Slashdot Mirror

owillis asks: "Reading this Salon article on file sharing programmers who are suspending or ending work on their projects due to the legal climate post-Napster, I wonder what the liabilty is for people who work on open source software. Does open source protect the creators from these laws or is it fair game?" We've discussed this before but it would be interesting to note if your opinions have changed after the Napster ruling. However it bothers me that in today's legal climate, it is easier to blame the creator of the tool rather than the users who use them illegally.

owillis asks: "Reading this Salon article on file sharing programmers who are suspending or ending work on their projects due to the legal climate post-Napster, I wonder what the liabilty is for people who work on open source software. Does open source protect the creators from these laws or is it fair game?" We've discussed this before but it would be interesting to note if your opinions have changed after the Napster ruling. However it bothers me that in today's legal climate, it is easier to blame the creator of the tool rather than the users who use them illegally.

joseph writes: "This article on C|Net announces Publius, a system similar to Freenet, meant to battle censorship on the Internet. What makes this approach interesting is its backing from AT&T Labs. Of particular interest in the article are the safeguards against the common opposition to such projects, like their use for piracy. Publius features no search utility and a maximum file size of 100k."

Judg3 writes " This story over at Wired.Com talks about a new Napster clone with a twist, pay per download. Yep, thats right. MoJoNation offers a "cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, the makers of Mojo. They want to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid. These payments are called (aptly enough) mojo. Their web page doesnt say much, well ok it says nothing. But theres some activity over at SourceForge. Though not a whole lot." Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet: It could affect web pages too: I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent. And I'd pay a few cents to download a new track. The last question is how micro is micro enough? A half cent per web page? A Quarter per audio track?

Judg3 writes " This story over at Wired.Com talks about a new Napster clone with a twist, pay per download. Yep, thats right. MoJoNation offers a "cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, the makers of Mojo. They want to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid. These payments are called (aptly enough) mojo. Their web page doesnt say much, well ok it says nothing. But theres some activity over at SourceForge. Though not a whole lot." Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet: It could affect web pages too: I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent. And I'd pay a few cents to download a new track. The last question is how micro is micro enough? A half cent per web page? A Quarter per audio track?

kuros writes: "Apparently, these guys feel the time has come for a MS Windows clone. The Open Windows Project aim is to create a 100% Microsoft Windows compatible operating system that is totally "free" of Microsoft proprietary code. As its name implies, O.W. will be completly open source and freely re-distributable. Open Windows will draw from current open source projects to expedite its production. These include: GXExplorer, FreeDOS, ReactOS and WinE. You may have seen similar projects that intend to use a modified version of Linux, etc. Open Windows will not be a Linux distribution; it will be written Windows compatible from the ground up." Without all the APIs, is this even feasible? (And after that, is it desirable?)

Omega996 asks: "Does anyone have any experience with Firewire on 'alternative' OSes? I use Linux (SuSE 6.4), FreeBSD, BeOS, and MacOS, and it seems only MacOS (and only recently) has Firewire support for something other than digital video input. I'm a UNIX geek, and I'd rather be using a UNIX variant with Firewire than MacOS 9, but I don't see any support for Firewire storage (disks, CD/RW, etc.). Am I missing something?" Well, here's a link to the Linux 1394 Project, however IEEE 1394 (or, if you are dealing with Sony devices, i.Link) is the generic name for Firewire. Does anyone have any information on such projects for FreeBSD, BeOS and other not-often-heard-from Operating Systems?

I'm here at Ottawa Linux Symposium, and I took the Quickies to the crowd and let them pick some of today's Quickies. Hope you like them. CitizenC told us to check out The Kama Sutra of Winnie the Pooh. Scary. alpha264 wrote in about a pegboard computer." Darkness Productions told us that Spaz Labs was back." Phrogman shared a huge collection of Space Images now available on Spaceref.com. kbolton told us to look at streaming anime for free. scampbell said that Yamaha Paper Craft has updated their rare-animal paper sculpture collection to include the Yellow-eyed Penguin. _endgame mentioned that voting has begun for the Freenet Logo." An anonymous coward wrote in about the Men of Sieg Hall calendar. I included that one for Telsa. cdlu wrote (from about ten feet away) about this thing that creates much annoyance from the console. MURL said that Christopher Lee has been cast in the role of a charismatic separatist in Episode II. And finally, I just wanted to mention that Dave Taylor from that company stopped by just to make sure that he wasn't mentioned in the Quickies. Teehee.

Chris Nandor wrote in to tell us that Larry Wall has announced his vision for perl 6 as part of this keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. You can read an announcement at Perl.org or read Chris's summary of things (like information about the from-scratch rewrite being planned!)

The following was written by Chris "Pudge" Nandor... Perl Guru, Slashcode Guru, and all around swell guy.

Perl 6 To Be Complete Rewrite (But Not What You Think)

Larry Wall and other active Perl porters and Perl helpers met on Tuesday afternoon at Perl Conference 4.0 and mapped out a what is planned to become a complete rewrite of Perl that will become Perl 6 in 18 to 24 months, with a prerelease targeted for next year's conference.

Perl 5 will not be abandoned, but will primarily be concerned with bugfixes both major and minor.

The meeting for members of the perl5-porters mailing list was the result of an earlier, smaller meeting of Wall, Nathan Torkington, Chip Salzenberg, and others who basically decided that Perl needed to be fixed in certain ways, and that a rewrite was the best way to do it. Salzenberg started the Topaz project two years ago, to reimplement Perl in C++. Though Topaz itself will not be the basis for Perl 6, Salzenberg noted that the lessons learned in the experience will be very helpful to the new effort.

Torkington led the three-hour meeting, starting off by saying what was wrong with Perl. Much of the focus on the problems with Perl centered around how increasingly difficult it was to improve, extend, and embed Perl. A rewrite and redesign are needed, he said, and maybe it is time for a hard change. So while the focus of the effort seems to be on improving the Perl guts and API, the project will also be used as an opportunity to clean out some of the cruft, including bad and seldom-used features.

Some of the primary (and still vague) goals of the effort will be to reimplement the core so it is better, stronger, and faster; improve syntax; add new features where appropriate; have better version and installation management for perl and its modules; and have a clear and automated migration path, which may include a backward compatibility mode. Some old features may be removed, like typeglobs. Others will be improved.

The group hopes to re-shape Perl community, too. Instead of one all-encompassing perl5-porters list, tightly focused mailing lists with a terminal lifespan will be formed. To start off, the mailing list bootstrap at perl.org will be for discussion of the beginnings of the project. Like most, if not all, other new lists, when it has fulfilled its purpose, it will be closed.

Wall said, "Perl 5 was my rewrite of perl ... I think this should be the community's rewrite of perl, and the community's rewrite of the community."

Specifics have not yet been ironed out. A group has been formed to begin the work, which will primarily consist of planning the work to be done. No coding is to be done at this stage, only planning and support. Roles were determined for the group, and then they were filled. They now include the perl 5 maintainer (Jarkko Hietaniemi and Nick Ing-Simmons), the language design pumpking (Larry Wall), the internals design pumpking (Dan Sugalski), the documentation manager (Adam Turoff), the system administrator (Ask Bjoern Hansen), the quality assurance bloke (Michael Schwern), the spokesdroid (brian d foy), the customer relations person (Dick Hardt), and the project manager himself, Nathan Torkington. Other porters, such as Chip Salzenberg, volunteered to consult when needed.

Some of the short term goals of this group are to draft a language specification, start an RFC channel, get feedback, and set up mailing lists, a documentation repository, and a web site. Hansen will be setting up the mailing lists. The bootstrap list will be open to the public, while the list for the intial small group of people will be closed for posting by anyone not on the list. All lists will be readable by the public, through the web, and perhaps through email. Turoff is going to be preparing the notes for the morning meeting, and foy will be posting the notes and the mailing list links on the www.perl.org web site.

Motor writes: "The very excellent weekly newsletter NTK (Need To Know) tipped me off about galeon - a desperately needed attempt to build a mere browser (as opposed to an entire operating system/xterm/game console) using the best bit of the Mozilla project: gecko." I wondered how long before someone did this. Very excellent looking.

eries wrote a good summary of a major problem with the GPL, with regards to web applications. Essentially, since the GPL is about 'Binary Redistrubtion', it doesn't work with web pages where the output is distributed, but the software itself doesn't have to be. Anyway, hit the link to read his comment about it. Definitely an issue that I've thought a lot about wrt Slashcode, but never found a clear solution.

eries writes "We recently ran into some licensing problems for a web-based open-source project. Since our project is an OO package written in PHP (a scripting language) the GPL does not quite apply. The GPL is designed to handle "binary redistribution" for software packages, but ours cannot be distributed in binary form. That means that someone could make a website out of a derivitive work and never have to open or disclose their code - an apparent violation of the spirit of the GPL. Now, we think it might be possible to modify the GPL to construe instances of a website sending HTML to be "executed" on a browser as redistribution (more on this later), but we don't really know how to go about it. Consequently, we are forced to try and find another license. We have looked at the Artistic and the APSL, but these are both pretty dubious. Has anyone else run into problems like this? We want to write to both the OSI and FSF and bring this to their attention, so we'd like to find out of others have run into the same situation. You can also check out this related discussion on the Sourceforge forums page.

IMHO, we need a way of defining, in cases like these, what constitutes a derived work. Clearly, things like your db password and content like graphics, logos, layout, etc. are not derived works. But how can we draw the line in the case of added functionality? How is this handled in more traditional content-delivery systems?

Is the HTML produced by our scripts just output? The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the application that a user is running when they use our software is not just a series of HTML files. Those files, by themselves, are worthless. Instead, their usefulness depends on an awful lot of "state" - the state of the browser (cookies, javascript), the web server, other scripts which the browser has to reconnect to, and the data in the database. The HTML files are just one component of the general state that our app produces. If you construe this more nebuloous "state" as the "binary" application that our software produces, then distributing it to a user via a web server is a non-sourced distirbution, and hence forbidden by the GPL. What do you think? I have to believe that someone running a mod_x application within an Apache server that gives access to it to tons of users is redistributing it without the source, unless you believe that clicking on "View Source" for this /. page you have access to the Slash source..."

eries wrote a good summary of a major problem with the GPL, with regards to web applications. Essentially, since the GPL is about 'Binary Redistrubtion', it doesn't work with web pages where the output is distributed, but the software itself doesn't have to be. Anyway, hit the link to read his comment about it. Definitely an issue that I've thought a lot about wrt Slashcode, but never found a clear solution.

eries writes "We recently ran into some licensing problems for a web-based open-source project. Since our project is an OO package written in PHP (a scripting language) the GPL does not quite apply. The GPL is designed to handle "binary redistribution" for software packages, but ours cannot be distributed in binary form. That means that someone could make a website out of a derivitive work and never have to open or disclose their code - an apparent violation of the spirit of the GPL. Now, we think it might be possible to modify the GPL to construe instances of a website sending HTML to be "executed" on a browser as redistribution (more on this later), but we don't really know how to go about it. Consequently, we are forced to try and find another license. We have looked at the Artistic and the APSL, but these are both pretty dubious. Has anyone else run into problems like this? We want to write to both the OSI and FSF and bring this to their attention, so we'd like to find out of others have run into the same situation. You can also check out this related discussion on the Sourceforge forums page.

IMHO, we need a way of defining, in cases like these, what constitutes a derived work. Clearly, things like your db password and content like graphics, logos, layout, etc. are not derived works. But how can we draw the line in the case of added functionality? How is this handled in more traditional content-delivery systems?

Is the HTML produced by our scripts just output? The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the application that a user is running when they use our software is not just a series of HTML files. Those files, by themselves, are worthless. Instead, their usefulness depends on an awful lot of "state" - the state of the browser (cookies, javascript), the web server, other scripts which the browser has to reconnect to, and the data in the database. The HTML files are just one component of the general state that our app produces. If you construe this more nebuloous "state" as the "binary" application that our software produces, then distributing it to a user via a web server is a non-sourced distirbution, and hence forbidden by the GPL. What do you think? I have to believe that someone running a mod_x application within an Apache server that gives access to it to tons of users is redistributing it without the source, unless you believe that clicking on "View Source" for this /. page you have access to the Slash source..."

Greyfox asks: "I'm looking for a good set of C++ bindings for ORBit. The only thing I can find seems to be OrbitCPP, which doesn't appear to be particularly robust yet. Are there any other projects out there to implement C++ bindings for ORBit?"

Updates on Tom's detective work, Kevin's touchy look-but-don't touch semi-citizen status, and last but not least a word from the elusive printman, here folded, spindled and mutilated for your edification.

Danke sehr, Herr Doktor Pabst! The sighs -- nay, screams! -- of disappointment rose like the wail of a cat in heat following the announcement that AMD's new chips would be clock-locked, nullifying the advantages of Abit's ultra-overclockable motherboard. Jonathan Dabian writes: "This is probably a little late for me to get the name postage on the front page, but Tom's Hardware posted a new story that is an update to the Monday Blurb where they revealed that the new AMD processors would be multiplier locked. In this new story, Tom Pabst reveals the information he has since pieced together about the connections on the top of the processor, and ideas on how to alter those laser etched connections. Overclocking on the Duron and Thunderbird isn't dead. All that's needed is an easy way to alter those connections."

How do you like your quasi-futuristic clothing, Mr. Mitnick? One of the many following the bizarre turns of the Kevin Mitnick saga, RadarRider writes: "According to the following article on MSNBC:' Reversing a previous decision, Kevin Mitnick?s probation officer has given the notorious computer intruder permission to lecture on hacking and cracking, work as a security consultant and write a column for a soon-to-be-launched e-commerce site.'"

Disallowing use of computers unless specially granted seems a fairly over-the-top punishment -- everything has embedded processors. I wonder if Kevin has to ask permission to use an infrared-type automatic toilet, or a programmable thermostat. Where's King Solomon when you need him?

Unca Steve, Unca Steve! Tell us a bedtime story, OK? Speaking of *ashback, gwernol writes: "There's a fascinating letter from Woz - one of the co-founders of Apple on his web page at woz.org. Its a candid glimpse into the early days of the computer world, including tales of hacking the world's first video games -Pong and Breakout - at Atari. See inside the mind of one of the truly great ones. Some interesting perspective on Steve Jobs, too."

(Hint: some of the same words you can't say on television are off-limits to mass-market video games, too!)

Now I can print up dozens of tasty eclaires under Linux! If you followed the recent story about modernizing UNIX printing standards, you may have caught the news that CUPS 1.1 has been released. Here's some more information from the horse's mouth. printman writes: "Nine months after the CUPS 1.0 release, we are proud the announce the birth of CUPS 1.1, with documentation nearly 500 pages long and distributions weighing in at around 4MB.

"What is CUPS", you ask? The Common UNIX Printing System ("CUPS") is an IPP-based printing system developed by Easy Software Products as a replacement for the aging and clunky Berkeley (LPD) and System V printing systems. CUPS provides all of the modern printing ammenities, including support for user-defined printers and options, non-PostScript printers, color management, and page accounting.

