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You could just mirror it once on Entropy or Freenet and it would go where ever it is wanted.

It will also have all the speed of a glacier advancing upon the Alps. Yes, in a dozen years maybe Java will be fast enough. It's certainly not there yet. The Freenet Project use Java, and their client is so slow as to be unusable. It could have been just as easily made cross-platform in a real language. Heck, last I checked I believe Squeak has a faster VM than Java.

Yes, we don't write in assembler because 'puters are fast enough to write in C now. We shouldn't write in Java because they're not fast enough for that yet--esp. for numeric calculations such as encryption uses. Actually, we shouldn't write in Java because it sucks as a language. Now, the Lisp-family of languages are excellent, and buffer overflows do not AFAIK occur in them. Perhaps a Common Lisp or Scheme implementation would be good.

Well, you just need to be anonymous while transferring the file.

Internet surfing really isn't very anonymous or secure, and I don't think the internet itself was ever meant to be. Maybe you should try Freenet.

You just described one of the many features FreeNet already has.

Plus it's all encrypted.

Too bad many downloads are broken due to nodes being transient.

It works great for text though.

Read the site if you want more information on the functionality of Freenet.

Also note that the Freenet project needs money to continue to pay its full time programmer. It is GPL software but it is very challenging code to work on and really needs dedicated people. So go to The Freenet Project Homepage and download a copy of the latest version and hopefully make a donation!

It's either freedom in the form of Freenet or lawsuits from the RIAA/MPAA/Your local government. Take your pic.

Also note that the Freenet project needs money to continue to pay its full time programmer. It is GPL software but it is very challenging code to work on and really needs dedicated people. So go to The Freenet Project Homepage and download a copy of the latest version and hopefully make a donation!

It's either freedom in the form of Freenet or lawsuits from the RIAA/MPAA/Your local government. Take your pic.

Freenet addresses this problem in several ways:

• You only need to sign up to Freenet once, thereafter it handles the task of finding new Freenet nodes to talk to automatically
• Freenet is self-propogating, you can send a URL to your friend by email pointing to your computer, and they can download Freenet from you - no reliance on a centralized site
• Unlike this service, Freenet allows people within Iran to publish freely and anonymously without relying on an external website.

Freenet doesn't offer very strong guarantees of anonymity. See the FAQ for details. Maybe you're thinking of GNUnet.

What about distributing signed spam lists through Freenet or Bit Torrent or something similar?

Do you think that would work?

This announcement means that I can (presumably) finally get Freenet running on my spare FreeBSD box. I hadn't been able to figure out how to get the quasi-official, not guaranteed to be functional, volunteer java ports (which may or may not actually include NIO, which Freenet uses) installed on FBSD. I'd pretty much given up.

This is great news, even if it's binary-only! My thanks to Sun and to the FreeBSD Java team.

we want to discourage systems which facilitate abuse by evading accountability

So what should be done about Freenet? Their stated goal "is to ensure that the government cannot control its population's ability to share information, to communicate".

I think Freenet is a good example for discussion since it's build from the ground up to minimize accountability.

we want to discourage systems which facilitate abuse by evading accountability

So what should be done about Freenet? Their stated goal "is to ensure that the government cannot control its population's ability to share information, to communicate".

I think Freenet is a good example for discussion since it's build from the ground up to minimize accountability.

Freenet Project

And then give yourself an A. :)

Switch to Freenet (www.freenetproject.org). Best of both worlds. Public network, anonymous transfers, and some other cool features, too.

Your idea sounds very similar to Freenet.

Isn't that similar to Freenet?

It is supposed to provide a save harbour for all contraversal sites, like this one! Ive inserted his site into the freenet. You can download freenet here, and access the site here

The Bittorent mainpage is shut down from a DOS, then shutdown by its chosen government (FCC), and now its in shambles. Freenet can have the same thing happen.

Uh, your really off your mark here. The Freenet web interface thingy comes with it's own mini webserver and the functionality to turn any non-transient node into a freenet distribution center. From the Freenet web interface, there's a link called Spread Freenet. (Link only works if you have Freenet installed and running.)

Even if the main Freenet site got taken down, things would still be just peachy...

While we're at it, what's this about the Bittorent mainpage going down? I know that a few popular tracker sites went down, but I've never heard of the main BitTorrent site going down. Click the link; it's up right now.

Moderators: How the hell did the parent get modded +2 Insightful?

Seriously. It is a bit ironic that the Freenet project doesn't run on a free system like Debian GNU/Linux. So there is an effort underway to Free Freenet! See the developer mailinglist archive. Please donate (Matthew Toseland - Toad - is the "Official Codemonkey" of the Freenet Project).

