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Oops, I gave the wrong domain name. It's really https://freenetproject.org/

"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?' "
-Mike Godwin - Electronic Freedom Foundation

The above quote has been on the Freenet Project Page since it's inception in 2000. I find it disturbing that it's starting to come true.

As if WikiLeaks would publish anything negative about Trump.

Anyone with leak-worthy info about Trump or anyone else should install Freenet and publish it there. It can't be censored or taken down.

https://freenetproject.org/ Those guys are already trying to do it. It is fully decentralized and private. It is very slow, and consumes huge bandwidth, but it works. The real concern here is the lack of choice when it comes to ISPs. They control the last mile, which almost everyone MUST lean on if they want to be on the internet. Break up the monopolies/duopolies and most the problems Mozilla wants to solve evaporates.

He should consider using a .bit address with Zeronet.

He should publish his site on Freenet. There's no such thing as a DDoS there, quite the opposite: the more requests there are for a specific URL, the more widely that content is propagated across the network, making it easier and faster for everyone to load. I say again, you cannot DDoS a Freenet site, there is no server to DDoS, as the content is distributed and hosted across the entire network. The only thing he'd lose is the comment section (Freenet's design is not conducive to interactive/dynamic stuff like commenting).

He'd lose his comment section, and his site's visibility to anyone who isn't running Freenet on their machine. Mentioning a fix isn't going to change peoples' ignorance of best-method and workaround solutions. Good idea, just not doable.

He should consider using a .bit address with Zeronet.

He should publish his site on Freenet. There's no such thing as a DDoS there, quite the opposite: the more requests there are for a specific URL, the more widely that content is propagated across the network, making it easier and faster for everyone to load. I say again, you cannot DDoS a Freenet site, there is no server to DDoS, as the content is distributed and hosted across the entire network. The only thing he'd lose is the comment section (Freenet's design is not conducive to interactive/dynamic stuff like commenting).

We've been talking about a 'second net' for many years now, one with no lusers. Perhaps Tor is it?

FreeNet and Internet2 (for starters) were both supposed to be 'it'...

(hell, FreeNet still exists. Who'da thunk it? Pity that my corporate firewall denies access outright, no?)

Freenet exists if people would use it.

It is a bit much, which is why your best approach is to avoid situations where you need to put all of your trust in a single other party.

Incorrect, the best approach to avoid such situations is not to expose information you consider to fall under your 'privacy' to such things.

Trusting the biggest dataminer on the planet to handle your data in such a way that they are not able to datamine it, with their word as the only reassurance, is a silly proposition.

Assuming you're able to prevent data collection from the biggest dataminer on the Internet that has tracking through a variety of services and even 3rd party services (as an example, doubleclick) is a false sense of security.

If you use an encryption solution from one party and a storage solution from another party, you've diluted the damage that a single malicious actor can do.

That is just a false sense of security, because now you're assuming you really have "diluted the damage".

Trying to sell the idea that that you can't have perfect privacy

No, I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm establishing that you are selling a false sense of security/privacy.

you should just give up and learn to love Big Brother

Hey look, you want to have anonymity and privacy, go use the Freenet Project (and use the necessary means to audit the thing). That's anonymity and privacy online, not your half baked non-sense.

Trusting Google to protect your privacy, especially from themselves, falls toward the first part of that spectrum.

You seem to be making assumptions about me. Having the expectation you have privacy and/or anonymity outside of specialized purpose built systems like Freenet is ludicrous.

This seems an awful lot like the Freenet project, minus attempting to guarantee anonymity or plausible deniability. It is definitely interesting if it takes off as it would be nice to have a global public DHT-based CDN, but seeing that Freenet was around in beta for in the late 90's, this is nothing particularly new.

Freenet:
https://freenetproject.org/

Freenet freenet, freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet free-net freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet. Freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet. Freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet freenet free-net freenet.

Freenet, Freenet Freenet

Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.

It's simple: you don't. It's right there in the First Amendment: any speech is legal, as long as it isn't something along the lines of yelling "fire" in a theater.

However, the thing everyone keeps missing is that some random internet site (in this case, Reddit) is owned by some other person or entity, and they can censor stuff on their own site as much as they want.

And since everyplace online or offline is owned by someone, this ends up being a rather clever way to render that First Amendment null and void in practice while still paying it lip service in speeches.

Oh well, there will be a new version of First Amendment taking into account the realities of modern world eventually or, preferably, a technical solution, for example in the form of one of those anonymizing p2p networks taking off for real.