CUPS 1.1 continues our commitment to an open-sourced, IPP-based printing system for all UNIX's. The new release contains many of the functional enhancements that have been requested by our users, including:

1. New USB backend and backend device discovery.
2. Banner page support
3. Digest authentication
4. Directory service enhancements, including polling, relaying, and access control
5. Directory structure changes to conform to the FHS 2.0 standard used by most Linux distributions.
6. Documentation improvements and additions
7. Drivers for EPSON printers
8. Filters - new PostScript RIP based on GNU Ghostscript 5.50 core, new PDF filter based on Xpdf, new text filter supporting Unicode and bidirectional text
9. IPP/1.1 support
10. Job persistence & history
11. Licensing change - the CUPS API is now provided under the GNU LGPL
12. LPD client support
13. User-defined printers and options
14. Web administration interface

In addition we have contributed more new code to the SAMBA team to support CUPS printing "natively" via IPP, providing a faster, more reliable Windows printing experience.

Others have also been busy at work adding to CUPS. Besides our ESP Print Pro software, two new graphical interfaces have appeared for CUPS - KUPS is a KDE-based interface for CUPS, and XPP is a FLTK-based interface for CUPS.

On the driver front, Grant Taylor has come up with CUPS-o-matic, a PPD file generator and filter script for existing Ghostscript printer drivers, and the GIMP print plug-in developers are working towards "universal" drivers for GIMP, Ghostscript, and CUPS.

Finally, many Linux distributions are including (or planning to include) CUPS or ESP Print Pro. This should provide the final push to get printer manufacturers to support their printers under Linux and *BSD.

For more information on CUPS, go to: www.cups.org

And for bonus points ... Katsu Jin Ken writes: "Indrema has posted a new picture of their upcoming console on their front page." It's looking a lot svelter and sleeker than the old look, and like the finest computers everywhere, features a blue LED. (On the other hand, beware the rude no-exit site design.) Please, Indrema, make it so!

Updates on Tom's detective work, Kevin's touchy look-but-don't touch semi-citizen status, and last but not least a word from the elusive printman, here folded, spindled and mutilated for your edification.

Danke sehr, Herr Doktor Pabst! The sighs -- nay, screams! -- of disappointment rose like the wail of a cat in heat following the announcement that AMD's new chips would be clock-locked, nullifying the advantages of Abit's ultra-overclockable motherboard. Jonathan Dabian writes: "This is probably a little late for me to get the name postage on the front page, but Tom's Hardware posted a new story that is an update to the Monday Blurb where they revealed that the new AMD processors would be multiplier locked. In this new story, Tom Pabst reveals the information he has since pieced together about the connections on the top of the processor, and ideas on how to alter those laser etched connections. Overclocking on the Duron and Thunderbird isn't dead. All that's needed is an easy way to alter those connections."

How do you like your quasi-futuristic clothing, Mr. Mitnick? One of the many following the bizarre turns of the Kevin Mitnick saga, RadarRider writes: "According to the following article on MSNBC:' Reversing a previous decision, Kevin Mitnick?s probation officer has given the notorious computer intruder permission to lecture on hacking and cracking, work as a security consultant and write a column for a soon-to-be-launched e-commerce site.'"

Disallowing use of computers unless specially granted seems a fairly over-the-top punishment -- everything has embedded processors. I wonder if Kevin has to ask permission to use an infrared-type automatic toilet, or a programmable thermostat. Where's King Solomon when you need him?

Unca Steve, Unca Steve! Tell us a bedtime story, OK? Speaking of *ashback, gwernol writes: "There's a fascinating letter from Woz - one of the co-founders of Apple on his web page at woz.org. Its a candid glimpse into the early days of the computer world, including tales of hacking the world's first video games -Pong and Breakout - at Atari. See inside the mind of one of the truly great ones. Some interesting perspective on Steve Jobs, too."

(Hint: some of the same words you can't say on television are off-limits to mass-market video games, too!)

Now I can print up dozens of tasty eclaires under Linux! If you followed the recent story about modernizing UNIX printing standards, you may have caught the news that CUPS 1.1 has been released. Here's some more information from the horse's mouth. printman writes: "Nine months after the CUPS 1.0 release, we are proud the announce the birth of CUPS 1.1, with documentation nearly 500 pages long and distributions weighing in at around 4MB.

"What is CUPS", you ask? The Common UNIX Printing System ("CUPS") is an IPP-based printing system developed by Easy Software Products as a replacement for the aging and clunky Berkeley (LPD) and System V printing systems. CUPS provides all of the modern printing ammenities, including support for user-defined printers and options, non-PostScript printers, color management, and page accounting.

CUPS 1.1 continues our commitment to an open-sourced, IPP-based printing system for all UNIX's. The new release contains many of the functional enhancements that have been requested by our users, including:

1. New USB backend and backend device discovery.
2. Banner page support
3. Digest authentication
4. Directory service enhancements, including polling, relaying, and access control
5. Directory structure changes to conform to the FHS 2.0 standard used by most Linux distributions.
6. Documentation improvements and additions
7. Drivers for EPSON printers
8. Filters - new PostScript RIP based on GNU Ghostscript 5.50 core, new PDF filter based on Xpdf, new text filter supporting Unicode and bidirectional text
9. IPP/1.1 support
10. Job persistence & history
11. Licensing change - the CUPS API is now provided under the GNU LGPL
12. LPD client support
13. User-defined printers and options
14. Web administration interface

In addition we have contributed more new code to the SAMBA team to support CUPS printing "natively" via IPP, providing a faster, more reliable Windows printing experience.

Others have also been busy at work adding to CUPS. Besides our ESP Print Pro software, two new graphical interfaces have appeared for CUPS - KUPS is a KDE-based interface for CUPS, and XPP is a FLTK-based interface for CUPS.

On the driver front, Grant Taylor has come up with CUPS-o-matic, a PPD file generator and filter script for existing Ghostscript printer drivers, and the GIMP print plug-in developers are working towards "universal" drivers for GIMP, Ghostscript, and CUPS.

Finally, many Linux distributions are including (or planning to include) CUPS or ESP Print Pro. This should provide the final push to get printer manufacturers to support their printers under Linux and *BSD.

For more information on CUPS, go to: www.cups.org

And for bonus points ... Katsu Jin Ken writes: "Indrema has posted a new picture of their upcoming console on their front page." It's looking a lot svelter and sleeker than the old look, and like the finest computers everywhere, features a blue LED. (On the other hand, beware the rude no-exit site design.) Please, Indrema, make it so!

_endgame writes "Fling is a new suite of internet protocols that perform the function of DNS, TCP, and UDP in a manner that's both untraceable and untappable. Fling protects clients from servers, servers from clients, and both from an eavesdropper in-between. The result is that anyone can serve or retrieve any data, without fear of censure."

18buddhas brought us stories and pictures of id Software's New Office. TheLocustNMI busted some MC Paul Barman and Commodore 64 on us. Geek rap, eh? Apparently C-64 is the sixth-most downloaded Jewish hip-hop group on the planet. An anonymous coward told us about grown men with joysticks on their heads. a2fan shared the super-secret Microsoft Breakup Plan. Ant told us to check out some commercials, and then akaChe got our hopes up with the iTari. Combat, anyone? Fish shared the proposal to encode Basic Egyptian Hieroglyphs in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2. Speaking of history, another anonymous coward sent in the link to a really great PBS parody, The 1999 House. tobyjaffey (aka trj) wrote in about the Geekshirts project at SourceForge. Josh Woodward told us about the scary fact that Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on His Own.

Alphix writes: "The first update to XFree86 4.0 has been released, a ton of bug fixes etc and a merge of new DRI code along with SPARC fixes should be enough to warrant an upgrade =). patches are here, source is here. Sourceforge and other mirrors should have it soon."

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17
26 June 2000
by Greg Roelofs

PNG support in Mozilla has improved greatly over the last few releases ("milestones"), and with each milestone comes a corresponding Slashdot posting and a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, not all of the discussion is entirely accurate, so here's a preemptive posting that attempts to update folks on the status of PNG support in Mozilla and other apps and to clear up some of the more common misconceptions. (This seems to be an annual event...)

Home Page

First of all, the PNG home page got booted off of cdrom.com in early March, and in early May it settled into what should be its absolutely final home:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/

This is currently hosted on freesoftware.com, Walnut Creek CD-ROM's new site for free software (quel surprise!), but if something should ever happen to Walnut Creek, libpng.org will be redirected appropriately. (On a related note, the new zlib URL is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/, which is also currently hosted on freesoftware.com.)

PNG Features for the Web

Insofar as this is ostensibly a Mozilla posting, let's have a brief rundown of the PNG features that are most useful to Web designers:

• alpha transparency - This is geek jargon for partial or variable transparency, and it lets you do nice effects that are independent of the background color(s), such as antialiased (non-jaggy) text, drop shadows, gradient fades, and translucency. PNG not only supports a full 8-bit alpha channel in grayscale and RGB images but also what amounts to an "RGBA palette" in colormapped images. The latter lets you do nice transparency without a huge hit in file size. For example, all but one of the transparent images on my PNG alpha-transparency test page are 8-bit or less; the lone exception (one of the toucans) is a 32-bit RGBA image, virtually indistinguishable from its 8-bit cousins. Note that PNG supports only unassociated (non-premultiplied) alpha, since the alternative is not lossless.

• gamma correction - Gamma allows you to display the same image on different platforms without looking too dark on some and too light on others. For best results it does require that both the designer's display system and the user's be calibrated, but even educated guessing is better than nothing in a viewing program (which is what Mozilla does). Warning! Watch out for Adobe Photoshop; version 5.0 had a serious factor-of-two bug in its PNG gamma support, and 4.0 also had some problems. (Things seem to be fixed in 5.5, however.)

• color correction - Where gamma has to do with image "brightness," color correction has to do with rendering shades of color precisely. PNG supports it, but not many applications do; it's pretty tricky to get right. Note that Photoshop 5.5 writes incorrect PNG "iCCP" chunks, and this will crash applications based on libpng 1.0.6. (Older versions of libpng ignore the chunk, and the soon-to-be-released libpng 1.0.7 will work around it.) Also note that feeding a valid iCCP chunk to PS 5.5 will hang it.

• compression - A lot of people have some seriously crazy ideas about PNG's compression. Here's the straight dope:
  • PNGs tend to be 15% to 20% smaller than equivalent GIFs on average. There are some GIFs, particularly 32- or 64-color ones, that are smaller than the best PNGs, but usually by only a couple of percent. There are also many that are more than twice as large as the corresponding PNGs, but these tend to be tiny images. (One exception is this image, which is dimensionally rather large yet only 1/3 the file size of the GIF version.)

  • PNGs tend to be much larger than standard JPEGs. JPEGs are lossy, while PNGs are lossless; for natural (photographic) material, no lossless format can compete with JPEG--PNGs will typically be 5 or 10 times as large. On the other hand, for simple graphics or text-filled images with relatively few colors and sharp edges, JPEG is much worse, both in quality and in file size. (This means you, Slackware guys!) Use the proper tool for the job--no single image format is best in all cases.

  • PNG is roughly comparable to JPEG-LS, the new lossless JPEG standard. On the Waterloo BragZone test suite, JPEG-LS beat PNG by 5% to 10% on natural images, but PNG beat JPEG-LS by 35% to 270% on "artistic" images. YMMV.

  • PNG's compression method can be implemented in such a way that it is completely free of all known patents, but it can also be implemented in such a way that it infringes on patents held by PKWARE, Stac and others. You can guess which way zlib was written. Folks who are neither rich nor expert in patent law should probably stick to zlib- and libpng-based implementations.

  • Unlike (LZW-based) GIF, in which the compression is basically deterministic--that is, you end up with pretty much the same data regardless of who does the compression--PNG's scheme leaves a lot of room for optimization. Some programs do a good job, some don't. The GIMP happens to be one of the good ones, as is pngcrush. Photoshop traditionally has been one of the not-so-good ones, although version 5.5 includes a "Save for Web" option that presumably invokes ImageReady. ImageReady 1.0 was mediocre and reportedly isn't much better in its current release (i.e., pngcrush beats it by 15% to 25%), but it is better than Photoshop's normal "Save as" option.

  • The compression engine can't help clueless users who perform apples-and-oranges comparisons. If you start with a truecolor image and save it as both GIF and PNG, chances are the PNG will be 24-bit while the GIF will be 8-bit. Guess what? It's pretty tough to overcome that initial 3:1 deficit, no matter how good your compression engine is. (If you're not sure what kind of PNGs you have, check!) Also don't add a lot of text annotations to the PNG--unless you do the same to the GIF--and especially don't add a useless alpha channel to opaque images! (That last is directed at the Burn All GIFs folks...) Recompressing an image after it's been through JPEG compression is also a bad idea; JPEG leaves a lot of nasty little artifacts (often invisible to the naked eye) that screw up non-JPEG compressors.

• interlacing - PNG's interlacing scheme is two-dimensional, much like progressive JPEG, but unlike GIF--which uses a one-dimensional, line-based scheme. The upshot is that an interlaced PNG with text in it will be readable roughly twice as soon as the corresponding interlaced GIF.

• animation - Nope. But see MNG, below.

• MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within Web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway...

• browser compatibility - We'll get to that in a moment.

PNG Extensions and the Future

PNG is extensible. PNG is lossless. PNG is a single-image, raster (bitmap) format. One of its overriding design goals was backward compatibility. As a result, don't expect to see any sort of lossy compression methods (JPEG is doing a fine job of that, with the exception of transparency--but see JNG, below). Also don't expect to see any vector-based extensions--SVG with gzip content-encoding has that covered. Indeed, don't expect to see any new, incompatible compression methods for quite a while. Until there are lossless methods that can, on average, halve the size of PNG images, the cost in software compatibility is far too great. (Keep in mind that there still browsers that don't support progressive JPEG, and that was a relatively trivial change! And let's not even talk about JPEG 2000...)

PNG is also not going to become an animated format. Leaving multiple-image support out of PNG was a conscious design decision by the PNG development group, and it's still the right decision. Overloading a still image format with animation or video features merely confuses users and Web browsers, which have no way to distinguish still images from animations without prying into the data streams (which usually means downloading them first). Developers who prefer to program monolithically can always program for MNG instead; it's architecturally identical to PNG, and PNG is a pure subset of MNG.

Related Formats

MNG: As the previous paragraph suggests, the animated version of PNG is called MNG, for Multiple-image Network Graphics. It supports looping (including nested loops), clipping, deltas, and other features, plus everything PNG supports--including alpha transparency, of course. The home page is here:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Since this spring, a free reference library, libmng, has been under development by Gerard Juyn; its home page is at:

• http://www.libmng.com/

Note that the MIME type is video/x-mng; it has not yet been registered with the IETF. Undoubtedly there will be many misconfigured Web servers in coming years...

JNG: JNG is short for JPEG Network Graphics and is a proper subset of MNG, just as PNG is, but it's worth a separate mention. The idea is to combine the best of both worlds: JPEG's excellent compression and PNG's incredibly spiffy alpha transparency and color correction. JNG is almost identical to PNG, but in addition to standard IDAT chunks (which in JNG contain the alpha channel), there are also JDAT chunks that contain a standard JPEG/JFIF stream (suitable for handing off to libjpeg). From a developer's standpoint, if you've got support for both PNG alpha and ordinary JPEG/JFIF, adding JNG is a breeze. Of course, JNG is also supported by recent libmng betas. Its MIME type is image/x-jng.