I mean we know you support them, I mean its not like you subscribed to http://freenetproject.org/ or EFF

You know, you can pay your $ to the RIAA, or you can pay the EFF, but either way you are going to pay.

So who would you prefer tax you?

Which do you prefer? Corperate Welfare? Freenet?

http://freenetproject.org/

Options are limited, you are a slave to the RIAA, or you support freenet.

Freenet does not have this centralization problem. And a very good new version just came out. I have been using both but because torrents are such a pain to find I have found freenet to be more useful. The freenet guys said bittorrent would run into this problem. I am surprised it has happened so soon.

Clearly this was inevitable with BitTorrent - it is a centralized technology. Freenet, while not designed for distribution of copyrighted material (any more than BT was), at least it afforts protection to the publishers of that material. Currently, in fact, it is pretty much as easy to use as BT - if not easier. Further, I would argue that Freenet has many benefits over BT as a content distribution platform irrespective of its anonymity benefits (such as its adaptive caching).

Maybe something like xmule and emule would do the trick? They even have the feature where you can set up your web browser so a click begins to download a file over it.

Also, I believe that freenet allows the content to be pulled from multiple hosts too. This is because of how the data is chunked to prevent analysis based on the size of the file.

Of course, I suppose we could always go back to sharing files the original way. Just get small communities together and share files like that. Then again, that's not impervious either, as was shown with the DoJ busts of large warez groups last year. Maybe this is why WASTE had AOL so scared. Then again, I'm paranoid.

Time for us all to mass migrate to Freenet. To get you all started, I've uploaded a copy of this bill to Freenet.

Read the Freenet FAQ. (Specifically this Q/A)

Freenet does not provide real anonymity. It just provides obscurity. If someone REALLY wants to find you, they can.

Read the Freenet FAQ. (Specifically this Q/A)

Freenet does not provide real anonymity. It just provides obscurity. If someone REALLY wants to find you, they can.

One highly relevant quote about anonymity:

Freenet does not offer true anonymity in the way that the Mixmaster and cypherpunk remailers do. Most of the non-trivial attacks (advanced traffic analysis, compromising any given majority of the nodes, etc.) that these were designed to counter would probably be successful in identifying someone making requests on Freenet. On Freenet, whatever you do, your identity is still revealed to the first Freenet Node you talk to, and even if you limit yourself to talk only to trusted nodes (a feature that will be implemented in the future), they will have to talk to the rest of the network at some time or another. The anonymity that Freenet offers is really just obscurity in the fact that it is hard to prove that your node wasn't proxying the request for or insert of data on behalf of somebody else (who might also just have been proxying it).

And another quote highly relevant to plausible deniability (which is effectively what Freenet relies upon to store potentially controversial content on any connected node, hopefully without exposing that node's owner to prosecution for hosting that content):

Hashing the key and encrypting the data is not meant a method to keep Freenet Node operators from being able to figure out what type of information is in their nodes if they really want to (after all, they can just find the key in the same way as someone who requests the information would) but rather to keep operators from having to know what information is in their nodes if they don't want to. This distinction is more a legal one than a technical one. It is not realistic to expect a node operator to try to continually collect and/ or guess possible keys and then check them against the information in his node (even if such an attack is viable from a security perspective), so a sane society is less likely to hold an operator liable for such information on the network.

They are clearly moving in the right direction, but are they really there yet? Would it be possible, for example, for the RIAA to say, "Hey everybody, this free application will help you decrypt your Freenet node so that you can ensure you're not infringing," and then they're free to nail if you if you're "trafficking" in illegal files? Obviously there are other hurdles (such as identifying you and the content you're hosting), but I suspect the basic idea still describes a potentially unpleasant scenario.

Also, I saw a slashdot reply to another article recently (somebody help me here?) which quoted a legal decision (somehow involving Sony?) which pretty clearly stated that you're still considered guilty if the prosecution can prove that you were intentionally trying to avoid having knowledge of what you suspected was illegal activity for the sole purpose of using that as a defense later on. (At least, that's how I interpreted it... I wish I could find the citation.) Freenet seems to fall flat on it's face in this respect.

Don't get me wrong, I've been fascinated with Freenet and I think they're trying to do a Very Good Thing, but these are two points that I think are important which a lot of people overlook.