A 'ban' on publishing 3D componentry online will solve everything.

Write something in a low level, portable language. Someone on slashdot should know how to roll up Usenet, IRC, voting & a web front end into a single set of packages that anyone can host.

Running Freenet with the Frost messaging program (it works almost identical to Usenet), you can have that. It needs a lot more users. C'mon! It's all encrypted and anonymous and the linux board could really use some more participants.

Been using Freenet for a while. For proper anonymity the thing has to be slow. Additionally the monetization strategy is dumb because you should charge for BANDWIDTH instead. Think about it, I'm sure you'll agree... Otherwise, please allow me to stream the contents of my NAS from within your Internet connection to my mobile devices 24/7.

Here's the thing: I see the trend, and it's the right way to go. If all the routers and machines on the net were DHT peers with caches, we could solve the deduplication problem of data storage while simultaneously reducing the required bandwidth. These solutions like in TFA and Freenet do not work so long as they are only hosted at endpoints. There's no reason the cute cat video I just emailed my neighbor about shouldn't be pulled from my local browser cache, or the next upstream router/server which contains it. That's the way the Internet already works, minus the ability for my surrounding peers to query me for the content.

What I have described is basically how NASA's DTN (Disruption Tolerant Networking) works. We can't have it because then spying would have to be done between every node, not just along trunks, and govs don't like that -- Especially when you consider that such a system would make shortwave radio store and forward mesh networking possible (one time hardware fee w/o service fees to access, and too expensive to snoop, so both ISPs and govs hate that idea and have basically outlawed packet radio for the masses).

TL;DR: Nice try, but you have to fix the legislature first. Data is just a number. No string of bits should be illegal to have possession of, and the public deserves an unregulated slice of that cellular / digital TV bandwidth to tinker in.

Freenet is not "shady". In fact its purpose was the opposite of shady: to enable legitimate internet use without being spied on by others.

There are others, among them OneSwarm, created at the University of Washington.

These projects were intended to promote freedom and privacy. That isn't a "shady" goal. Though people who want to spy on you (like the government) try to pretend that it is.

Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.

Ooh, like a cross between Freenet and FidoNet? I'm in. I don't know that this is the right software, but PirateBox shows a lot of potential and runs on the same hardware.

I get what you're saying, but I don't get how NDN is supposed to replace TCP/IP. Sure, it replaces many things done with UDP, and it even can do some things better than TCP, but it's not going to be replacing IPvX any time soon, just as TCP and UDP and ICMP etc. can happily co-exist.

What I find interesting is that there's been an implementation of NDN/IP for YEARS -- it's called Freenet. Something tells me that the sponsoring groups wouldn't like to see this particular implementation be the first thing to try out their new network layer however....

I was dialing up to Freenets back in 1988, paying for 'privileged' access (though they were non-profit) and was using email, archie, gopher, IRC, etc... Wouldn't this be considered an ISP?

Only if you could send IP packets directly onto the Internet and receive IP packets directly from the Internet, which would seem to imply that they were Freenets in a sense other than this sense of Freenet ("Freenet is a self-contained network, while Tor allows accessing the web anonymously, as well as using "hidden services" (anonymous web servers). Freenet is not a proxy: You cannot connect to services like Google or Facebook using Freenet." And, no, "Google and Facebook didn't exist at the time" is not a counterargument; replace them with whatever Internet services existed at the time, and if the resulting "You cannot connect to service such as ... using Freenet." remains true, it wasn't an ISP.).

Sneaker Net: Decentralized peer to peer data exchanges using paper, punched cards, scrolls, stone tablets, bits of knotted string and other primitive methods such as the Postals Services get humans to the personal computing explosion.

Prior to mid 1980's: Software doesn't have patents yet, no innovation could have happened before this point.

Software Patents: Due to government restriction on innovation in the 1980's Personal Computers instantly appear. Some say it is a conspiracy, involving E.T.s

ARPANET: After millions of years of primitive communication, humans finally test peer to peer data routing on machines, and one day this becomes the Internet. Semaphores and Radios remain a CIA Hoax!

FIDONET: The Internet (being designed by committee) takes too damn long so the citizenry say, "Well, fuck that let's do it our selves", because of long distance fees and the FCC the Internet wins over a more decentralized approach.

The WWW: A centralized approach to digital file sharing. In ignorance of all prior human history (including such one-to-many landmark designs such as Hollering, Signal Fires and Television), HTML and DNS fails to leverage the Internet's capabilities fully, creates lots of needless bottlenecks at the data silohs it erects, enables censorship, and spying on data consumption for the first time. (Librarians shudder, and eventually the state takes away the right to privacy in dead-tree reading material too, because "Turrist!").