Browser Status

Most browsers have supported PNG since at least late 1997 (when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer finally did), but almost without exception, their support for alpha transparency has been abominable. Amazingly enough, it seems that 2000 may be the year that browsers finally support it, more or less ubiquitously. In April alone there were three newcomers, with another in May; so far this year, the total has more than doubled. Here's the current list of browsers that at least attempt to do alpha transparency correctly, with their supported platforms indicated in italics. If screen shots of the PNG alpha-transparency test page are available, they're linked to the browser name:

• Arena (Unix/X) - this was the first browser with good alpha support (at least for Unix, and I think anywhere). It died in 1998, however, and the final release tends to core-dump on PNG images. It always used its own "sandy" background pattern rather than that specified in the HTML. (Very old screen shot.)
• Browse (RISC OS) - Acorn's browser was the first to fully support PNG transparency and gamma correction, including background images, but it died along with Acorn itself in June 1999. The browser may or may not eventually show up in Pace Micro's digital set-top boxes. (Very old screen shot.)
• iCab (Macintosh) - this was the first Macintosh browser to support alpha transparency (since the 1.8 beta), but it doesn't do gamma correction yet.
• ICE Browser (Java) - ICEsoft's commercial browser for Java reportedly has full alpha support, but I haven't verified that.
• Internet Explorer (Macintosh) - version 5.0 added superb PNG support, including alpha, gamma and color correction. This is probably the best PNG-supporting browser available today. Unfortunately, the Windows and Unix versions seem to be a completely separate code base, so there's no telling when (or if) they'll have equally good support. (See the browsers page for details.)
• Konqueror (Unix/KDE) - I just heard that KDE's file-manager-cum-browser has full alpha support, but I haven't had a chance to check it myself. I'll try to get some screen shots added soon, however.
• Mozilla (Macintosh, Unix/X, Windows) - alpha was enabled in April, though there are a few gotchas: the Windows code is currently broken (bug 36694 and 19283, to be fixed by beta3), and the X code is a slightly nasty hack--it looks beautiful on 24-bit displays, but it's slow when scrolling, and the quality for users of 8- and 16-bit displays will be relatively poor. Nevertheless, it's a vast improvement over the previous code, and it's basically the only game in town for Unix users. Note that the infamous PNG interlacing bug (3195) was fixed in May, and Tim Rowley checked in initial MNG and JNG support on 12June.
• NetPositive (BeOS) - version 2.2, released in April, added support for alpha transparency; but like iCab, it doesn't yet do gamma correction. (It also doesn't display interlaced PNGs progressively.)
• Netscape - see Mozilla (which is basically what Navigator 6.0 will be).
• Sega Dreamcast Web Browser (Dreamcast) - version 2.0 of Planetweb's browser for the Sega Dreamcast game console, released in May, fully supports alpha transparency, but I don't have any screen shots yet.
• Webster XL (RISC OS) - R-Comp's RISC OS browser is claimed to have full alpha support, but I don't have verification, and it doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
• WebTV (WebTV) - surprisingly enough, WebTV has decent support for 32-bit RGBA PNGs, but its support for palette transparency is broken. In principle it should be easy to fix, but then again, it's a strange platform. (Note that the fonts look considerably better on a television screen.)

Honorable Mention goes to Siegel & Gale's PNG Live plug-in for Netscape, which was the only plug-in ever to manage alpha transparency (in Windows only). It died before ever getting out of beta, though, and plug-ins in general are useless for PNG. So is the HTML 4.0 OBJECT tag, but don't get me started...

Other Apps, Libs, etc.

I currently list some 500 distinct PNG-supporting packages (more if you break things like Microsoft Office into their constituent parts) in 8 categories (soon to be 9 or 10), not to mention a dozen pieces of hardware. PNG has now reached the point where even freeware authors generally don't bother to tell me when they've added support; it's largely taken for granted. (I do occasional Freshmeat sweeps, but I usually don't have time, and many entries don't mention PNG even if it's supported.) Quite a number of the apps include full source code, by the way--which is the way it should be, of course. ;-)

Within the libraries-and-toolkits category, there are a surprising number of independent PNG implementations (either encoders or decoders or both), including ones in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, and even Ada95. PNG is now a standard part of Java 2 SE 1.3 and Tcl/Tk, and it is the main image format in the popular gd library and all of its Perl-based derivatives. In turn, this has led to its online use in areas as diverse as server statistics, chemical diagrams, computer-generated mazes, and weather maps.

Even better, PNG is the native, internal image format for a number of major applications (including Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Office), and it's becoming a popular icon format for advanced GUIs. It also ships as a standard part of BeOS, via the Translation Kit, and it's supported natively in the Windows Me shell (and possibly in Windows 2000 Professional).

Conclusion?

Ordinarily I'd mumble something about how PNG has finally achieved massive studliness and will soon be taking over the world, but what the hell--it has, it is, and if it's not obvious from what I've already written, another couple of lines won't make any difference. Go forth, visit the web site, write code, make lots of PNGs, etc., etc.

And Microsoft, pleeeeease get on the ball with Internet Explorer for Windows and Unix...

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17
26 June 2000
by Greg Roelofs

PNG support in Mozilla has improved greatly over the last few releases ("milestones"), and with each milestone comes a corresponding Slashdot posting and a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, not all of the discussion is entirely accurate, so here's a preemptive posting that attempts to update folks on the status of PNG support in Mozilla and other apps and to clear up some of the more common misconceptions. (This seems to be an annual event...)

Home Page

First of all, the PNG home page got booted off of cdrom.com in early March, and in early May it settled into what should be its absolutely final home:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/

This is currently hosted on freesoftware.com, Walnut Creek CD-ROM's new site for free software (quel surprise!), but if something should ever happen to Walnut Creek, libpng.org will be redirected appropriately. (On a related note, the new zlib URL is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/, which is also currently hosted on freesoftware.com.)

PNG Features for the Web

Insofar as this is ostensibly a Mozilla posting, let's have a brief rundown of the PNG features that are most useful to Web designers:

• alpha transparency - This is geek jargon for partial or variable transparency, and it lets you do nice effects that are independent of the background color(s), such as antialiased (non-jaggy) text, drop shadows, gradient fades, and translucency. PNG not only supports a full 8-bit alpha channel in grayscale and RGB images but also what amounts to an "RGBA palette" in colormapped images. The latter lets you do nice transparency without a huge hit in file size. For example, all but one of the transparent images on my PNG alpha-transparency test page are 8-bit or less; the lone exception (one of the toucans) is a 32-bit RGBA image, virtually indistinguishable from its 8-bit cousins. Note that PNG supports only unassociated (non-premultiplied) alpha, since the alternative is not lossless.

• gamma correction - Gamma allows you to display the same image on different platforms without looking too dark on some and too light on others. For best results it does require that both the designer's display system and the user's be calibrated, but even educated guessing is better than nothing in a viewing program (which is what Mozilla does). Warning! Watch out for Adobe Photoshop; version 5.0 had a serious factor-of-two bug in its PNG gamma support, and 4.0 also had some problems. (Things seem to be fixed in 5.5, however.)

• color correction - Where gamma has to do with image "brightness," color correction has to do with rendering shades of color precisely. PNG supports it, but not many applications do; it's pretty tricky to get right. Note that Photoshop 5.5 writes incorrect PNG "iCCP" chunks, and this will crash applications based on libpng 1.0.6. (Older versions of libpng ignore the chunk, and the soon-to-be-released libpng 1.0.7 will work around it.) Also note that feeding a valid iCCP chunk to PS 5.5 will hang it.

• compression - A lot of people have some seriously crazy ideas about PNG's compression. Here's the straight dope:
  • PNGs tend to be 15% to 20% smaller than equivalent GIFs on average. There are some GIFs, particularly 32- or 64-color ones, that are smaller than the best PNGs, but usually by only a couple of percent. There are also many that are more than twice as large as the corresponding PNGs, but these tend to be tiny images. (One exception is this image, which is dimensionally rather large yet only 1/3 the file size of the GIF version.)

  • PNGs tend to be much larger than standard JPEGs. JPEGs are lossy, while PNGs are lossless; for natural (photographic) material, no lossless format can compete with JPEG--PNGs will typically be 5 or 10 times as large. On the other hand, for simple graphics or text-filled images with relatively few colors and sharp edges, JPEG is much worse, both in quality and in file size. (This means you, Slackware guys!) Use the proper tool for the job--no single image format is best in all cases.

  • PNG is roughly comparable to JPEG-LS, the new lossless JPEG standard. On the Waterloo BragZone test suite, JPEG-LS beat PNG by 5% to 10% on natural images, but PNG beat JPEG-LS by 35% to 270% on "artistic" images. YMMV.

  • PNG's compression method can be implemented in such a way that it is completely free of all known patents, but it can also be implemented in such a way that it infringes on patents held by PKWARE, Stac and others. You can guess which way zlib was written. Folks who are neither rich nor expert in patent law should probably stick to zlib- and libpng-based implementations.

  • Unlike (LZW-based) GIF, in which the compression is basically deterministic--that is, you end up with pretty much the same data regardless of who does the compression--PNG's scheme leaves a lot of room for optimization. Some programs do a good job, some don't. The GIMP happens to be one of the good ones, as is pngcrush. Photoshop traditionally has been one of the not-so-good ones, although version 5.5 includes a "Save for Web" option that presumably invokes ImageReady. ImageReady 1.0 was mediocre and reportedly isn't much better in its current release (i.e., pngcrush beats it by 15% to 25%), but it is better than Photoshop's normal "Save as" option.

  • The compression engine can't help clueless users who perform apples-and-oranges comparisons. If you start with a truecolor image and save it as both GIF and PNG, chances are the PNG will be 24-bit while the GIF will be 8-bit. Guess what? It's pretty tough to overcome that initial 3:1 deficit, no matter how good your compression engine is. (If you're not sure what kind of PNGs you have, check!) Also don't add a lot of text annotations to the PNG--unless you do the same to the GIF--and especially don't add a useless alpha channel to opaque images! (That last is directed at the Burn All GIFs folks...) Recompressing an image after it's been through JPEG compression is also a bad idea; JPEG leaves a lot of nasty little artifacts (often invisible to the naked eye) that screw up non-JPEG compressors.

• interlacing - PNG's interlacing scheme is two-dimensional, much like progressive JPEG, but unlike GIF--which uses a one-dimensional, line-based scheme. The upshot is that an interlaced PNG with text in it will be readable roughly twice as soon as the corresponding interlaced GIF.

• animation - Nope. But see MNG, below.

• MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within Web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway...

• browser compatibility - We'll get to that in a moment.

PNG Extensions and the Future

PNG is extensible. PNG is lossless. PNG is a single-image, raster (bitmap) format. One of its overriding design goals was backward compatibility. As a result, don't expect to see any sort of lossy compression methods (JPEG is doing a fine job of that, with the exception of transparency--but see JNG, below). Also don't expect to see any vector-based extensions--SVG with gzip content-encoding has that covered. Indeed, don't expect to see any new, incompatible compression methods for quite a while. Until there are lossless methods that can, on average, halve the size of PNG images, the cost in software compatibility is far too great. (Keep in mind that there still browsers that don't support progressive JPEG, and that was a relatively trivial change! And let's not even talk about JPEG 2000...)

PNG is also not going to become an animated format. Leaving multiple-image support out of PNG was a conscious design decision by the PNG development group, and it's still the right decision. Overloading a still image format with animation or video features merely confuses users and Web browsers, which have no way to distinguish still images from animations without prying into the data streams (which usually means downloading them first). Developers who prefer to program monolithically can always program for MNG instead; it's architecturally identical to PNG, and PNG is a pure subset of MNG.

Related Formats

MNG: As the previous paragraph suggests, the animated version of PNG is called MNG, for Multiple-image Network Graphics. It supports looping (including nested loops), clipping, deltas, and other features, plus everything PNG supports--including alpha transparency, of course. The home page is here:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Since this spring, a free reference library, libmng, has been under development by Gerard Juyn; its home page is at:

• http://www.libmng.com/

Note that the MIME type is video/x-mng; it has not yet been registered with the IETF. Undoubtedly there will be many misconfigured Web servers in coming years...

JNG: JNG is short for JPEG Network Graphics and is a proper subset of MNG, just as PNG is, but it's worth a separate mention. The idea is to combine the best of both worlds: JPEG's excellent compression and PNG's incredibly spiffy alpha transparency and color correction. JNG is almost identical to PNG, but in addition to standard IDAT chunks (which in JNG contain the alpha channel), there are also JDAT chunks that contain a standard JPEG/JFIF stream (suitable for handing off to libjpeg). From a developer's standpoint, if you've got support for both PNG alpha and ordinary JPEG/JFIF, adding JNG is a breeze. Of course, JNG is also supported by recent libmng betas. Its MIME type is image/x-jng.

Browser Status

Most browsers have supported PNG since at least late 1997 (when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer finally did), but almost without exception, their support for alpha transparency has been abominable. Amazingly enough, it seems that 2000 may be the year that browsers finally support it, more or less ubiquitously. In April alone there were three newcomers, with another in May; so far this year, the total has more than doubled. Here's the current list of browsers that at least attempt to do alpha transparency correctly, with their supported platforms indicated in italics. If screen shots of the PNG alpha-transparency test page are available, they're linked to the browser name:

• Arena (Unix/X) - this was the first browser with good alpha support (at least for Unix, and I think anywhere). It died in 1998, however, and the final release tends to core-dump on PNG images. It always used its own "sandy" background pattern rather than that specified in the HTML. (Very old screen shot.)
• Browse (RISC OS) - Acorn's browser was the first to fully support PNG transparency and gamma correction, including background images, but it died along with Acorn itself in June 1999. The browser may or may not eventually show up in Pace Micro's digital set-top boxes. (Very old screen shot.)
• iCab (Macintosh) - this was the first Macintosh browser to support alpha transparency (since the 1.8 beta), but it doesn't do gamma correction yet.
• ICE Browser (Java) - ICEsoft's commercial browser for Java reportedly has full alpha support, but I haven't verified that.
• Internet Explorer (Macintosh) - version 5.0 added superb PNG support, including alpha, gamma and color correction. This is probably the best PNG-supporting browser available today. Unfortunately, the Windows and Unix versions seem to be a completely separate code base, so there's no telling when (or if) they'll have equally good support. (See the browsers page for details.)
• Konqueror (Unix/KDE) - I just heard that KDE's file-manager-cum-browser has full alpha support, but I haven't had a chance to check it myself. I'll try to get some screen shots added soon, however.
• Mozilla (Macintosh, Unix/X, Windows) - alpha was enabled in April, though there are a few gotchas: the Windows code is currently broken (bug 36694 and 19283, to be fixed by beta3), and the X code is a slightly nasty hack--it looks beautiful on 24-bit displays, but it's slow when scrolling, and the quality for users of 8- and 16-bit displays will be relatively poor. Nevertheless, it's a vast improvement over the previous code, and it's basically the only game in town for Unix users. Note that the infamous PNG interlacing bug (3195) was fixed in May, and Tim Rowley checked in initial MNG and JNG support on 12June.
• NetPositive (BeOS) - version 2.2, released in April, added support for alpha transparency; but like iCab, it doesn't yet do gamma correction. (It also doesn't display interlaced PNGs progressively.)
• Netscape - see Mozilla (which is basically what Navigator 6.0 will be).
• Sega Dreamcast Web Browser (Dreamcast) - version 2.0 of Planetweb's browser for the Sega Dreamcast game console, released in May, fully supports alpha transparency, but I don't have any screen shots yet.
• Webster XL (RISC OS) - R-Comp's RISC OS browser is claimed to have full alpha support, but I don't have verification, and it doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
• WebTV (WebTV) - surprisingly enough, WebTV has decent support for 32-bit RGBA PNGs, but its support for palette transparency is broken. In principle it should be easy to fix, but then again, it's a strange platform. (Note that the fonts look considerably better on a television screen.)

