be much appreciated.

The Freenet Project is working towards the next major release of the Freenet software, hopefully this side of Christmas. Among the major new features will be:

• Trusted links, so that only your friends will know that you are part of the network
• Switch from TCP to UDP to support seamless firewall traversal
• Complete code rewrite and simplification
• Support for live broadcast of information, in addition to storage and retrieval (allowing everything from IRC over Freenet to "instant RSS")

The Freenet project requires $2,300 per month to pay for its full time developer, Matthew Toseland, but currently the project's reserves are very low, so if you can spare it (especially given the more immediate drains on people's generosity), your donation would be much appreciated.

This show its very clearly again: It is time to protect ourselves and our privacy and anonymity against totalitarian governments by using encyption and software that anonymizes such as Freenet: http://freenetproject.org/

Since the "European Commission" seems to defy the democratic decisions of its citizens again perhaps it is time for anonymous encrypted filesharing with programs such as Freenet: http://freenetproject.org/

I invite you to read the freenet white paper, as it tells exactly how to circumvent this problem.

You're right, you can't hide the fact that you are _participating_ in freenet. However, you can hide what you are saying, and if you are actually saying anything. In a nutshell, what a freenet node does is accept messages to be sent to freenet, and retrieve information, both at the request of the user of the node, and at the request of other nodes. It randomly changes requests to appear to originate from itself (as opposed to the node they actually came from.)

Using strong encryption to protect the communication between nodes, it becomes impossible for anyone, in the network or not, to tell if a node is actually requesting information, or just forwarding a request. That's the entire idea, you don't know if your neighbor is asking, or if it's his neighbor, etc. You can't hide from ISPs that you're a freenetter, but you can establish a legal doubt as to whether you did anything on freenet.

This new design for Freenet is different, it is a globally scalable invite-only Darknet. Oskar Sandberg and Ian Clarke have developed a method to route messages through a "fixed links" P2P network in a scalable way. This is non-trivial as most scalable P2P search algorithms (such as that previously employed in Freenet, and other Distributed HashTable algorithms) rely on being able to choose which peers are connected to each-other. Its like trying to create signposts for a gigantic maze in an entirely decentralised way.

We hope to make a paper describing this available through the Freenet website in the next few days.

-Ian

If you think about it, this sounds quite similar to the way Freenet works.

Who is going to pay money to geek geocities or hotmail online?

No one. I guess it's time to start developing HTTP-over-P2P software for real. Freenet has a very primitive (only static HTML, no possibility of updates expect through absurd hacks like DBR or edition based pages) implementation of this in their "fproxy" software.

Server-based Web sites were (and still are, for money-laden individuals or organizations) fine, but a p2p network with HTTP interface has potential to be much better.

And this is why you need a fully working anonymous web, something like http://freenetproject.org/.

This would be the first step in the evolution to anonymous p2p, it's a good compromise, and way better than the current method, where everything is done in plain view. If (or more likely, when) the thought police starts attacking this, _then_ we can move to the fully paranoid networks.

Sure most have one or two innovative features, but what applications in the OS world are really innovative, especially from an end user perspective?

Certainly not desktop environments, servers, remote shells, anonymizing (or swarming) networks, or compilers.

Because all of those things are just replacements for commercial applications, and did nothing new.

Bittorrent isn't intended to protect your identity. It never was. The fact that it's commonly used for activities that might get people in trouble is just due to lack of a poweful, easy-to-use solution in the arena of programs that do protect your identity (see: Freenet, Tor, and MUTE), and possibly in part to bad planning on the part of an increasingly fragmented and confused base of illegal file-sharers.

FYI - there is a short response to this article on the Freenet website.

The Reg has an article that points out a soft spot in the supposed anonymity provided by Freenet.

A recent story in The Register claims to have exclusively discovered an "easy forensic attack" that would allow an attacker to determine what you had downloaded from Freenet. Whether raiding somone's home and gaining access to their computer can really be considered an "easy" attack is debatable, but either way this issue is not news to us, we have publicly discussed it as early as October 2003, when it was raised on our mailing list.

The article doesn't point out that while the attack as described requires someone to have direct access to your computer, Freenet is not designed to thwart forensic analysis of your hard disk, but there are numerous tools which do that have been widely available for years. These tools can be used in conjunction with Freenet if you consider it likely that your home will be raided and your computer forensically analysed.

Of course, even the theoretical possibility of this kind of attack is undesirable, and as the article points out, it will be addressed in the next major release of Freenet which we are working on at present.