Distributed File Sharing: Online decentralized information transfers, tries to make the data storage work the way the Internet, and every-"bloody"-thing else does. Fine upstanding citizens understand such technologies can only be used for, evil (I mean, just look at rumors, gossip, repeating camp-fire stories, and brains).

Tor: Online Anonymity to fight the dumb-ass "features" of the centralized web's design. This centralized approach to anonymity fails because it's fucking laggy and it bounces data between endpoints instead of placing the technology in the IP routers.

Anonymous P2P: Anonymous (somewhat) Distributed File Sharing, lays the groundwork for what will replace the WWW.

Dead Drops: Offline decentralized digital information transfers, because "Oh yeah!", the FIDONET approach and packet routing doesn't actually need wires; Sneakernet v2.0 don't even need broadcast radios -- as if such things had ever existed.

DTN: NASA tries to figure out how Disruption Tolerant Networking would work, but completely ignores that DHT infohashes deduplicate the fucking data. Meanwhile, users of napster, Bittorrent, WoW game installers, and dark-age-couriers scratch their heads vigorously and realize since "information conveyance isn't rocket science" space agencies pretty much suck at it.

Web 4.2.0: Finally mirroring, life, the universe and everything, the web becomes decentralized too, because caches should talk to each other Derp! You mostly pull from neighbors so tracking your online habits has exponential cost. There is no more "fast lane", everything essentially has free collocation, and the more popular content is the more available and faster it comes in. The world's surviving sysops give a collective shrug and say, "well, that finally happed." (Marijuana is also universally legalized, purely by coincidence).

Terrestrial DTN: A NASA engineer, once fined for using Bittorrent, takes a break from rolling out the DTN and realizes it would cost a lot less if everyone just owned their own software defined short-wave radio to operate the

land sweetheart pre-IPO deals

The thing about pre-IPO is that it means IPO is in the future. Think about IPO. Now, if you're working for investors who pay you to analyze investment risk, then wouldn't having Rice on the board factor into the Risk category pretty heavily? One fucked up privacy/advertising foobar influenced by this spy-happy nutter on the board could easily end the company. It's not like everyone and their mother isn't competing in cloud storage now.

Furthermore, in a post-Snowden world the appointment of Rice doesn't reflect well on the decision making capability of an Internet enable service company or its CEO. That's getting tallied in the graph right as a mark against the IPO valuation; Even if it was a smart move for connections and she was out before the IPO it's not a smart move for the owners or future shareholders. Since Dropbox proved they're not capable of figuring out that corporate decisions affect consumer perception of their image I wouldn't invest a dime at IPO even if I had no other reason not to do so -- Like their past deception over user data privacy (there is none, the encryption is for transport but they can see what's stored).

With distributed solutions having actual security being common, it's only a matter of time before someone makes a slick interface for Freenet, and puts solutions like Dropbox out of business. The looming IPO is essentially the DB owners cashing in on their doomed business, and their only market value will be in short term speculation on their stock price. I see this retarding Rice appointment as a poison pill to ensure the IPO goes through without anyone buying them -- You'd have to be a fool to try buying them now.

All of us together.

Which requires communication. Which is why NSA and its ilk are so hell-bent on wiretapping everything: to ensure any rebellion is crushed in the bud. Which, in turn, gives various governments ever greater assurance that they'll face no opposition no matter what they do, thus encouraging them to go farther.

It's a nasty vicious circle which could easily end up in another age of tyranny. It's why things like Tor and Freenet are so important: anonymous communication is the only way to organize effective resistance before things get so bad that lots of people are willing to risk death to fight, which in turn is the only way to keep things from getting that bad.

Of course, effective resistance also requires people to recognize a "divide and conquer" strategy when it's used against them. Which is why those in power are wish to discredit the concept of "class war": to keep the oppressed from having a group identity different from the oppressors. There is actually a class war going on, and has been for a while. The current economic troubles are part of the collateral damage, caused by the massive increase in debt caused by the concentration of wealth, and it will only get worse from here if the lower classed don't start fighting back effectively rather than dreaming futile dreams of winning the lottery and joining the 1%.

sometimes

It depends on your definition of sometimes.

Or you could just use Freenet. It's slow, but it's specifically designed for anonymous, censorship-resistant file sharing, and since every node stores file chunks, every node will help the network even if run by a sick weirdo who's only interested in discussing the philosophy of ethics on Frost.

maybe pirate radio will become more popular again

It's already here for the internet, and it's called Freenet.