Honorable Mention goes to Siegel & Gale's PNG Live plug-in for Netscape, which was the only plug-in ever to manage alpha transparency (in Windows only). It died before ever getting out of beta, though, and plug-ins in general are useless for PNG. So is the HTML 4.0 OBJECT tag, but don't get me started...

Other Apps, Libs, etc.

I currently list some 500 distinct PNG-supporting packages (more if you break things like Microsoft Office into their constituent parts) in 8 categories (soon to be 9 or 10), not to mention a dozen pieces of hardware. PNG has now reached the point where even freeware authors generally don't bother to tell me when they've added support; it's largely taken for granted. (I do occasional Freshmeat sweeps, but I usually don't have time, and many entries don't mention PNG even if it's supported.) Quite a number of the apps include full source code, by the way--which is the way it should be, of course. ;-)

Within the libraries-and-toolkits category, there are a surprising number of independent PNG implementations (either encoders or decoders or both), including ones in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, and even Ada95. PNG is now a standard part of Java 2 SE 1.3 and Tcl/Tk, and it is the main image format in the popular gd library and all of its Perl-based derivatives. In turn, this has led to its online use in areas as diverse as server statistics, chemical diagrams, computer-generated mazes, and weather maps.

Even better, PNG is the native, internal image format for a number of major applications (including Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Office), and it's becoming a popular icon format for advanced GUIs. It also ships as a standard part of BeOS, via the Translation Kit, and it's supported natively in the Windows Me shell (and possibly in Windows 2000 Professional).

Conclusion?

Ordinarily I'd mumble something about how PNG has finally achieved massive studliness and will soon be taking over the world, but what the hell--it has, it is, and if it's not obvious from what I've already written, another couple of lines won't make any difference. Go forth, visit the web site, write code, make lots of PNGs, etc., etc.

And Microsoft, pleeeeease get on the ball with Internet Explorer for Windows and Unix...

DAldredge sent us linkage to the unmaintained free software project list (if you can't figure this one out based on the name, seek help quickly). A very good idea that I'm pleased to see implemented. There's a lot of orphaned software out there... some of it because it's pretty useless, but others just because people move on. Hopefully a site like this can help us breath life back into the good ones.

Ur@eus writes: "The Gnucash team has released the 1.4.0 version of their wonderful Quicken-like personal finance manager. This is the first stable release since the move from Motif to GNOME. You find Gnucash 1.4.0 at Gnucash.org" This plugs a major gaping hole in Linux software: I've been using gnucash for a year now, and it's made great leaps in terms of features and stability. It isn't quicken, but its close enough for most of us. If you're having problems with the main link, try this mirror.

Erik Moeller writes "David Madore, mathematician at ENS, describes a method that might be the ultimate weapon in the battle against Internet censorship. In his paper A method of free speech on the Internet: random pads he introduces a system of so-called pads, chunks of random data that are used to encrypt controversial information.(Read More)

Every byte in the source file is XOR'd with exactly one byte in the random file. The result file, by itself, is totally indistinguishable from white noise, provided that the pad used is truly random. Madore now suggests that users store pads on different servers and use several of them in combination to encrypt data.

A FTP or WWW site that stores one of the pads could argue that they are only storing random noise, and another might do the same. It would be mathematically impossible to prove them guilty of storing illegal information (unless there is a way to prove that one pad was created after the other). Only by the combination of the two (or more) files I am able to retrieve the original controversial information. The critical parts are the links to the pads I need to obtain the information, but those might be traded on a distributed system like Gnutella or FreeNet. Plus links take very little space and can be relocated easily to freespace ISPs.

The concept is a little more complicated than my summary here, so please read the paper (and mirror it, it's GPL'd!). There are already scripts and programs to create pads and restore the original files (including a GUI program for Win32). I might add that the idea of pad encryption is fairly old, already used in WWII -- its advantage is that it is mathematically safe if the pads are truly random and only used once, thus its name "One Time Pad"."

Rob wrote in to say: "There is an interesting news item on Doomworld about all the different licenses under which the sourceports of Doom are distributed -- at once! According to this article, some source ports use up to three different licenses, among them the GPL. So doesn't this make it GPL'd? But what about the other licenses? Do the authors have to stick to a single license and dispose of code which is covered by another license?"

starseeker writes: "The Berlin people have released version 0.2.0. Check out the new screenshots.Talk about your awesome graphics!" For a project that's had a lot of smoke over the years, it's pretty nice to see something tangible.

Bryan Brunton asks: "I am writing an open source game called Merchant Empires For now, it is almost completely based on a closed source game called Space Merchant. IMO, Space Merchant is slow, ugly, and bug-filled. I am getting Space Merchant users who log into my game, spew some profanity and claim that I will be sued. I have no access to Space Merchant source code. Can I be sued? If so, what do I need to do to make my game qualify as a clean room implementation?"

djmagic writes "SourceForge has opened it's IA-64 portal for porting projects to Linux running on (surprise) IA-64. " It's still a tad sparse, but you should be able to compile on the Compilefarm if you're interested in porting something. There's also a news.com story on the thing.

djmagic writes "SourceForge has opened it's IA-64 portal for porting projects to Linux running on (surprise) IA-64. " It's still a tad sparse, but you should be able to compile on the Compilefarm if you're interested in porting something. There's also a news.com story on the thing.

pudge writes "Yo. We released slash-1.0.3. Bug reports and CVS and file downloads are on SourceForge. Slashcode is now hosted at Exodus with Slashdot and Freshmeat. " The scary part is that now Slashdot and Slashcode are totally synched up... which means programmers can e-mail diffs instead of bug reports and feature suggestions (hint hint hint!)

hypos writes: "According to this ZDNet article, IBM is going to add an insulating layer of oxide between the transistor and its silicon bed, which IBM claims can increase a processor's performance by 20 to 30%. Best of all, it's supposed to come to new Macs soon. "

At about 10pm Eastern Time tonight, the overworked and mentally deranged Slashdot crew will make the transition from our current overburdened setup to our brand spanking new hardware over at Exodus. It'll take a few minutes for us to dump the existing data over there, and a second story will announce when this actually occurs, but at that moment, any comments posted here will be lost. We've tested the new metal pretty extensively, but none of us are planning on sleeping much. Bug reports can go to CowboyNeal (who plans to not sleep until friday anyway ;) Don't say we didn't warn ya ;) Update: 05/09 09:48 by CN : You can also post bugs at our SourceForge bugs page so that you can see what's already been filed, and make the transition that much smoother.

I've attached a rather feisty rant from an anonymous coward criticizing the SourceForge project for releasing a tarball, but failing to be much of an open source project. 'Course since it took me a year between Slashcode releases, I'm a tad more forgiving on the subject, but the guy makes a lot of good points.

An anonymous reader writes: "I've observed the development of the SourceForge software and documentation during the past four months and I'm amazed to see that it's developped in a closed fashion, opposite to all of the open source ecology standards.

About the only thing related to open source is the publication of a tarball containing the php scripts used to run sourceforge. It has been published in a as-is fashion, no packaging effort was made. The only documentation included was apparently provided by volunteers and is outdated since it refers to the previous version. This documentation only covers a small part of the software.

There is no CVS tree for the project, not even read-only. Given the fact that three months elapsed between the last releases, there is no way contributors can do a proper job. At the same time VA Linux evangelists attend conferences repeating the golden rule of open source colaborative development: release often.

The only way for contributors to participate to the SourceForge development effort is to submit patches using the patch manager. The SourceForge guys will then decide if it should be integrated or not. Well, this could work if they were careful. But the situation is pathetic : patches sit in the queue during weeks and some of them even don't have a followup. It does not matter much anyway since there has been only nine patches since the beginning.

The SourceForge site documentation shows another remarkable mistake. It is maintained by volunteers. It's far more accurate and complete than the default site documentation but is not easily accessed. When clicking on the Site Documentation link it first shows the outdated documentation and a link to the volunteers work is only included at the bottom of the page. This is a minor issue. Much more annoying is what apparently occurred last week. All the volunteer work was trashed and replaced by a new system without notice. The volunteers protested but the SourceForge staff didn't care to reply ( the thread). The guy who did the mistake didn't even care to commit his changes to the CVS tree of the documentation project. The CVS tree does not match the content of the documentation anymore.

Behaving this way, the SourceForge staff does a big mistake. First it frustrates potential contributors, second it does not allow them to scale well. It's pretty obvious that they are completly overloaded with work and that they really need help.

What kind of conclusion can we draw ? The worst would be that the SourceForge staff is a bunch of talented programmers who do not believe in open source, even though they provide tools to help its development. The best would be that they need the open source community to kick their ass to go back in the path :-)

I sincerly hope that SlashDot will publish this bit. But VA Linux now owns Slashdot and may be immune to this kind of news ... "

CT:Technically VA Linux doesn't own Slashdot. Andover.Net does: the deal hasn't closed yet. And nobody is immune to 'nuthin, however I have slightly different opinions: releasing and maintaining a good open source package is hard and time consuming, as I learned firsthand with Slashcode. The vast majority of users don't contribute back (unless you count complaining). Don't get me wrong, I obviously love open-source development, but when the bitchers get to a critical mass, those who can actually add something positive get drowned out, get bored, and do other things.

It wasn't until Andover.Net came along and hired Pudge and Patg that it became feasible to bring Slashcode to a solid 1.0 release. Now, for the ultimate irony: Slashdot itself is a release behind the latest code ... at least for another 48 hours or so. For the year between the 0.3-0.4 tarballs, and the 0.9-1.0 Slashcode tarballs, I committed virtually every sin listed up there. My point is that its hard to maintain open source packages. Especially when the negative comments outweigh the patches fixing the problems, and on top of that, you have another job (like running a Web site for example ;) It's often a case of the best of intentions being bogged down in the most mundane of details.

Of course, since I obviously am simply a mouthpiece for various corporate entities my opinions are irrelevant and discardable, have a nice day ;)

I've attached a rather feisty rant from an anonymous coward criticizing the SourceForge project for releasing a tarball, but failing to be much of an open source project. 'Course since it took me a year between Slashcode releases, I'm a tad more forgiving on the subject, but the guy makes a lot of good points.

An anonymous reader writes: "I've observed the development of the SourceForge software and documentation during the past four months and I'm amazed to see that it's developped in a closed fashion, opposite to all of the open source ecology standards.

About the only thing related to open source is the publication of a tarball containing the php scripts used to run sourceforge. It has been published in a as-is fashion, no packaging effort was made. The only documentation included was apparently provided by volunteers and is outdated since it refers to the previous version. This documentation only covers a small part of the software.

There is no CVS tree for the project, not even read-only. Given the fact that three months elapsed between the last releases, there is no way contributors can do a proper job. At the same time VA Linux evangelists attend conferences repeating the golden rule of open source colaborative development: release often.

The only way for contributors to participate to the SourceForge development effort is to submit patches using the patch manager. The SourceForge guys will then decide if it should be integrated or not. Well, this could work if they were careful. But the situation is pathetic : patches sit in the queue during weeks and some of them even don't have a followup. It does not matter much anyway since there has been only nine patches since the beginning.

The SourceForge site documentation shows another remarkable mistake. It is maintained by volunteers. It's far more accurate and complete than the default site documentation but is not easily accessed. When clicking on the Site Documentation link it first shows the outdated documentation and a link to the volunteers work is only included at the bottom of the page. This is a minor issue. Much more annoying is what apparently occurred last week. All the volunteer work was trashed and replaced by a new system without notice. The volunteers protested but the SourceForge staff didn't care to reply ( the thread). The guy who did the mistake didn't even care to commit his changes to the CVS tree of the documentation project. The CVS tree does not match the content of the documentation anymore.

Behaving this way, the SourceForge staff does a big mistake. First it frustrates potential contributors, second it does not allow them to scale well. It's pretty obvious that they are completly overloaded with work and that they really need help.

What kind of conclusion can we draw ? The worst would be that the SourceForge staff is a bunch of talented programmers who do not believe in open source, even though they provide tools to help its development. The best would be that they need the open source community to kick their ass to go back in the path :-)

I sincerly hope that SlashDot will publish this bit. But VA Linux now owns Slashdot and may be immune to this kind of news ... "

CT:Technically VA Linux doesn't own Slashdot. Andover.Net does: the deal hasn't closed yet. And nobody is immune to 'nuthin, however I have slightly different opinions: releasing and maintaining a good open source package is hard and time consuming, as I learned firsthand with Slashcode. The vast majority of users don't contribute back (unless you count complaining). Don't get me wrong, I obviously love open-source development, but when the bitchers get to a critical mass, those who can actually add something positive get drowned out, get bored, and do other things.

It wasn't until Andover.Net came along and hired Pudge and Patg that it became feasible to bring Slashcode to a solid 1.0 release. Now, for the ultimate irony: Slashdot itself is a release behind the latest code ... at least for another 48 hours or so. For the year between the 0.3-0.4 tarballs, and the 0.9-1.0 Slashcode tarballs, I committed virtually every sin listed up there. My point is that its hard to maintain open source packages. Especially when the negative comments outweigh the patches fixing the problems, and on top of that, you have another job (like running a Web site for example ;) It's often a case of the best of intentions being bogged down in the most mundane of details.

Of course, since I obviously am simply a mouthpiece for various corporate entities my opinions are irrelevant and discardable, have a nice day ;)

I've attached a rather feisty rant from an anonymous coward criticizing the SourceForge project for releasing a tarball, but failing to be much of an open source project. 'Course since it took me a year between Slashcode releases, I'm a tad more forgiving on the subject, but the guy makes a lot of good points.

An anonymous reader writes: "I've observed the development of the SourceForge software and documentation during the past four months and I'm amazed to see that it's developped in a closed fashion, opposite to all of the open source ecology standards.

About the only thing related to open source is the publication of a tarball containing the php scripts used to run sourceforge. It has been published in a as-is fashion, no packaging effort was made. The only documentation included was apparently provided by volunteers and is outdated since it refers to the previous version. This documentation only covers a small part of the software.