Heh, ironically, slashdot is currently showing me this quote: Be careful how you get yourself involved with persons or situations that can't bear inspection. :)

Good point. This whole freenet thing gives me the creeps. It is created to distribute illegal mp3 files and not getting caught but is presented as a good way to ensure the flow of 'free speech'. Have you read the 'philosophy' section on the web page? Some parts of it make my skin crawl. For instance:

"The core problem with copyright is that enforcement of it requires monitoring of communications, and you cannot be guaranteed free speech if someone is monitoring everything you say."

But if no-one is monitoring everything you say there is no point in saying it is there?

"You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law"

O yes you can. Copying something someone worked real hard to make is someting entirely different from having ideas of your own.

In my opinion these Freenet guys confuse speech with copying. These two things are NOT the same. In most Western countries the freedom of speech is guaranteed. Everyone is allowed to speak their mind. I think it's very wrong to spread someone elses 'information' (no definition of what they mean by 'information' is given on the Freenet site) against their will or in a way that person is not comfortable with and am therefore opposed to using Freenet and their likes in this way.

It's not karma whoring if you're an Anonymous Coward.

Freenet is pretty much as searchable as the Internet; if you know the address of Freesites, you can rig a search engine to index them, in fact there are already several such.

However, most people on Freenet use FROST, which bears a strong resemblance to Usenet, to share files, and it is searchable, and provides multiple discussion forums as well.

There is one other distinction; The more people interested in a file on freenet, the more it propagates; the more it propagates, the faster it will download. A fairly popular file will download at your bandwidth limit.

If you haven't used freenet for a while, like maybe since build 0.3 or early 0.4, you should really try it now, very, very stable.

Let's see... is freenet a good, safe alternative to current P2P apps? Let's consult the Freenet FAQ:

Is Freenet searchable?
No search mechanism has yet been implemented.

Bzzzzzt! Sorry, you lose. Try again!

Please forgive me if I'm wrong, but UDPP2P does not seem to be "promising".

I've checked the web site. It basically says "we broadcast all the queries and if someone has the file we meet each other by using secret codes hidden in those queries".

A peer-to-peer network that does queries in terms of network-wide broadcast is always doomed to fail. Gnutalla failed (and was redesigned) the same way. Even Novell NetWare was unable to scale because of SAP (service advertising protocol).

Nevertheless, the web site says "peers will somehow know each other". This is also a big problem in P2P networks. -- No design only big words.

Anyways, if I were you, I'd use freenet. It's anonymous, and it works much better than the scheme explained on the web site.

Some introductory material first:

Projects like Freenet, GNUnet and IIP are creating decentralized, anonymous Peer-to-Peer networks that can strongly resist censorship by any attacker. I believe that if (when?) these kinds of secure networks replace currently popular networks (FastTrack, IRC, etc) as IP infringement tools, your job of effectively finding, stoping and prosecuting IP infringers will become much, much harder, and will require many more computer resources (perhaps impossibly many resources, both in computing time and in network bandwith).

Now my questions:

For how long do you think mass IP infringement will continue to take place in plain view, rather than on decentralized, anonymous, P2P networks?

If mass IP infringment does move to those kinds of networks, what kind of resources will your office be able to expend to attack those networks?

Would you be allowed to attack those networks at all without violating their user's First Ammendment right to anonymous speech?

What changes to IP law do you think would be needed to address decentralized anonymous networks?

It won't have any impact at all. The fact is, our current system is broken. The media companies have all the money and power, and they can buy whatever laws they want. They will lobby, spend, and do whatever it takes to extend and broaden copyright without limit. People are correct in believing that this will choke creativity and kill culture, but the media companies actually benefit. You see, people will put up with garbage, as long as they have nothing better to compare it to. Marketing will ensure that everybody only hears about the "hot new thing", and they can recycle the same ten or twenty movies, at minimal cost and zero risk, until the end of time.

We're not going to win that war, all of the decisive battles have already been lost, and our legal options are locked up. Either we admit defeat, and give in to a steady stream of Julia Roberts' movies and their ilk, or we fight on in a different arena. I propose that we build a digital library of all recorded works: music, films, books, etc. and put it on Freenet. There is really no other option available to us, and I think that this will be the endgame. Let's do it before technology becomes illegal too.

Since when did we become a nation of wimps? If it were up to our current government, the biology of the human body would be suppressed, so that "terrorists" wouldn't know where to shoot us in order to kill us. Just like this case - if we can figure it out, so can they. This information is just like any other information -- it can be used for good or evil. Obviously there is information that is more pertinent than other information, the size of Jenna Bush's bra, for instance, would be considered by most to be unimportant. How that information was obtained; however, would be a little more important. In what way is our government censoring this information any different than what the Chinese government does? Perhaps he should release this onto Freenet. It would finally validate what Ian Clarke has been saying for the last few years. Censorship must be eliminated if we are to have a democratic society.

