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Site is not responding. Anyone have a mirror? Anyone who happened to read it able to comment on how this compares to Freenet ?

Support a free internet for everyone. Run a freenet node, available at http://www.freenetproject.org/.

As always, if anyone would like to support our development effort, please feel free to donate.

As always, if anyone would like to support our development effort, please feel free to donate.

...distributed file sharing, cryptography, proxies, and parity will collide and instead of any one person hosting a complete file, the file will be containerized, split, parity containers built, and the pieces uploaded to peers at random based only on their availible space and relative activity and pipe size and so on and the original copy deleted.

Enough copies of pieces and parity files would propagate out based on statistics to ensure reasonable chance to get at anything, not any less easy than eMule of today. If you download all pieces and construct successfully, the solid file isn't seen and listed by IP because only the parts are shared at large. Your whole copy is totally outside the system once gotten.

Once no one person has a complete copy of anything, and each piece is named in gibberish that only the system understands and knows, what are they going to do then? Sue a teen girl because one twentieth of a Metallica song might be on their hard drive and she's got no way of knowing for sure because her storage is managed by the collective peer network?

It's not the general web or usenet being discussed here, but Freenet and unfortunately it's not just scare tactics. The main entry portals are littered with links to it

Don't forget the venerable Freenet: http://www.freenetproject.org/ and GNUnet http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/ Entropy is dead though, and it's crypto was never really proven.

There's 2 basic levels on which your vision could be implemented: the logical level and the physical level.

Logically, we could create another layer of networking on top of TCP/IP, similar to creating a large VPN. See also the unfortunately-failed Freenet Project.

Physically, we could create our own network, in hardware, which is separate from the Internet, going point-to-point between peoples' homes, and require that all additions to the network be voted-on by people local to the potential joiner, so that we limit only trustworthy nodes onto the network. For instance, we could require that no government employees are allowed access, that no businesses may join., etc. -- only individuals in their homes (or, more-permissively, we might allow businesses which agree to a set of anti-net-pollution rules on the network).

There are enough people interested in a logical net, as Freenet was about 2 years ago demonstrating, but unfortunately, it's also a lower barrier-to-entry, because anybody can download the app and join up.

OTOH, the physical net is *much* harder to set up and connect -- problems with property rights, distance from more-remote nodes, FCC regulations, etc. would abound. And then there's the basic question of what hardware would be used to begin with, which in large part would dictate how those above problems are solved...

The light bulb is trivial, but it was an 'innovative idea'.

The light bulb was not trivial at the time it was invented. Neither the idea (use electricity to heat something so hot it gives bright light) nor implementation (which required years of work and thousands of experiments to get working) were in any way trivial.

In any case, this whole discussion is idotic. Base-16 numbers has been used to shorten the representation of binary strings for years. Any hex editor will show you the binary data in hex format. In fact, several applications (such as FProxy of Freenet encode with a bigger base (FProxy encodes dates into base-16 and passes them in the URL) to shorten them.

isn't there a peer to peer protocol that doesn't revolve around supernodes?

You don't anonymously receive and send packets on the Internet, you have a designated IP address and that can be followed to you.

That's where designs like Freenet (also Freenet) come in. You can trade ease and bandwidth-efficiency for a smidgeon of anonymity -- not in the sense of "they can't tell I'm running Freenet", but in the lesser plausible deniability sense: "I didn't ask for that file; I was just relaying another node's requests."

In theory, a Freenet node is supposed to cache all of the requests that pass through it, but in practice, it doesn't work very well just yet.... Well, maybe if we're lucky, our children will have free speech before they die.

I wonder what everyone's doing with all these huge drives

1. Creating a digital archive of the extended families photographs (5 Mb per print, 46 Mb per negative image when available). Figure 10,000+ negatives. Plus archiving all the digital photos.
2. Creating a digital archive of all the vinyl records for the extended family
3. Digital archive of all family Super-8 films
4. Digital archive of all video tapes (The Wiggles won't last forever with a weekly screening)
5. Digital archive of the DVDs (sooner or later Nemo will get scratched)
6. Spam training database
7. Freenet datastore
8. Email

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).

Unfortunately Freenet is an incredibly inefficient method of data transfer. Remember it was designed with security and anonymity as top priorities, performance comes as a distant third.

For example, there is padding and encryption of all data, but the impact of this is minimised because the data is split up such to minimise the need for padding, and the encryption is childs-play for a modern CPU.

Further, Freenet does some pretty clever stuff with caching and minimising inter-node latency that is still, in many ways, way ahead of any other P2P applications (see this article for more info on that).

I wonder if FreeNet might be a good source for torrents. It's hella slow, but you only need 35K or so downloaded before you can go off and connect to the torrent.