There is no CVS tree for the project, not even read-only. Given the fact that three months elapsed between the last releases, there is no way contributors can do a proper job. At the same time VA Linux evangelists attend conferences repeating the golden rule of open source colaborative development: release often.

The only way for contributors to participate to the SourceForge development effort is to submit patches using the patch manager. The SourceForge guys will then decide if it should be integrated or not. Well, this could work if they were careful. But the situation is pathetic : patches sit in the queue during weeks and some of them even don't have a followup. It does not matter much anyway since there has been only nine patches since the beginning.

The SourceForge site documentation shows another remarkable mistake. It is maintained by volunteers. It's far more accurate and complete than the default site documentation but is not easily accessed. When clicking on the Site Documentation link it first shows the outdated documentation and a link to the volunteers work is only included at the bottom of the page. This is a minor issue. Much more annoying is what apparently occurred last week. All the volunteer work was trashed and replaced by a new system without notice. The volunteers protested but the SourceForge staff didn't care to reply ( the thread). The guy who did the mistake didn't even care to commit his changes to the CVS tree of the documentation project. The CVS tree does not match the content of the documentation anymore.

Behaving this way, the SourceForge staff does a big mistake. First it frustrates potential contributors, second it does not allow them to scale well. It's pretty obvious that they are completly overloaded with work and that they really need help.

What kind of conclusion can we draw ? The worst would be that the SourceForge staff is a bunch of talented programmers who do not believe in open source, even though they provide tools to help its development. The best would be that they need the open source community to kick their ass to go back in the path :-)

I sincerly hope that SlashDot will publish this bit. But VA Linux now owns Slashdot and may be immune to this kind of news ... "

CT:Technically VA Linux doesn't own Slashdot. Andover.Net does: the deal hasn't closed yet. And nobody is immune to 'nuthin, however I have slightly different opinions: releasing and maintaining a good open source package is hard and time consuming, as I learned firsthand with Slashcode. The vast majority of users don't contribute back (unless you count complaining). Don't get me wrong, I obviously love open-source development, but when the bitchers get to a critical mass, those who can actually add something positive get drowned out, get bored, and do other things.

It wasn't until Andover.Net came along and hired Pudge and Patg that it became feasible to bring Slashcode to a solid 1.0 release. Now, for the ultimate irony: Slashdot itself is a release behind the latest code ... at least for another 48 hours or so. For the year between the 0.3-0.4 tarballs, and the 0.9-1.0 Slashcode tarballs, I committed virtually every sin listed up there. My point is that its hard to maintain open source packages. Especially when the negative comments outweigh the patches fixing the problems, and on top of that, you have another job (like running a Web site for example ;) It's often a case of the best of intentions being bogged down in the most mundane of details.

Of course, since I obviously am simply a mouthpiece for various corporate entities my opinions are irrelevant and discardable, have a nice day ;)

I've attached a rather feisty rant from an anonymous coward criticizing the SourceForge project for releasing a tarball, but failing to be much of an open source project. 'Course since it took me a year between Slashcode releases, I'm a tad more forgiving on the subject, but the guy makes a lot of good points.

An anonymous reader writes: "I've observed the development of the SourceForge software and documentation during the past four months and I'm amazed to see that it's developped in a closed fashion, opposite to all of the open source ecology standards.

About the only thing related to open source is the publication of a tarball containing the php scripts used to run sourceforge. It has been published in a as-is fashion, no packaging effort was made. The only documentation included was apparently provided by volunteers and is outdated since it refers to the previous version. This documentation only covers a small part of the software.

There is no CVS tree for the project, not even read-only. Given the fact that three months elapsed between the last releases, there is no way contributors can do a proper job. At the same time VA Linux evangelists attend conferences repeating the golden rule of open source colaborative development: release often.

The only way for contributors to participate to the SourceForge development effort is to submit patches using the patch manager. The SourceForge guys will then decide if it should be integrated or not. Well, this could work if they were careful. But the situation is pathetic : patches sit in the queue during weeks and some of them even don't have a followup. It does not matter much anyway since there has been only nine patches since the beginning.

The SourceForge site documentation shows another remarkable mistake. It is maintained by volunteers. It's far more accurate and complete than the default site documentation but is not easily accessed. When clicking on the Site Documentation link it first shows the outdated documentation and a link to the volunteers work is only included at the bottom of the page. This is a minor issue. Much more annoying is what apparently occurred last week. All the volunteer work was trashed and replaced by a new system without notice. The volunteers protested but the SourceForge staff didn't care to reply ( the thread). The guy who did the mistake didn't even care to commit his changes to the CVS tree of the documentation project. The CVS tree does not match the content of the documentation anymore.

Behaving this way, the SourceForge staff does a big mistake. First it frustrates potential contributors, second it does not allow them to scale well. It's pretty obvious that they are completly overloaded with work and that they really need help.

What kind of conclusion can we draw ? The worst would be that the SourceForge staff is a bunch of talented programmers who do not believe in open source, even though they provide tools to help its development. The best would be that they need the open source community to kick their ass to go back in the path :-)

I sincerly hope that SlashDot will publish this bit. But VA Linux now owns Slashdot and may be immune to this kind of news ... "

CT:Technically VA Linux doesn't own Slashdot. Andover.Net does: the deal hasn't closed yet. And nobody is immune to 'nuthin, however I have slightly different opinions: releasing and maintaining a good open source package is hard and time consuming, as I learned firsthand with Slashcode. The vast majority of users don't contribute back (unless you count complaining). Don't get me wrong, I obviously love open-source development, but when the bitchers get to a critical mass, those who can actually add something positive get drowned out, get bored, and do other things.

It wasn't until Andover.Net came along and hired Pudge and Patg that it became feasible to bring Slashcode to a solid 1.0 release. Now, for the ultimate irony: Slashdot itself is a release behind the latest code ... at least for another 48 hours or so. For the year between the 0.3-0.4 tarballs, and the 0.9-1.0 Slashcode tarballs, I committed virtually every sin listed up there. My point is that its hard to maintain open source packages. Especially when the negative comments outweigh the patches fixing the problems, and on top of that, you have another job (like running a Web site for example ;) It's often a case of the best of intentions being bogged down in the most mundane of details.

Of course, since I obviously am simply a mouthpiece for various corporate entities my opinions are irrelevant and discardable, have a nice day ;)

I've attached a rather feisty rant from an anonymous coward criticizing the SourceForge project for releasing a tarball, but failing to be much of an open source project. 'Course since it took me a year between Slashcode releases, I'm a tad more forgiving on the subject, but the guy makes a lot of good points.

An anonymous reader writes: "I've observed the development of the SourceForge software and documentation during the past four months and I'm amazed to see that it's developped in a closed fashion, opposite to all of the open source ecology standards.

About the only thing related to open source is the publication of a tarball containing the php scripts used to run sourceforge. It has been published in a as-is fashion, no packaging effort was made. The only documentation included was apparently provided by volunteers and is outdated since it refers to the previous version. This documentation only covers a small part of the software.

There is no CVS tree for the project, not even read-only. Given the fact that three months elapsed between the last releases, there is no way contributors can do a proper job. At the same time VA Linux evangelists attend conferences repeating the golden rule of open source colaborative development: release often.

The only way for contributors to participate to the SourceForge development effort is to submit patches using the patch manager. The SourceForge guys will then decide if it should be integrated or not. Well, this could work if they were careful. But the situation is pathetic : patches sit in the queue during weeks and some of them even don't have a followup. It does not matter much anyway since there has been only nine patches since the beginning.

The SourceForge site documentation shows another remarkable mistake. It is maintained by volunteers. It's far more accurate and complete than the default site documentation but is not easily accessed. When clicking on the Site Documentation link it first shows the outdated documentation and a link to the volunteers work is only included at the bottom of the page. This is a minor issue. Much more annoying is what apparently occurred last week. All the volunteer work was trashed and replaced by a new system without notice. The volunteers protested but the SourceForge staff didn't care to reply ( the thread). The guy who did the mistake didn't even care to commit his changes to the CVS tree of the documentation project. The CVS tree does not match the content of the documentation anymore.

Behaving this way, the SourceForge staff does a big mistake. First it frustrates potential contributors, second it does not allow them to scale well. It's pretty obvious that they are completly overloaded with work and that they really need help.

What kind of conclusion can we draw ? The worst would be that the SourceForge staff is a bunch of talented programmers who do not believe in open source, even though they provide tools to help its development. The best would be that they need the open source community to kick their ass to go back in the path :-)

I sincerly hope that SlashDot will publish this bit. But VA Linux now owns Slashdot and may be immune to this kind of news ... "

CT:Technically VA Linux doesn't own Slashdot. Andover.Net does: the deal hasn't closed yet. And nobody is immune to 'nuthin, however I have slightly different opinions: releasing and maintaining a good open source package is hard and time consuming, as I learned firsthand with Slashcode. The vast majority of users don't contribute back (unless you count complaining). Don't get me wrong, I obviously love open-source development, but when the bitchers get to a critical mass, those who can actually add something positive get drowned out, get bored, and do other things.

It wasn't until Andover.Net came along and hired Pudge and Patg that it became feasible to bring Slashcode to a solid 1.0 release. Now, for the ultimate irony: Slashdot itself is a release behind the latest code ... at least for another 48 hours or so. For the year between the 0.3-0.4 tarballs, and the 0.9-1.0 Slashcode tarballs, I committed virtually every sin listed up there. My point is that its hard to maintain open source packages. Especially when the negative comments outweigh the patches fixing the problems, and on top of that, you have another job (like running a Web site for example ;) It's often a case of the best of intentions being bogged down in the most mundane of details.

Of course, since I obviously am simply a mouthpiece for various corporate entities my opinions are irrelevant and discardable, have a nice day ;)

I've attached a rather feisty rant from an anonymous coward criticizing the SourceForge project for releasing a tarball, but failing to be much of an open source project. 'Course since it took me a year between Slashcode releases, I'm a tad more forgiving on the subject, but the guy makes a lot of good points.

An anonymous reader writes: "I've observed the development of the SourceForge software and documentation during the past four months and I'm amazed to see that it's developped in a closed fashion, opposite to all of the open source ecology standards.

About the only thing related to open source is the publication of a tarball containing the php scripts used to run sourceforge. It has been published in a as-is fashion, no packaging effort was made. The only documentation included was apparently provided by volunteers and is outdated since it refers to the previous version. This documentation only covers a small part of the software.

There is no CVS tree for the project, not even read-only. Given the fact that three months elapsed between the last releases, there is no way contributors can do a proper job. At the same time VA Linux evangelists attend conferences repeating the golden rule of open source colaborative development: release often.

The only way for contributors to participate to the SourceForge development effort is to submit patches using the patch manager. The SourceForge guys will then decide if it should be integrated or not. Well, this could work if they were careful. But the situation is pathetic : patches sit in the queue during weeks and some of them even don't have a followup. It does not matter much anyway since there has been only nine patches since the beginning.

The SourceForge site documentation shows another remarkable mistake. It is maintained by volunteers. It's far more accurate and complete than the default site documentation but is not easily accessed. When clicking on the Site Documentation link it first shows the outdated documentation and a link to the volunteers work is only included at the bottom of the page. This is a minor issue. Much more annoying is what apparently occurred last week. All the volunteer work was trashed and replaced by a new system without notice. The volunteers protested but the SourceForge staff didn't care to reply ( the thread). The guy who did the mistake didn't even care to commit his changes to the CVS tree of the documentation project. The CVS tree does not match the content of the documentation anymore.

Behaving this way, the SourceForge staff does a big mistake. First it frustrates potential contributors, second it does not allow them to scale well. It's pretty obvious that they are completly overloaded with work and that they really need help.

What kind of conclusion can we draw ? The worst would be that the SourceForge staff is a bunch of talented programmers who do not believe in open source, even though they provide tools to help its development. The best would be that they need the open source community to kick their ass to go back in the path :-)

I sincerly hope that SlashDot will publish this bit. But VA Linux now owns Slashdot and may be immune to this kind of news ... "

CT:Technically VA Linux doesn't own Slashdot. Andover.Net does: the deal hasn't closed yet. And nobody is immune to 'nuthin, however I have slightly different opinions: releasing and maintaining a good open source package is hard and time consuming, as I learned firsthand with Slashcode. The vast majority of users don't contribute back (unless you count complaining). Don't get me wrong, I obviously love open-source development, but when the bitchers get to a critical mass, those who can actually add something positive get drowned out, get bored, and do other things.

It wasn't until Andover.Net came along and hired Pudge and Patg that it became feasible to bring Slashcode to a solid 1.0 release. Now, for the ultimate irony: Slashdot itself is a release behind the latest code ... at least for another 48 hours or so. For the year between the 0.3-0.4 tarballs, and the 0.9-1.0 Slashcode tarballs, I committed virtually every sin listed up there. My point is that its hard to maintain open source packages. Especially when the negative comments outweigh the patches fixing the problems, and on top of that, you have another job (like running a Web site for example ;) It's often a case of the best of intentions being bogged down in the most mundane of details.

Of course, since I obviously am simply a mouthpiece for various corporate entities my opinions are irrelevant and discardable, have a nice day ;)

amccall writes: "After a long outage, The Linux Game Tome has been updated and is now back in action!" Congratulations to Bob for getting the Tome back up, and mad props to Tony Guntharp and the crew at SourceForge for hosting the new site.

Ethanol writes: "SCO announced this morning that they're releasing cscope (a really, really sharp development tool for large C/C++ projects) and will soon release fur (a profiling/analysis/reordering tool for relocatable binaries that can speed up execution times quite a bit) under the BSD license. See their press release for details. "

On April 5th you asked Ian Clarke of FreeNet many questions about this new project, which is designed to permit almost totally anonymous Internet posting of almost any kind of material. Here are his answers.

Who is liable?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by tcd004

You said that this: "allows information to be published and read without fear of censorship because individual documents cannot be traced to their source..."

I'm all for an open forum for free speech, but this seems almost reckless. In most venues of speech, accountability for someone's words is fundamental. The Internet has opened up the possiblity of free speech without accountability to a small degree, and look at what has happened. Do you fear any legal repercussions to your group for creating this forum based on this fact?

Ian:

Thanks for your question tcd004. The problem is that it is sometimes impossible to have free speech unless it can be delivered anonymously, since the threat of retribution can be a very effective deterrent against people stating their opinions. I would even go so far as to say that a forum which forced people to identify themselves was not permitting true free speech (This is why Slashdot allows "Anonymous Cowards" to have their say). I should further point out that there is no reason that people cannot digitally sign information they place in Freenet to indicate that they are the authors of a piece of information, but we don't force people to do that. Someone could even build up an anonymous reputation by signing all of their work with the same private key.

My personal feeling is that liable, and liable law, assumes that people will believe everything they read. This might, to an extent, be true in this time of centralized media, but my hope is that systems like Freenet (and indeed SlashDot) will encourage people to make judgments about the reliability of information themselves rather than relying on a corruptible centralized source.

Why the name FreeNet?
(Score:4, Insightful)
by K8Fan

Maybe I'm just showing my age, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?