Right now freenetproject.org points at something else which also means that their client installer doesn't work since it tries to download something from that url...

If you have Freenet installed on your computer, click this link to read the statement and help spread it. If you do this it will ensure that Microsoft will NOT ever be able to remove this information from the Internet. Come on, folks, this is what Freenet is for!

Alternatively, if you know what you're doing, the key is KSK@xbox-unmodded-exploit

..all xbox hackers should use freenet to publish their discoveries. That would give them total anonymity and good night sleep without getting burdened by possible lawsuits.

Everytime the RIAA ups the stakes, people will simply migrate to a more secure P2P architecture - and it is hard to get more secure, decentralized, and anonymous than Freenet.

Guess its time for pirates to consider moving their activities to Freenet. Anonymous and censor resistant.

http://freenetproject.org/eusp/index.php

Alex Macfie <alex@cgce.net>

http://freenetproject.org/eusp/index.php

Alex Macfie <alex@cgce.net>

If anyone actually gets ahold of this, despite the inevitable heavy slashdotting it will receive, please mirror it on Freenet! It's very hard to censor a network with no servers, no administrators, and no controlling entity. ;) If the Powers That Be don't want you corrupting your mind with impure knowledge, then such material belongs on Freenet!

If you're not familiar with the Freenet project, take look: Users donate bandwidth and space by running a "node", and the network's content exists in the collective datastore shared by thousands of nodes.

Data is duplicated as it's retrieved, so popular content gets more redundantly distributed. Node-to-node communications are encrypted, and so is the content in each datastore. You don't know and can't control what's on your own node.

The usual interface to Freenet is a web browser, since web pages and images can be easily inserted into the network. Other types of data (music, movies, programs) are common, and front-end programs exist to facilitate large uploads and downloads.

Check out Freenet, run a stable node, and play with it! The more you use it, the faster it gets. Bandwidth is more important than space; if you can host a node on something faster than a dialup it would be nice.

Oh, and here's the cool thing about Freenet that makes it perfect for things like modchip designs: Once inserted, content cannot be forcibly removed. Even the creators of the network can't delete something from it. The only way content falls out of freenet is if everyone ignores it.

Freenet is perfect if you want to avoid this sort of arbitrary rule. Freenet is uncensorable, anonymous, and almost usable! (It's made great improvements lately, and it needs your help to grow.)

Read about how freenet works (totally distributed) and why it's cool (encryption means you don't even know what's stored on your node), and then run a node! Putter around for a while then publish something. Your political speech belongs on Freenet.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Until intellectual "property" law gets reformed, all this activity needs to take place on Freenet.

Yes, it doesn't work the same way that Kazaa does or Napster did, it is more like a parallel world wide web, but I certainly don't think that the Napster-inspired UI paradigm is the "be all and end all" of P2P user interfaces.

Some people complain that Freenet's anonymity make it too slow, yet I have been able to get entire 900MB movies from it at about 90k/sec (over a 160k/sec downstream connection), and do-so consistently and reliably.

The Freenet developers are working hard to improve Freenet's speed too - as we speak they are working to migrate over to the vastly more efficient java.nio networking library which should dramatically reduce Freenet's CPU requirements.

Further down the line, they have been working on a radical rethink of Freenet's core routing algorithm, called "Next Gen Routing", which should make Freenet much faster when it comes to retrieving information.

Anyone worried about this issue should go to the Freenet website and help them with a donation ASAP.

Yes, it doesn't work the same way that Kazaa does or Napster did, it is more like a parallel world wide web, but I certainly don't think that the Napster-inspired UI paradigm is the "be all and end all" of P2P user interfaces.

Some people complain that Freenet's anonymity make it too slow, yet I have been able to get entire 900MB movies from it at about 90k/sec (over a 160k/sec downstream connection), and do-so consistently and reliably.

The Freenet developers are working hard to improve Freenet's speed too - as we speak they are working to migrate over to the vastly more efficient java.nio networking library which should dramatically reduce Freenet's CPU requirements.

Further down the line, they have been working on a radical rethink of Freenet's core routing algorithm, called "Next Gen Routing", which should make Freenet much faster when it comes to retrieving information.

Anyone worried about this issue should go to the Freenet website and help them with a donation ASAP.

Ever heard of Freenet? This is what it is made for.