The Freenet network is still alive and is very useful for this kind of thing.

https://freenetproject.org/

You estimate of Tor's privacy is higher than mine, and, evidently, PJ's.

An interesting read, thanks! What about setting up Freenet's Freemail then?

The traffic doesn't have to be meaningless. Join Freenet or another onion-routing network, and let your traffic be useful!

Er Freenet has supported peer to peer darknets for some time. It's not nearly perfect but it's definitely not something from science fiction. There are others though probably it's even more difficult to tell how trustworthy they are.

Er Freenet has supported peer to peer darknets for some time. It's not nearly perfect but it's definitely not something from science fiction. There are others though probably it's even more difficult to tell how trustworthy they are.

The Freenet Project has been around long enough and provides anonymity in masses and secure data transfer. Maybe it's time to switch?

Wasn't this what it was supposed to be?

Yup. And social river, buddy cloud, Choice Social, freenet and many more. I don't see why one other should "take off"

Let's consider Freenet. Don't they store and retrieve data based on some cryptographic keys? Of course, data is distributed across all participants, and communications still piggy back on top of IP. But that's what I'd call content-centric networking. The content isn't located by location, but by its nature (hash/key/...).

This has already been done:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing

https://freenetproject.org/

For those who are curious what Freenet is: It's a distributed data store, which is censorship-resistant and allows to publish information anonymously.

All this can go on Freenet and SOPA / PIPA / CHUPA PINGA style legislation can go pack sand. Freenet isn't susceptible to some of the legal attacks so far presented, hence why there is nasty shit there always. But as a medium for free exchange of information, it is bar none, due to that inability to be censored! Sad that more don't hook up. But SOPA / PIPA and the shutdown of file sharing sites will insure that Freenet gets more users.

http://freenetproject.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
WARNING: Offensive content will also be found on Freenet. You'll know which, as they don't hide themselves. Don't browse to those sites...

Personally, I'm old and cynical and believed these threats would come as the internet [well, the web mainly] became more dominated by commercial forces. So I think the answer for 'us' is encryption everywhere and structures and tools like Tor: https://www.torproject.org/ and Freenet: http://freenetproject.org/ I know that many people on here know about these, but links for those that don't.

It's no accident that the USA tried and tries to place export limits on encryption methods and tools.

And trackerless mode (DHT and magnet) requires UDP (and incoming connection). Impossible with tor.

PS If you want distributed anonymous datastore, you'd better look at freenet.

Freenet is exactly that. Unfortunately it's nowhere near the normal web performance-wise.

Freenet uses a distributed data store, where information is pushed into the grid by the uploader, then spreads around further when accessed. That unfortunately means that things only survive long term if they're accessed. On the good side, data doesn't depend on the provider to keep existing. If people keep accessing something, it will remain present in the network.

It's also rather painfully slow. We're talking of minutes to load a webpage, though once the node is well connected to the network it can perform fairly well.

It's not very user friendly. Besides the slowness, conservation of data is not guaranteed, and Freenet addresses are long hashes. There ae no friendly domain names. All you can have is a categorized Yahoo styled index, and bookmarks.

Freenet has mostly static content. Things like forums are possible and exist but it takes special Freenet-targeted technology. You can't run any random web forum on it. There's a forum included in the Freenet system itself, you can access it from the interface.

The other option is Tor hidden services. That's the usual web, except the Tor network obscures the location of the actual server and its clients. Performance is usually good. Unlike with Freenet, there's still a single server somewhere, which if found can be taken down.

We will disclose your Personally-Identifiable Data if we reasonably believe we are required to do so by law, regulation or other government authority [...]

From SpiderOak Service Agreement:

You may use the Services only for lawful purposes and solely in accordance with this Agreement and any other specific terms of use, rules or policies, as may be provided by SpiderOak from time to time, that may be applicable to any particular portion of the Services. You may not store, transmit or share through the Services any material, or otherwise engage in any conduct that: violates or infringes the rights of others, including without limitation patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, publicity or other proprietary rights; involves uploading, posting, emailing, transmitting or otherwise making available Selected Data that you do not have the right to make available under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships (such as insider information, proprietary and confidential information learned or disclosed as part of employment relationships or under non-disclosure agreements, etc.); [... and a lot more stuff ... ]

Question: if they are truly "zero knowledge", why would they care? They cannot identify infringing data anyway, if it's true. Furthermore, we know that being in the US, they will have to comply with government requests to access your data and they are not allowed to tell you. Also, while IANAL, their terms offer many loopholes, such as the possibility to employ (very) weak encryption in cases where some 3rd party desires access to your data. Therefore I'd trust Wuala more, it's based in Europe, where such secret subpoenas are (AFAIK) not possible. For people who have an absolute need for "privacy" (or for breaking the law, which in some free speech-impaired countries is very dangerous), there's still Freenet, which can be used as a (cumbersome) file storage...