Here is part of the Detroit Freenet FAQ:

* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net is a free, public-access community computer system. Free-Nets can serve populations of any size, from large metropolitan areas to small cities and towns. They offer a wide spectrum of on-line information services to the public, including community and government databases and worldwide electronic messaging. They don't charge for their services, so everything on them is free. Free-Nets also have an interactive aspect, in that users can dialogue with information providers. While there are many Free-Nets around the world, each Free-Net is tailored to meet the needs of the local community, so no two Free-Nets are identical.

Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.

Ian:

Basically our experience is that while other systems and projects have used the term "Freenet" in the past, for the most part it had fallen out of common usage (if you don't believe me just take a look at the current contents of alt.freenet - which is primarily spam). We believe that since we are developing a "Free Network", the abbreviation of "Freenet" is too good not to use, and since it isn't really in common-usage anywhere else right now, we have resurrected it.

Poisoning the waters
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Mike Schiraldi

What protection is there against someone poisoning the system with malicious data? For example, let's say MPAASoftRIAAOL Corp. sets up a system of computers all over the place with wildly different IPs, and they feed either random or specially crafted bogus data into the system.

This is sort of analogous to renaming Barry_Manilow.mp3 to DaveMatthewsBand.mp3 and putting it on Napster. How do we prevent it? Some sort of decentralized, everyone-is-created-equal moderation system?

Ian:

You raise an interesting point, and one which has created much discussion on the mailing list since these "cancer" attacks are probably the most difficult to defend against in any system, particularly if it is decentralized like Freenet. Right now, the way Freenet works limits the damage that can be done with such a node, but in the future we plan to implement mechanisms which will make such an attack even less effective. Basically Freenet avoids becoming dependent on any particular node since requests will be spread almost equally among all Freenet nodes (by the nature of the dynamic caching and mirroring). This means that even if 0.1% of the total number of Freenet nodes are corrupted, at most about 0.1-0.4% of requests will be affected by it. Right now whenever someone requests some data in Freenet, in a sense they are voting for it, and all of the nodes which were involved in retrieving it. This is less than ideal since you don't actually know what you will get until it is too late (much like voting in the real world!). We plan to implement a mechanism to address this, where you can "undo" your vote if you aren't happy with the result, and thus Freenet gets a much more accurate idea of the quality of different types of information, and the quality of the nodes used to retrieve it. This will mean that a malicious node of the type you describe will eventually be ignored by the rest of Freenet, so hopefully the threat you describe won't be an issue when we release Freenet 1.0.

Bandwidth and Piracy
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Valdrax

In your own FAQ, you pretty much sidestep the entire issue that FreeNet would become a humongous "warez" distribution system by saying that it's merely a more efficient means of doing what others have been doing before. Ignoring the seeming subtle endorsement of piracy through the system, I'll raise an important question for adminstrators of FreeNet nodes.

In your FAQ, you say that it is very hard for FreeNet node admins to know what is on their site. With the inevitable proliferation of "warez" on the site, how will the system avoid getting bogged down with hundreds of illegal copies of popular pieces of software?

For example, when Diablo 2 finally comes out in the stores, what would prevent servers from being overloaded with:

/software/games/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/RPGs/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/rpg/Diablo2.iso
/warez/l337gam3z/Diablo2.iso
/fr33gam3z/war3z/rpg/diabloII.crack.iso
/mywarez/ObfuscatedDistributionKey/Diablo2.image ...etc.?

You could literally have hundreds of 650 Mb images of games floating around jamming up everyone's nodes. With the lack of searchability, no one would know what keys hook into what files. Without this knowledge, warez people might keep uploading copies to different keys, thus flooding the system. In essence, does not the lack of protection against piracy and the seemingly intentional goal of keeping admins from controlling their system threaten to bring down the entire network under the burden of warez and junk?

Ian:

The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie. restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons), and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce copyright. As for whether Freenet will be "overloaded" with Warez junk, well current methods of distributing Warez work fine already, but as for Freenet - the system will contain whatever information people request. If people request Warez, then there will be Warez on Freenet, if they request pornography, then there will be pornography on Freenet, and if they request political documents then there will be political documents on Freenet. Freenet makes no distinction, and if it did it could not claim to permit true freedom of information. If you want to know more about why we just might be able to live without copyright take a look at our philosophy page.

Regarding your comment about large files clogging up Freenet, right now, inserting a huge file into Freenet probably won't work, since a node won't store a file which exceeds its disk-cache limit. We also plan to make large files need to justify themselves in-terms of the number of hits they receive, so that they don't displace loads of smaller files.

Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by griffjon

It's pretty scary when Wired slams you with the headline, "Alternative Net Protects Pirates", which contained in the story gems such as:

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and "privacy nuts."

And, failing Monday's piece in the Nando Times , that's actually been the best article so far. The New Scientist is running "out of control: The Internet is about to get even harder to police" in their current issue, and ABCNews.com did a one-paragraph style summary of this article, with the lead of "An Internet system designed to guarantee anonymous free speech on the Web could be used by child pornographers and terrorists, according to New Scientist magazine," which then proceeds to all but call you and the other programmers pedophiles in a grammatical burp.

My question is, if this is to be successful (which I for one am all in favor of, I'm in close contact with Brandon and Steven, two of the FreeNet programmers, and am very much in support of the existence of this), FreeNet can't come off as a tool for criminals and miscreants, lest you attract more attention than you'd like from the Fed-types. Now, you may say that because it's open-source and already available, etc., that the Feds can't put it down, but if it is branded as an evil tool for child pornographers (like it is currently), it will never gain the popularity and user-base needed to make it sufficiently robust against machine removals.

To get something called a tool for privacy nuts by Wired is pretty bad--and the rest of the press has been worse; is there any plan to get this project out of the gutter?

Ian:

Well, we actually have had more good press than you suggest, the recent Wall Street Journal article was very positive, as was an early Brave GNU World article (see our publicity page for links). As for the bad press, well I think whenever you do something really new you are always going to encounter resistance. I think most of these journalists were trying to stir up some controversy, which is what journalists do. Interestingly many of these journalists have explained that they are often given a brief by their editors before they have even spoken to me on what tone the article will have. You rapidly develop a thick skin when you are involved in this kind of project, although for the most part I have been reasonably happy with the press coverage we have received.

Re: Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Eric_Scheirer

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and 'privacy nuts.'"

I stand by my quote in that article, although naturally it's a little short on context. Let me make clear that I am in favor of privacy, security, and anonymity when appropriate, and I despise the current attempts to make the WWW more corporate-controlled via both code and law. I don't think there's anything wrong with Freenet, I just don't think it will ever take off in the mainstream.

The fact is that most of the things that most people like to use the WWW for--such as e-commerce and Slashdot--cannot be built on Freenet, since it has no cookies and no memory. Given this, I can't see anything happening with Freenet except that it becomes a huge storehouse for illegal porn, pirated MP3s and 3l33t w8r3z.

It's a shame, because the potential political benefits that it raises, by allowing dissident speech in repressive countries, is great.

I guess my question for the Freenet developers would be: I am not a pirate, a privacy nut, a political dissident, or someone trying to spread illegal trade secrets. What does Freenet offer me? And are these benefits broad enough to a broad enough segment of the world population to create the momentum needed for Freenet to work sociologically as well as technically?

-- Eric Scheirer
MIT Media Laboratory

Ian:

Brandon (one of the other core Freenet developers) did e-mail you twice to answer the comments you made in Wired, he still awaits your response on the matter. Ok, what does Freenet offer someone who doesn't care about anonymity? One point that many people miss is that it is actually a very efficient way to distribute information due to its dynamic caching and dynamic mirroring. Freenet will move information to where it is in-demand, and will duplicate popular information automatically so that you should never encounter "The SlashDot Effect" with Freenet. In other words, your ability to publish information is no longer limited to the Bandwidth you can pay for. Because of this it should actually be a better way to distribute information than, say, the WWW or Usenet, even ignoring the fact that the information can't be censored. TheCarp mentions this below.

Wireless Freenet
(Score:4, Interesting)
by john187

I think Freenet would dovetail nicely with wireless network technology. I system of Freenet servers 1-2 km apart could blanket metropolitan areas and eliminate dependency on ISP's for network service.

What are your thoughts on this? Are any hardware people interested in looking at this problem? Building some prototypes?

Ian:

I agree completely, we have actually kept the protocol packet-based for just this sort of reason. I think Freenet would be perfect for a distribute decentralized radio network, and it would be a very exciting project.

Reversed priorities?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mattr

If files live longer the more they are thrashed, will this not just breed thrasher bots and crowd out data from clients with less connectivity? How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.

Also, I take it you are comfortable with already having divulged the identities of the entire first wave of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems like your most vulnerable time is now.

I've long considered the value of a peer to peer system for countries underdeveloped in the areas of infrastructure and rights. Unfortunately it seems that social engineering is steadily on the side of repression. Wouldn't the best way to get FreeNet into such environments be to make it a source of economic strength? In other words, your growth metric might look much better if you include authorship, copyright, and microcashpayment management. I can't see the Declaration of Independence sticking in the current system for long.. but it is in both a good library and a good bookstore.

Basically you have built a distribution system which in its optimal configuration has no delivery time since you already have the commodity on your hard drive... make it work for business as well and it may reduce prices and take on a life of its own.

Ian:

Well there is certainly more than one question here!

Firstly, the issue of "thrashing" or flooding Freenet is covered in the FAQ - I refer you to section 4.2. To summarize, the dynamic caching mechanism makes it very difficult to artificially make data more popular (since Freenet will just cache it on a node right beside you, and all of your requests will be soaked up by it).

As for divulging the addresses of the first few people to set-up Freenet nodes (I assume you refer to our "Inform.php" mechanism) that is merely a mechanism to "boot-strap" Freenet for testing purposes. Once Freenet is up and running properly we will have no need for such a mechanism, but it is useful in the early stages (and people have the option to switch it off in the config file if they really care that much). I should make it clear that Freenet now is still at an early stage of development. The project is lucky to have some very talented and hard-working developers, particularly Brandon Wiley and Oskar Sandberg who have really helped turned this from a dream into a reality, but we still have much work to do. Data modification, Content Hashed Keys, local data encryption, the list of ideas which we want to implement before a 1.0 release is long - but this is indicative of the cutting-edge nature of the project.

In terms of making it possible to sell information using Freenet, or a Freenet-like system, I suspect that might be missing the point we are making! Never say never though...

Kiddy porn, rape movies, snuff films.
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jinker

No matter what zealots tell you, no freedom is absolute. Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.

My thoughts when I first heard about this project were extremely positive for the first five seconds or so. I was going to set up a server, and suggest all my other bandwidth-rich friends do the same. Then I thought about what would be going to and from my server.

Anonymity has its place from time to time, but usually in the cases of an abuse by a higher power against an individual. But in the general case, I feel that freedom of speech entails the responsability of accountability.

If I'm going to say that I hate Virgos, and all Virgos should be locked up and treated as the inhuman beasts that they are, I should have the conviction to do so without a pointy hood over my head.

If I'm going to be distributing porn, I should be able to do it with a clean conscience. If I wanted to post naked pictures on a Web site, I'd be in some way traceable. And if I wasn't identifiable, there at least would be a mechanism in place (an e-mail to my upstream provider) to curb my freedom of speech if I was posting vile material.

The ideal of individual freedom falls apart in the environment of actual individuals who abuse it.

I'm not saying in any way that this should be a legal matter, or that the product should be banned, just that in the case that it turns out like I expect it to (the majority of traffic for illicit files, both violating copyright and basic human decency) I will have no respect, even a measure of contempt for the people that do run the servers. THEY will be the ones I will hold accountable for the 'free speech' being exercised on the network. And if they were to be sued off the net by the RIAA, Church of Scientology and MPAA, I can't say I'll be surprised, or all that upset.

What arguments can you make FOR free, anonymous access to kiddie porn, snuff films and rape/torture erotica? Why should *I*, a server operator, nurture these sorts of activities in an ideal environment?

Ian:

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you. On the other hand, if you want to help build a system which will help humanity share information, even though some of that information will be distasteful to you personally, then set up a Freenet node. See our philosophy page for more information on this.

some technical questions.
. (Score:4, Interesting)
by Cuthalion

Once something is put on freenet it cannot be removed. What does this mean? No censorship, but also misinformation stays in the system just as long as correct information, so long as it can 'trick' people into requesting it (by seeming to be relevant, for instance). This can be exploited intentionally to censor (some things are nearly unfindable on search engines because of 'key' collisions - the band 'Reload', for instance), or unintentionally - I write something, post it, and five minutes later learn that I was mistaken. Oh well! People will just have to decide for themselves what is truth. Even if I DO post a retraction, there is no way to verify that a trusted entity (such as the original author) retracted it.

As a medium for sharing artistic works (e.g., music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts, (e.g., hardware specs, controvertial news items, etc.) this seems a major shortcoming. Is there any solution to this problem in place or in progress? I ask because I feel that this is not adequately discussed in the FAQ.

Ian:

As I mention above we are working on improving the way that people can "vote" for the validity of information - I hope that this will address some of the concerns you raise. Having said that, you can't really drownout information on Freenet in the manner you suggest. If you have the key, you can get the data unless it has died out due to never being requested.

The whole area of choosing appropriate keys for the data you wish to insert is a huge, and ripe for further research. For some things, like MP3s, or poems, choosing an appropriate key is pretty easy ("music/mp3/artist/album/track" or "poem/poet/title" for example). It merely requires a standard way to refer to these things - and since it is in everybody's interest to use the same standard, hopefully good standards will emerge quite quickly. Other things are less easy. When people created the Internet, they probably never thought it might be used the way we are using it now - and they didn't need to. Similarly, Freenet is a platform upon which we hope others will build.

Re: Why compete?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by TheCarp

Actually....the Freenet Has a huge technical advantage over http protocols. The thing is... it's not just hard to track down who wrote it (unless they sign their name...it's only anonymous if you want it to be) and where it's stored...

It has cacheing built in. When you request something, it propagates. This means more copies exist. So if a document is REALLY popular, then no one server is bogged down with distributing it.

Imagine some really popular band that believes in mp3 distribution puts out a new mp3. Now everyone 80% of college students go to download it.

WHat happens? After the first few downloads at each college...the local university freenet server will have a copy of the mp3 and will be serving it to that university.

None of the requests for it will be going outside the local university network. Its the basic equivalent of everyone in the world being behind multiple layers of http cacheing proxy, except somewhat better (its built into the protocol)

Ian:

What can I say? Cool - you get it! Just to reiterate though, Freenet is an experiment. It is quite different from projects like Linux and Mozilla, which are essentially open source re-implementations of technology which has already been proven (and, incidentally, I am a big supporter of both of these projects). There aren't really any precedents which we could follow in designing Freenet, certainly nothing that came close to what we wanted to achieve. The difficulty with Freenet is that we can only *really* test it by encouraging people to use it on a reasonably wide scale. There is much further work to be done on Freenet, it is really only at the beginning of its testing phase right now - so please don't expect it to change the world just yet - but please do try it out!

--------------------------

You may also be interested to note that we have released Freenet 0.1beta.