It's been a while since I last checked out Freenet. If I remember right, you mirror content without knowing what that content is When I last checked out Freenet (years ago), I was shocked by the amount of child porn that was available, and I was doubly shocked at the small amount of useful information on Freenet.

If I use Freenet to download a movie, will I also be hosting child porn? With Bittorrent and eDonkey, I have a choice of what content I distribute.

According to the Freenet FAQ:
The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting. If this is not acceptable to you, you should not run a Freenet node.

Look, I can't take such a neutral stance in regards to child exploitation. I don't agree with Freenet's statement, and I won't participate. Child porn is exploits and harms innocent children. Dismissing child porn as a simple "freedom of speech" it completely ignores rights of the victim. Child pornographers should to be burned alive.

If someone drugged you, raped you, took pictures of the rape, do they automatically have the right to put distribute those photos on the Internet? What about your rights?

Freenet's performance has been improving lately after several months of not working very well. In combination with Frost, perhaps now people will seriously start to migrate to this anonymous architecture.

Yeah, and then lets remember the fact that someway, somehow, an open source solution will arise

These guys must be pretty pissed that someone got slashdotted weeks before they did with some software that is entirely free, and does at least as much as what they claim their non-free software does.

A network with no central servers or even 'supernodes' reduces the effect of DoS-attacks, and leaves no single person or company to attack with a lawsuit. But that alone isn't enough. Other problems remain, like the privacy issue. Many P2P networks reveal IP addresses of nodes on 'the other end'. Thus, after retrieval of a file, you know from what IP address(es) the file came from. That leaves the network vulnerable for attacks or legal steps against individual users.

To prevent this, it must be impossible to find out who/where a retrieved file (or search query) actually came from (IP, geographical location or otherwise).

Besides the well known Freenet, there's another promising one called ANts. From what I can tell, it works by passing data between nodes, without passing info on the endpoints where data is coming from/going to. Each node passes data on, but doesn't know if the next node will keep it, or in turn pass it on to yet another node in a path. IP addresses are replaced with a virtual 'network ID' (regularly discarded), and combined with encryption, a single node can't tell what it's passing on, where it came from, or where it's going. IP addresses are only known for a few neighbours it contacts directly. For an analogy, think anonymous remailers. The project page also mentions something similar called MUTE. I guess you could call projects like this 3rd generation P2P networks. Looking forward to it! (and please add if you know more like these)

The current java release 1.5/5.0 is not affected at all.

I don't believe that's the case with freenet, AROS and if you look at most of the projects on sourceforge (Don't look only at the most popular, look at how many projects there are, and check how many of them are suitably developed).

Great. So now this'll just further fuel the movement of the extremely large file-sharers to move to those P2P networks that are completely anonymous, like GNUNet or Freenet.

You should donate to freenet or a similar anonymous p2p application. This will allow you to share again in the future.

This kind of applications will you pausible deniabilty.

Note that the anonimy is reached by routing your traffic through other peers so this is inevitably slower than kazaa/torrent/emule/dc/...

One solution is a large repository of seemingly random data with separately distributed "recipe files" that describe how to rebuild the files you want. If you make the random files sufficently interconnected, you can make it so that any order to stop distributing a specific random looking block of data will prevent numerous legal files from being built in addition to the copywrited data that is targeted.

It is because of things like this that we need technology like I2P and Freenet more than ever. Freenet seems to be stuck in a morass and making no progress but I2P is useful now and would have prevented Indymedia's servers from being taken down.

Of course, the Freenet routing protocol is a bit iffy right now, but when it works, it's pretty cool.

The idea of streaming across Freenet's infrastructure has been done before. Who needs a grassroots TV network when you can have a grassroots, anonymous, encrypted TV network?

The other side-effect of Freenet's architecture is that popular data persists. You might be able to retrieve a show from days or weeks ago, if enough nodes watched it in the first place.

For the moment, performance limits it to audio streams, but video might be workable in the near future. The dev team can always use more bright minds. Are you free?

But hotmail would have your IP address for when you first created the account. Oh duh! You'd use an Internet cafe.

Well, unless you use Freenet for file sharing, then anyone who knows that you run a p2p app also knows your IP address.

Besides, if they need to consult Hotmail logs to identify you, then it might prove to be a little difficult to sue you if you don't have an account ;).

Sure, you can run all the free software in the world on your OpenBIOS computer. You will not be able to watch media, listen to media, surf the net, etc, because everything will require a "trusted" computer.

What really is important, is, that we always can choose an alternative. If they really stop us from using the net as long as we don't buy a MS OS, we turn over to Freenet Project.
If Microsoft uses its power (read money) and let the industry produce "protected" media there will be workarounds to view your favorite movie or listen to your CD's without using Windows in a very short time.
It wouldn't be the first time something like that happens.

I wonder if you could legally view child pornography if you classified it as part of the belief of a religion.