I never said it was. I simply said that most domains aren't interesting enough to warrant the degree of paranoia you were displaying over someone hacking into your servers to access your Namecoin keys.

I already gave you evidence regarding insecure installations being exploited on an automated basis. Interesting doesn't matter and yet you simply choose to ignore this fact I highlighted.

You obviously have no real interest in a distributed name resolution system.

I have interest in having a secure system that has proper controls for dealing with problems. I'm going to participate because solutions like this effect me if they end up becoming something major.

but does affect others to the point where the cost and risk of managing their own security is far outweighed by the protection against censorship the distributed model offers

To be fair, if censorship is the real issue, use a system like Freenet, which is built for handling censorship issues instead of deciding that Domain Name System needs to be redefined. DNS is only but a small part of information exchange. Blocking can take place on many other levels without touching DNS. One only needs to look at how China has technologies that intercept packets of all kinds, scanning for forbidden elements and forcing a disconnect.

Also, by not taking security into consideration, such as hash collisions (which are fairly easy with how the bitcoin cipher is currently done), you can't expect to exercise good anti-censorship technologies when governments have vast amounts of resources to throw at a problem to make it go away.

The Namecoin protocol allows you to run your own traditional nameservers for subdomains, so you're unlikely to require frequent updates to the top-level domain in the first place.

One of the domains I run is an IRC network that occasionally has some annoying script kiddies that attempt DDoS attacks. The DNS servers are automatically rotated to prevent DDoS attacks from taking it out and to make it more difficult to gather all the different name servers for attack lists. For obvious reasons, your method isn't applicable to dealing with this particular issue.

I would use glue records for the network, but sadly they don't update fast enough when things need to be changed. Namecoin makes handling such situations more difficult, slower with more risk, if script kiddies can cause a problem like this, do you really think this will stop a government who has far more resources at their disposal than any single script kiddy?

I should also note that Anonymous' favourite tool for censorship is DDoS attacks as well. A technology like Freenet is far better suited for the uses of anti-censorship. Namecoin's useful would be short lived if it gained popularity due to all the glaring issues it fails to deal with on a security and censorship level.

Namecoin is as much the solution to DNS as SOPA is the solution to piracy.

Why don't they improve Sone, the Freenet social network plugin? It already supports "web of trust" principles and could help drag Freenet out of the "for illegal stuff only" quicksand it seems to have been stuck in for the past couple of years... Freenet is by design resistant to censorship and denial-of-service attacks and can only get better if more people use it actively.

Why don't they improve Sone, the Freenet social network plugin? It already supports "web of trust" principles and could help drag Freenet out of the "for illegal stuff only" quicksand it seems to have been stuck in for the past couple of years... Freenet is by design resistant to censorship and denial-of-service attacks and can only get better if more people use it actively.

Well the last time I tried OpenJDK with freenet it didn't work right.

To be fair, many (most?) Freenet builds don't work right with any JRE. "Due to insufficient testing" is at the very top of the news page as of this writing. Hardly a surprise, seeing how Freenet is very much a work in progress, and has been for over a decade.

An ideal storage solution for open source projects is the distributed cloud storage of the Freenet project.

I’m using Sone, too, and I finally understood why people like Facebook - and could experience that with Sone without having to give up my privacy. And due to the WebOfTrust, it even has better spam resistance than twitter et. al.

I have several IDs: An official ID, one for talking with friends (they can know I’m that one) and an anonymous one which not even my wife knows (she could, but she does not want to). The anonymous ones allow me to speak my mind without fearing future repercussions.

  http://freenetproject.org/

http://freenetproject.org/

Something similar to Freenet but more lightweight would be interesting, creating true cloud storage distributed among all the users of the software.

1) How do we route around this damage?

Although it's been some time since I last looked at the project, Freenet still seems like a good bet.

This might be interesting as well: - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Freenet Bitcoin over freenet. Makes it even more harder to track down people and nodes. Yes unless all isps are instructed to not only filter bitcoin but freenet (and tor) traffic as well.