All the best,

- Ian

On April 5th you asked Ian Clarke of FreeNet many questions about this new project, which is designed to permit almost totally anonymous Internet posting of almost any kind of material. Here are his answers.

Who is liable?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by tcd004

You said that this: "allows information to be published and read without fear of censorship because individual documents cannot be traced to their source..."

I'm all for an open forum for free speech, but this seems almost reckless. In most venues of speech, accountability for someone's words is fundamental. The Internet has opened up the possiblity of free speech without accountability to a small degree, and look at what has happened. Do you fear any legal repercussions to your group for creating this forum based on this fact?

Ian:

Thanks for your question tcd004. The problem is that it is sometimes impossible to have free speech unless it can be delivered anonymously, since the threat of retribution can be a very effective deterrent against people stating their opinions. I would even go so far as to say that a forum which forced people to identify themselves was not permitting true free speech (This is why Slashdot allows "Anonymous Cowards" to have their say). I should further point out that there is no reason that people cannot digitally sign information they place in Freenet to indicate that they are the authors of a piece of information, but we don't force people to do that. Someone could even build up an anonymous reputation by signing all of their work with the same private key.

My personal feeling is that liable, and liable law, assumes that people will believe everything they read. This might, to an extent, be true in this time of centralized media, but my hope is that systems like Freenet (and indeed SlashDot) will encourage people to make judgments about the reliability of information themselves rather than relying on a corruptible centralized source.

Why the name FreeNet?
(Score:4, Insightful)
by K8Fan

Maybe I'm just showing my age, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?

Here is part of the Detroit Freenet FAQ:

* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net is a free, public-access community computer system. Free-Nets can serve populations of any size, from large metropolitan areas to small cities and towns. They offer a wide spectrum of on-line information services to the public, including community and government databases and worldwide electronic messaging. They don't charge for their services, so everything on them is free. Free-Nets also have an interactive aspect, in that users can dialogue with information providers. While there are many Free-Nets around the world, each Free-Net is tailored to meet the needs of the local community, so no two Free-Nets are identical.

Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.

Ian:

Basically our experience is that while other systems and projects have used the term "Freenet" in the past, for the most part it had fallen out of common usage (if you don't believe me just take a look at the current contents of alt.freenet - which is primarily spam). We believe that since we are developing a "Free Network", the abbreviation of "Freenet" is too good not to use, and since it isn't really in common-usage anywhere else right now, we have resurrected it.

Poisoning the waters
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Mike Schiraldi

What protection is there against someone poisoning the system with malicious data? For example, let's say MPAASoftRIAAOL Corp. sets up a system of computers all over the place with wildly different IPs, and they feed either random or specially crafted bogus data into the system.

This is sort of analogous to renaming Barry_Manilow.mp3 to DaveMatthewsBand.mp3 and putting it on Napster. How do we prevent it? Some sort of decentralized, everyone-is-created-equal moderation system?

Ian:

You raise an interesting point, and one which has created much discussion on the mailing list since these "cancer" attacks are probably the most difficult to defend against in any system, particularly if it is decentralized like Freenet. Right now, the way Freenet works limits the damage that can be done with such a node, but in the future we plan to implement mechanisms which will make such an attack even less effective. Basically Freenet avoids becoming dependent on any particular node since requests will be spread almost equally among all Freenet nodes (by the nature of the dynamic caching and mirroring). This means that even if 0.1% of the total number of Freenet nodes are corrupted, at most about 0.1-0.4% of requests will be affected by it. Right now whenever someone requests some data in Freenet, in a sense they are voting for it, and all of the nodes which were involved in retrieving it. This is less than ideal since you don't actually know what you will get until it is too late (much like voting in the real world!). We plan to implement a mechanism to address this, where you can "undo" your vote if you aren't happy with the result, and thus Freenet gets a much more accurate idea of the quality of different types of information, and the quality of the nodes used to retrieve it. This will mean that a malicious node of the type you describe will eventually be ignored by the rest of Freenet, so hopefully the threat you describe won't be an issue when we release Freenet 1.0.

Bandwidth and Piracy
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Valdrax

In your own FAQ, you pretty much sidestep the entire issue that FreeNet would become a humongous "warez" distribution system by saying that it's merely a more efficient means of doing what others have been doing before. Ignoring the seeming subtle endorsement of piracy through the system, I'll raise an important question for adminstrators of FreeNet nodes.

In your FAQ, you say that it is very hard for FreeNet node admins to know what is on their site. With the inevitable proliferation of "warez" on the site, how will the system avoid getting bogged down with hundreds of illegal copies of popular pieces of software?

For example, when Diablo 2 finally comes out in the stores, what would prevent servers from being overloaded with:

/software/games/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/RPGs/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/rpg/Diablo2.iso
/warez/l337gam3z/Diablo2.iso
/fr33gam3z/war3z/rpg/diabloII.crack.iso
/mywarez/ObfuscatedDistributionKey/Diablo2.image ...etc.?

You could literally have hundreds of 650 Mb images of games floating around jamming up everyone's nodes. With the lack of searchability, no one would know what keys hook into what files. Without this knowledge, warez people might keep uploading copies to different keys, thus flooding the system. In essence, does not the lack of protection against piracy and the seemingly intentional goal of keeping admins from controlling their system threaten to bring down the entire network under the burden of warez and junk?

Ian:

The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie. restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons), and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce copyright. As for whether Freenet will be "overloaded" with Warez junk, well current methods of distributing Warez work fine already, but as for Freenet - the system will contain whatever information people request. If people request Warez, then there will be Warez on Freenet, if they request pornography, then there will be pornography on Freenet, and if they request political documents then there will be political documents on Freenet. Freenet makes no distinction, and if it did it could not claim to permit true freedom of information. If you want to know more about why we just might be able to live without copyright take a look at our philosophy page.

Regarding your comment about large files clogging up Freenet, right now, inserting a huge file into Freenet probably won't work, since a node won't store a file which exceeds its disk-cache limit. We also plan to make large files need to justify themselves in-terms of the number of hits they receive, so that they don't displace loads of smaller files.

Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by griffjon

It's pretty scary when Wired slams you with the headline, "Alternative Net Protects Pirates", which contained in the story gems such as:

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and "privacy nuts."

And, failing Monday's piece in the Nando Times , that's actually been the best article so far. The New Scientist is running "out of control: The Internet is about to get even harder to police" in their current issue, and ABCNews.com did a one-paragraph style summary of this article, with the lead of "An Internet system designed to guarantee anonymous free speech on the Web could be used by child pornographers and terrorists, according to New Scientist magazine," which then proceeds to all but call you and the other programmers pedophiles in a grammatical burp.

My question is, if this is to be successful (which I for one am all in favor of, I'm in close contact with Brandon and Steven, two of the FreeNet programmers, and am very much in support of the existence of this), FreeNet can't come off as a tool for criminals and miscreants, lest you attract more attention than you'd like from the Fed-types. Now, you may say that because it's open-source and already available, etc., that the Feds can't put it down, but if it is branded as an evil tool for child pornographers (like it is currently), it will never gain the popularity and user-base needed to make it sufficiently robust against machine removals.

To get something called a tool for privacy nuts by Wired is pretty bad--and the rest of the press has been worse; is there any plan to get this project out of the gutter?

Ian:

Well, we actually have had more good press than you suggest, the recent Wall Street Journal article was very positive, as was an early Brave GNU World article (see our publicity page for links). As for the bad press, well I think whenever you do something really new you are always going to encounter resistance. I think most of these journalists were trying to stir up some controversy, which is what journalists do. Interestingly many of these journalists have explained that they are often given a brief by their editors before they have even spoken to me on what tone the article will have. You rapidly develop a thick skin when you are involved in this kind of project, although for the most part I have been reasonably happy with the press coverage we have received.

Re: Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Eric_Scheirer

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and 'privacy nuts.'"

I stand by my quote in that article, although naturally it's a little short on context. Let me make clear that I am in favor of privacy, security, and anonymity when appropriate, and I despise the current attempts to make the WWW more corporate-controlled via both code and law. I don't think there's anything wrong with Freenet, I just don't think it will ever take off in the mainstream.

The fact is that most of the things that most people like to use the WWW for--such as e-commerce and Slashdot--cannot be built on Freenet, since it has no cookies and no memory. Given this, I can't see anything happening with Freenet except that it becomes a huge storehouse for illegal porn, pirated MP3s and 3l33t w8r3z.

It's a shame, because the potential political benefits that it raises, by allowing dissident speech in repressive countries, is great.

I guess my question for the Freenet developers would be: I am not a pirate, a privacy nut, a political dissident, or someone trying to spread illegal trade secrets. What does Freenet offer me? And are these benefits broad enough to a broad enough segment of the world population to create the momentum needed for Freenet to work sociologically as well as technically?

-- Eric Scheirer
MIT Media Laboratory

Ian:

Brandon (one of the other core Freenet developers) did e-mail you twice to answer the comments you made in Wired, he still awaits your response on the matter. Ok, what does Freenet offer someone who doesn't care about anonymity? One point that many people miss is that it is actually a very efficient way to distribute information due to its dynamic caching and dynamic mirroring. Freenet will move information to where it is in-demand, and will duplicate popular information automatically so that you should never encounter "The SlashDot Effect" with Freenet. In other words, your ability to publish information is no longer limited to the Bandwidth you can pay for. Because of this it should actually be a better way to distribute information than, say, the WWW or Usenet, even ignoring the fact that the information can't be censored. TheCarp mentions this below.

Wireless Freenet
(Score:4, Interesting)
by john187

I think Freenet would dovetail nicely with wireless network technology. I system of Freenet servers 1-2 km apart could blanket metropolitan areas and eliminate dependency on ISP's for network service.

What are your thoughts on this? Are any hardware people interested in looking at this problem? Building some prototypes?

Ian:

I agree completely, we have actually kept the protocol packet-based for just this sort of reason. I think Freenet would be perfect for a distribute decentralized radio network, and it would be a very exciting project.

Reversed priorities?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mattr

If files live longer the more they are thrashed, will this not just breed thrasher bots and crowd out data from clients with less connectivity? How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.

Also, I take it you are comfortable with already having divulged the identities of the entire first wave of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems like your most vulnerable time is now.

I've long considered the value of a peer to peer system for countries underdeveloped in the areas of infrastructure and rights. Unfortunately it seems that social engineering is steadily on the side of repression. Wouldn't the best way to get FreeNet into such environments be to make it a source of economic strength? In other words, your growth metric might look much better if you include authorship, copyright, and microcashpayment management. I can't see the Declaration of Independence sticking in the current system for long.. but it is in both a good library and a good bookstore.

Basically you have built a distribution system which in its optimal configuration has no delivery time since you already have the commodity on your hard drive... make it work for business as well and it may reduce prices and take on a life of its own.

Ian:

Well there is certainly more than one question here!

Firstly, the issue of "thrashing" or flooding Freenet is covered in the FAQ - I refer you to section 4.2. To summarize, the dynamic caching mechanism makes it very difficult to artificially make data more popular (since Freenet will just cache it on a node right beside you, and all of your requests will be soaked up by it).

As for divulging the addresses of the first few people to set-up Freenet nodes (I assume you refer to our "Inform.php" mechanism) that is merely a mechanism to "boot-strap" Freenet for testing purposes. Once Freenet is up and running properly we will have no need for such a mechanism, but it is useful in the early stages (and people have the option to switch it off in the config file if they really care that much). I should make it clear that Freenet now is still at an early stage of development. The project is lucky to have some very talented and hard-working developers, particularly Brandon Wiley and Oskar Sandberg who have really helped turned this from a dream into a reality, but we still have much work to do. Data modification, Content Hashed Keys, local data encryption, the list of ideas which we want to implement before a 1.0 release is long - but this is indicative of the cutting-edge nature of the project.

In terms of making it possible to sell information using Freenet, or a Freenet-like system, I suspect that might be missing the point we are making! Never say never though...

Kiddy porn, rape movies, snuff films.
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jinker

No matter what zealots tell you, no freedom is absolute. Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.

My thoughts when I first heard about this project were extremely positive for the first five seconds or so. I was going to set up a server, and suggest all my other bandwidth-rich friends do the same. Then I thought about what would be going to and from my server.

Anonymity has its place from time to time, but usually in the cases of an abuse by a higher power against an individual. But in the general case, I feel that freedom of speech entails the responsability of accountability.

If I'm going to say that I hate Virgos, and all Virgos should be locked up and treated as the inhuman beasts that they are, I should have the conviction to do so without a pointy hood over my head.

If I'm going to be distributing porn, I should be able to do it with a clean conscience. If I wanted to post naked pictures on a Web site, I'd be in some way traceable. And if I wasn't identifiable, there at least would be a mechanism in place (an e-mail to my upstream provider) to curb my freedom of speech if I was posting vile material.

The ideal of individual freedom falls apart in the environment of actual individuals who abuse it.

I'm not saying in any way that this should be a legal matter, or that the product should be banned, just that in the case that it turns out like I expect it to (the majority of traffic for illicit files, both violating copyright and basic human decency) I will have no respect, even a measure of contempt for the people that do run the servers. THEY will be the ones I will hold accountable for the 'free speech' being exercised on the network. And if they were to be sued off the net by the RIAA, Church of Scientology and MPAA, I can't say I'll be surprised, or all that upset.

What arguments can you make FOR free, anonymous access to kiddie porn, snuff films and rape/torture erotica? Why should *I*, a server operator, nurture these sorts of activities in an ideal environment?

Ian:

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you. On the other hand, if you want to help build a system which will help humanity share information, even though some of that information will be distasteful to you personally, then set up a Freenet node. See our philosophy page for more information on this.

some technical questions.
. (Score:4, Interesting)
by Cuthalion

Once something is put on freenet it cannot be removed. What does this mean? No censorship, but also misinformation stays in the system just as long as correct information, so long as it can 'trick' people into requesting it (by seeming to be relevant, for instance). This can be exploited intentionally to censor (some things are nearly unfindable on search engines because of 'key' collisions - the band 'Reload', for instance), or unintentionally - I write something, post it, and five minutes later learn that I was mistaken. Oh well! People will just have to decide for themselves what is truth. Even if I DO post a retraction, there is no way to verify that a trusted entity (such as the original author) retracted it.

As a medium for sharing artistic works (e.g., music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts, (e.g., hardware specs, controvertial news items, etc.) this seems a major shortcoming. Is there any solution to this problem in place or in progress? I ask because I feel that this is not adequately discussed in the FAQ.

Ian:

As I mention above we are working on improving the way that people can "vote" for the validity of information - I hope that this will address some of the concerns you raise. Having said that, you can't really drownout information on Freenet in the manner you suggest. If you have the key, you can get the data unless it has died out due to never being requested.

The whole area of choosing appropriate keys for the data you wish to insert is a huge, and ripe for further research. For some things, like MP3s, or poems, choosing an appropriate key is pretty easy ("music/mp3/artist/album/track" or "poem/poet/title" for example). It merely requires a standard way to refer to these things - and since it is in everybody's interest to use the same standard, hopefully good standards will emerge quite quickly. Other things are less easy. When people created the Internet, they probably never thought it might be used the way we are using it now - and they didn't need to. Similarly, Freenet is a platform upon which we hope others will build.