I'm not sayin', but I'm sayin'.

Secondly, I wonder if the law had passed if ISPs would have done anything about FreeNet.

C'mon man! Please post links to these laws. Maybe you can use file sharing network links like Freenet http://www.freenetproject.org/ if you are worried about anonymity.

Oh, you mean to IBM...

"Cannot" is a big word, but you can go a long way with, say, Freenet or MUTE.

Both work differently, and MUTE is the one that's more like current P2P, except that all traffic is multi-hop, IP addresses of the actual content providers are hidden, and all network traffic is encrypted.

oh, you mean Freenet?

(Tell-Sell mode)

The latest TiVo hack... Soon coming to a Freenet or MUTE node near you... It's amazing!

(/Tell-Sell mode)

A little later, it'll be all over the general file-sharing networks, without ever having left a trace to its origin. At that stage, the cat is irrevocably out of the bag.

The point you raise is interesting: it doesn't matter that anonymous networks like Freenet or MUTE are not currently used by a lot of users; they _are_ used by ~1000-~10000 users. When more than a view of those start sharing it at high-usage filesharing networks, the cat is out of the bag. I can indeed imagine really high-profile hacks (say: like the utopical patch that'll break DRMS and/of TCPA in a few years, or so ;) to be "released" in either the two-stage way I just described, or by using virusses (as a last resort).

Interesting...

Doesn't Freenet already do this within its own network?

Yes, actually... Freenet.

Another interesting conference on a smaller scale was held in Viennal last week: Free Bitflows. Participants there were Brewster Kahle from Archive.org (with images of the Amsterdam PetaBox), Ian Clarke from Freenet, Musicians favoring fair and free distribution, and the organizer of Wizards of OS, among others. What are links to comparable events in the US?

How long before they block freenet?

It's called Freenet, which has already gone under fire because pedos have realized it also.

After a long wait, and a lot of luck, freenet *might* run for you, and take up all your CPU while it's at it. But at least it's a step toward stopping government censorship.

The blog post linked in the summary (as John Aschroft) contains what appears to be an entire Vanity Fair article. While it's properly attributed, it will no doubt be removed via pressure from somewhere or other; most likely not at the request of Vanity Fair, but by someone else using the article's copyright as a straw man.

The text has been mirrored for posterity in the Freenet network at:

CHK@~hhRclleaZhvLuTqszqG3ZuoGCsQAwI,u3nABqXhTmGA tC 9SDv5lYw/Ashcroft.txt

If the CHK@ is greek to you, please have a look at the Freenet project.

And there we go again... Apart from the fact that I find the influence that big industries have on the justice system in the US nauseating, the music industry seems to think that it can "stop" swapping in any way. This is typical black and white thinking

What is actually happening here is that the "system" (in this case the swappers and the music industry together) shift to a new equilibrium location, where the trade-off between speed and ease-of-use on the one hand, and speed on the other hand, is optimal for the given situation on the legal battle-field.

First we had Napster: very easy to use, but having the flaw of a single point of failure. Then we had the FastTrack and Gnutella networks (think KaZaa and LimeWire here): good bandwidth, but no anonymity at all, but at least without the need for a single point of failure. Then came eDonkey and his friends: less bandwidth, more obfuscation. A step further along the line lies FreeNet: anonimity beyond reasonable doubt, but a slow network and it's hard to find things. In the future, the balance might shift even further to the side of obfuscation, encryption and low bandwidth.

Now before you start yelling: "But FreeNet doesn't work!". Think again: Since about mid-May, it works well again! Try it!

So: go to their website and download that client! Happy browsing!

I very much want to see what her website has to say. And I very much don't want the FBI/NSA/SS (Social Security, not their Nazi counterparts also known as the SS, though it may be getting difficult to see the difference(stifling free speach etc, ya know))/whomever, to investigate me for that. Hmmm where is FreeNet when you need them?

I really wish there was a popularily used replacement for the IP address space that would gaurentee anonymity. Isn't that part of the good 'ol USA? free speach?....Or did we lose that when Prez Ford left office?....

"teen sex.mpg.scr"

Actually, that's what Freenet and ENTROPY are meant to do.

Also, to those naysayers: try to keep up with the latest Freenet/ENTROPY builds.

I have been of the oppinion that App level firewalls at the ISP level (hell even port blocking during worm-storms) is a necessary function. During the Nachi outbreak ISPs were killing ICMP just because of the sheer mass of pings flying around were bring down gear.

How, excatly speaking, can an ISP know which app generated which packet in a remote machine ?

And ISP-level port blocking is the foulest evil an ISP can commit, far worse than asymmetric connections or hidden monthly usage limits. Port blocking prevents your computer from being used as anything except a simple surf station; even some FTP sites refuse to work. There is absolutely no justification for this.

Internet was designed to be a P2P network. Do not break it. Especially just because some people insist on using computers without bothering to learn to maintain them (or hiring someone else to do so).

At the very least, ISPs should be responsible for the prevention of outbound malicious traffic, automated or manual (aka: crackers, kiddies etc.) When they knowingly ignore the traffic traversing their network and wreaking havoc on others, I am always disgusted.

Yes, it's so simple and straightforward to tell a good packet from a bad. All it requires... is checking the evil bit !

An ISP is just a traffick carrier. In no way, shape or form, should they be responsible for the actions of their users. If they are, it will be an additional incentive for them to block all the ports from incoming connections, reducing the value of Internet for all and making interesting and important applications like Freenet impossible. But even if they block all the incoming ports, it still won't stop the worms from spreading (by e-mail), it will simply give them an excuse for the Courts ("Hey, we did our best !"). All pain, no gain.

As this is self-obvious, I must ask: Are you a RIAA mole, trying to destroy the P2P networks ? Or are you a government mole, trying to destroy the capacity of Internet for applications like Freenet ? Or are you just a particularly clever troll who got modded insightfull by a not-so-clever moderator ?

Inquiring minds want to know ?-)

I have been of the oppinion that App level firewalls at the ISP level (hell even port blocking during worm-storms) is a necessary function. During the Nachi outbreak ISPs were killing ICMP just because of the sheer mass of pings flying around were bring down gear.

How, excatly speaking, can an ISP know which app generated which packet in a remote machine ?

And ISP-level port blocking is the foulest evil an ISP can commit, far worse than asymmetric connections or hidden monthly usage limits. Port blocking prevents your computer from being used as anything except a simple surf station; even some FTP sites refuse to work. There is absolutely no justification for this.

Internet was designed to be a P2P network. Do not break it. Especially just because some people insist on using computers without bothering to learn to maintain them (or hiring someone else to do so).

At the very least, ISPs should be responsible for the prevention of outbound malicious traffic, automated or manual (aka: crackers, kiddies etc.) When they knowingly ignore the traffic traversing their network and wreaking havoc on others, I am always disgusted.

Yes, it's so simple and straightforward to tell a good packet from a bad. All it requires... is checking the evil bit !

An ISP is just a traffick carrier. In no way, shape or form, should they be responsible for the actions of their users. If they are, it will be an additional incentive for them to block all the ports from incoming connections, reducing the value of Internet for all and making interesting and important applications like Freenet impossible. But even if they block all the incoming ports, it still won't stop the worms from spreading (by e-mail), it will simply give them an excuse for the Courts ("Hey, we did our best !"). All pain, no gain.

As this is self-obvious, I must ask: Are you a RIAA mole, trying to destroy the P2P networks ? Or are you a government mole, trying to destroy the capacity of Internet for applications like Freenet ? Or are you just a particularly clever troll who got modded insightfull by a not-so-clever moderator ?

Inquiring minds want to know ?-)

Why haven't I seen any comments about using Freenet for this yet? Where's Ian hiding today?

Try Freenet. It's much better now than it ever has been.

There are several P2P research projects that are looking at building reliabale and scalable P2P systems.

Most people don't see it as competitive with apps like BitTorrent because of its focus on anonymity, however with its dynamic caching, integrity checking, and complete decentralization, it is actually a pretty good content delivery platform. It is possible to get downloads at speeds comparable to fast web servers with large files (because the overhead of finding the file is much less significant than when retrieving small files).

Freenet has also been operating in the wild for years, and as-such its developers have been forced to contend with real-world issues that apps like Tapestry and Chord are only beginning to consider.

Freenet's approach is heuristic, rather than the deterministic "Distributed HashTable" (DHT) approach used by some other applications. Personally, I am sceptical as to whether DHTs can ever be made sufficiently robust to deal with the unreliable nature of nodes on the Internet, a good example being NeoNet, which has been trying to make DHTs work in the real world for over a year with no success.

I'm not entirely sure what all the tasks of ICANN are, but I guess regulating who can show what content under which domain never was part of them (and should never be).

But it could be. Delete someone's DNS records, and the site will drop off the Internet. Sure, it's still there, but it can't be accessed without knowing the IP address, and how many are going to start changing their DNS settings back and forth for different sites ?

I can just see it - China lobbying for removal of all anti-Chinese-government websites, Germany demanding the removal of every website which mentions the words "Nazi" or "World War II", and everyone else trying to remove anything offensive for anyone. While I'm usually for international cooperation, I don't think taking DNS from a corporation who carries anyone who pays and giving it to a bunch of well-and-not-so-well-meaning politicians is a good idea.

We must have a working Freenet before this comes to pass - the Net is too important to leave to politicians to rule.

Seriously, I can't remember when I heard my prime dueller do the rumble, and its only got 512 megs of ram.