Re: Why compete?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by TheCarp

Actually....the Freenet Has a huge technical advantage over http protocols. The thing is... it's not just hard to track down who wrote it (unless they sign their name...it's only anonymous if you want it to be) and where it's stored...

It has cacheing built in. When you request something, it propagates. This means more copies exist. So if a document is REALLY popular, then no one server is bogged down with distributing it.

Imagine some really popular band that believes in mp3 distribution puts out a new mp3. Now everyone 80% of college students go to download it.

WHat happens? After the first few downloads at each college...the local university freenet server will have a copy of the mp3 and will be serving it to that university.

None of the requests for it will be going outside the local university network. Its the basic equivalent of everyone in the world being behind multiple layers of http cacheing proxy, except somewhat better (its built into the protocol)

Ian:

What can I say? Cool - you get it! Just to reiterate though, Freenet is an experiment. It is quite different from projects like Linux and Mozilla, which are essentially open source re-implementations of technology which has already been proven (and, incidentally, I am a big supporter of both of these projects). There aren't really any precedents which we could follow in designing Freenet, certainly nothing that came close to what we wanted to achieve. The difficulty with Freenet is that we can only *really* test it by encouraging people to use it on a reasonably wide scale. There is much further work to be done on Freenet, it is really only at the beginning of its testing phase right now - so please don't expect it to change the world just yet - but please do try it out!

--------------------------

You may also be interested to note that we have released Freenet 0.1beta.

All the best,

- Ian

On April 5th you asked Ian Clarke of FreeNet many questions about this new project, which is designed to permit almost totally anonymous Internet posting of almost any kind of material. Here are his answers.

Who is liable?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by tcd004

You said that this: "allows information to be published and read without fear of censorship because individual documents cannot be traced to their source..."

I'm all for an open forum for free speech, but this seems almost reckless. In most venues of speech, accountability for someone's words is fundamental. The Internet has opened up the possiblity of free speech without accountability to a small degree, and look at what has happened. Do you fear any legal repercussions to your group for creating this forum based on this fact?

Ian:

Thanks for your question tcd004. The problem is that it is sometimes impossible to have free speech unless it can be delivered anonymously, since the threat of retribution can be a very effective deterrent against people stating their opinions. I would even go so far as to say that a forum which forced people to identify themselves was not permitting true free speech (This is why Slashdot allows "Anonymous Cowards" to have their say). I should further point out that there is no reason that people cannot digitally sign information they place in Freenet to indicate that they are the authors of a piece of information, but we don't force people to do that. Someone could even build up an anonymous reputation by signing all of their work with the same private key.

My personal feeling is that liable, and liable law, assumes that people will believe everything they read. This might, to an extent, be true in this time of centralized media, but my hope is that systems like Freenet (and indeed SlashDot) will encourage people to make judgments about the reliability of information themselves rather than relying on a corruptible centralized source.

Why the name FreeNet?
(Score:4, Insightful)
by K8Fan

Maybe I'm just showing my age, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?

Here is part of the Detroit Freenet FAQ:

* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net is a free, public-access community computer system. Free-Nets can serve populations of any size, from large metropolitan areas to small cities and towns. They offer a wide spectrum of on-line information services to the public, including community and government databases and worldwide electronic messaging. They don't charge for their services, so everything on them is free. Free-Nets also have an interactive aspect, in that users can dialogue with information providers. While there are many Free-Nets around the world, each Free-Net is tailored to meet the needs of the local community, so no two Free-Nets are identical.

Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.

Ian:

Basically our experience is that while other systems and projects have used the term "Freenet" in the past, for the most part it had fallen out of common usage (if you don't believe me just take a look at the current contents of alt.freenet - which is primarily spam). We believe that since we are developing a "Free Network", the abbreviation of "Freenet" is too good not to use, and since it isn't really in common-usage anywhere else right now, we have resurrected it.

Poisoning the waters
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Mike Schiraldi

What protection is there against someone poisoning the system with malicious data? For example, let's say MPAASoftRIAAOL Corp. sets up a system of computers all over the place with wildly different IPs, and they feed either random or specially crafted bogus data into the system.

This is sort of analogous to renaming Barry_Manilow.mp3 to DaveMatthewsBand.mp3 and putting it on Napster. How do we prevent it? Some sort of decentralized, everyone-is-created-equal moderation system?

Ian:

You raise an interesting point, and one which has created much discussion on the mailing list since these "cancer" attacks are probably the most difficult to defend against in any system, particularly if it is decentralized like Freenet. Right now, the way Freenet works limits the damage that can be done with such a node, but in the future we plan to implement mechanisms which will make such an attack even less effective. Basically Freenet avoids becoming dependent on any particular node since requests will be spread almost equally among all Freenet nodes (by the nature of the dynamic caching and mirroring). This means that even if 0.1% of the total number of Freenet nodes are corrupted, at most about 0.1-0.4% of requests will be affected by it. Right now whenever someone requests some data in Freenet, in a sense they are voting for it, and all of the nodes which were involved in retrieving it. This is less than ideal since you don't actually know what you will get until it is too late (much like voting in the real world!). We plan to implement a mechanism to address this, where you can "undo" your vote if you aren't happy with the result, and thus Freenet gets a much more accurate idea of the quality of different types of information, and the quality of the nodes used to retrieve it. This will mean that a malicious node of the type you describe will eventually be ignored by the rest of Freenet, so hopefully the threat you describe won't be an issue when we release Freenet 1.0.

Bandwidth and Piracy
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Valdrax

In your own FAQ, you pretty much sidestep the entire issue that FreeNet would become a humongous "warez" distribution system by saying that it's merely a more efficient means of doing what others have been doing before. Ignoring the seeming subtle endorsement of piracy through the system, I'll raise an important question for adminstrators of FreeNet nodes.

In your FAQ, you say that it is very hard for FreeNet node admins to know what is on their site. With the inevitable proliferation of "warez" on the site, how will the system avoid getting bogged down with hundreds of illegal copies of popular pieces of software?

For example, when Diablo 2 finally comes out in the stores, what would prevent servers from being overloaded with:

/software/games/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/RPGs/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/rpg/Diablo2.iso
/warez/l337gam3z/Diablo2.iso
/fr33gam3z/war3z/rpg/diabloII.crack.iso
/mywarez/ObfuscatedDistributionKey/Diablo2.image ...etc.?

You could literally have hundreds of 650 Mb images of games floating around jamming up everyone's nodes. With the lack of searchability, no one would know what keys hook into what files. Without this knowledge, warez people might keep uploading copies to different keys, thus flooding the system. In essence, does not the lack of protection against piracy and the seemingly intentional goal of keeping admins from controlling their system threaten to bring down the entire network under the burden of warez and junk?

Ian:

The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie. restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons), and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce copyright. As for whether Freenet will be "overloaded" with Warez junk, well current methods of distributing Warez work fine already, but as for Freenet - the system will contain whatever information people request. If people request Warez, then there will be Warez on Freenet, if they request pornography, then there will be pornography on Freenet, and if they request political documents then there will be political documents on Freenet. Freenet makes no distinction, and if it did it could not claim to permit true freedom of information. If you want to know more about why we just might be able to live without copyright take a look at our philosophy page.

Regarding your comment about large files clogging up Freenet, right now, inserting a huge file into Freenet probably won't work, since a node won't store a file which exceeds its disk-cache limit. We also plan to make large files need to justify themselves in-terms of the number of hits they receive, so that they don't displace loads of smaller files.

Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by griffjon

It's pretty scary when Wired slams you with the headline, "Alternative Net Protects Pirates", which contained in the story gems such as:

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and "privacy nuts."

And, failing Monday's piece in the Nando Times , that's actually been the best article so far. The New Scientist is running "out of control: The Internet is about to get even harder to police" in their current issue, and ABCNews.com did a one-paragraph style summary of this article, with the lead of "An Internet system designed to guarantee anonymous free speech on the Web could be used by child pornographers and terrorists, according to New Scientist magazine," which then proceeds to all but call you and the other programmers pedophiles in a grammatical burp.

My question is, if this is to be successful (which I for one am all in favor of, I'm in close contact with Brandon and Steven, two of the FreeNet programmers, and am very much in support of the existence of this), FreeNet can't come off as a tool for criminals and miscreants, lest you attract more attention than you'd like from the Fed-types. Now, you may say that because it's open-source and already available, etc., that the Feds can't put it down, but if it is branded as an evil tool for child pornographers (like it is currently), it will never gain the popularity and user-base needed to make it sufficiently robust against machine removals.

To get something called a tool for privacy nuts by Wired is pretty bad--and the rest of the press has been worse; is there any plan to get this project out of the gutter?

Ian:

Well, we actually have had more good press than you suggest, the recent Wall Street Journal article was very positive, as was an early Brave GNU World article (see our publicity page for links). As for the bad press, well I think whenever you do something really new you are always going to encounter resistance. I think most of these journalists were trying to stir up some controversy, which is what journalists do. Interestingly many of these journalists have explained that they are often given a brief by their editors before they have even spoken to me on what tone the article will have. You rapidly develop a thick skin when you are involved in this kind of project, although for the most part I have been reasonably happy with the press coverage we have received.

Re: Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Eric_Scheirer

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and 'privacy nuts.'"

I stand by my quote in that article, although naturally it's a little short on context. Let me make clear that I am in favor of privacy, security, and anonymity when appropriate, and I despise the current attempts to make the WWW more corporate-controlled via both code and law. I don't think there's anything wrong with Freenet, I just don't think it will ever take off in the mainstream.

The fact is that most of the things that most people like to use the WWW for--such as e-commerce and Slashdot--cannot be built on Freenet, since it has no cookies and no memory. Given this, I can't see anything happening with Freenet except that it becomes a huge storehouse for illegal porn, pirated MP3s and 3l33t w8r3z.

It's a shame, because the potential political benefits that it raises, by allowing dissident speech in repressive countries, is great.

I guess my question for the Freenet developers would be: I am not a pirate, a privacy nut, a political dissident, or someone trying to spread illegal trade secrets. What does Freenet offer me? And are these benefits broad enough to a broad enough segment of the world population to create the momentum needed for Freenet to work sociologically as well as technically?

-- Eric Scheirer
MIT Media Laboratory

Ian:

Brandon (one of the other core Freenet developers) did e-mail you twice to answer the comments you made in Wired, he still awaits your response on the matter. Ok, what does Freenet offer someone who doesn't care about anonymity? One point that many people miss is that it is actually a very efficient way to distribute information due to its dynamic caching and dynamic mirroring. Freenet will move information to where it is in-demand, and will duplicate popular information automatically so that you should never encounter "The SlashDot Effect" with Freenet. In other words, your ability to publish information is no longer limited to the Bandwidth you can pay for. Because of this it should actually be a better way to distribute information than, say, the WWW or Usenet, even ignoring the fact that the information can't be censored. TheCarp mentions this below.

Wireless Freenet
(Score:4, Interesting)
by john187

I think Freenet would dovetail nicely with wireless network technology. I system of Freenet servers 1-2 km apart could blanket metropolitan areas and eliminate dependency on ISP's for network service.

What are your thoughts on this? Are any hardware people interested in looking at this problem? Building some prototypes?

Ian:

I agree completely, we have actually kept the protocol packet-based for just this sort of reason. I think Freenet would be perfect for a distribute decentralized radio network, and it would be a very exciting project.

Reversed priorities?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mattr

If files live longer the more they are thrashed, will this not just breed thrasher bots and crowd out data from clients with less connectivity? How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.

Also, I take it you are comfortable with already having divulged the identities of the entire first wave of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems like your most vulnerable time is now.

I've long considered the value of a peer to peer system for countries underdeveloped in the areas of infrastructure and rights. Unfortunately it seems that social engineering is steadily on the side of repression. Wouldn't the best way to get FreeNet into such environments be to make it a source of economic strength? In other words, your growth metric might look much better if you include authorship, copyright, and microcashpayment management. I can't see the Declaration of Independence sticking in the current system for long.. but it is in both a good library and a good bookstore.

Basically you have built a distribution system which in its optimal configuration has no delivery time since you already have the commodity on your hard drive... make it work for business as well and it may reduce prices and take on a life of its own.

Ian:

Well there is certainly more than one question here!

Firstly, the issue of "thrashing" or flooding Freenet is covered in the FAQ - I refer you to section 4.2. To summarize, the dynamic caching mechanism makes it very difficult to artificially make data more popular (since Freenet will just cache it on a node right beside you, and all of your requests will be soaked up by it).

As for divulging the addresses of the first few people to set-up Freenet nodes (I assume you refer to our "Inform.php" mechanism) that is merely a mechanism to "boot-strap" Freenet for testing purposes. Once Freenet is up and running properly we will have no need for such a mechanism, but it is useful in the early stages (and people have the option to switch it off in the config file if they really care that much). I should make it clear that Freenet now is still at an early stage of development. The project is lucky to have some very talented and hard-working developers, particularly Brandon Wiley and Oskar Sandberg who have really helped turned this from a dream into a reality, but we still have much work to do. Data modification, Content Hashed Keys, local data encryption, the list of ideas which we want to implement before a 1.0 release is long - but this is indicative of the cutting-edge nature of the project.

In terms of making it possible to sell information using Freenet, or a Freenet-like system, I suspect that might be missing the point we are making! Never say never though...

Kiddy porn, rape movies, snuff films.
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jinker

No matter what zealots tell you, no freedom is absolute. Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.

My thoughts when I first heard about this project were extremely positive for the first five seconds or so. I was going to set up a server, and suggest all my other bandwidth-rich friends do the same. Then I thought about what would be going to and from my server.

Anonymity has its place from time to time, but usually in the cases of an abuse by a higher power against an individual. But in the general case, I feel that freedom of speech entails the responsability of accountability.

If I'm going to say that I hate Virgos, and all Virgos should be locked up and treated as the inhuman beasts that they are, I should have the conviction to do so without a pointy hood over my head.

If I'm going to be distributing porn, I should be able to do it with a clean conscience. If I wanted to post naked pictures on a Web site, I'd be in some way traceable. And if I wasn't identifiable, there at least would be a mechanism in place (an e-mail to my upstream provider) to curb my freedom of speech if I was posting vile material.

The ideal of individual freedom falls apart in the environment of actual individuals who abuse it.

I'm not saying in any way that this should be a legal matter, or that the product should be banned, just that in the case that it turns out like I expect it to (the majority of traffic for illicit files, both violating copyright and basic human decency) I will have no respect, even a measure of contempt for the people that do run the servers. THEY will be the ones I will hold accountable for the 'free speech' being exercised on the network. And if they were to be sued off the net by the RIAA, Church of Scientology and MPAA, I can't say I'll be surprised, or all that upset.

What arguments can you make FOR free, anonymous access to kiddie porn, snuff films and rape/torture erotica? Why should *I*, a server operator, nurture these sorts of activities in an ideal environment?

Ian:

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you. On the other hand, if you want to help build a system which will help humanity share information, even though some of that information will be distasteful to you personally, then set up a Freenet node. See our philosophy page for more information on this.

some technical questions.
. (Score:4, Interesting)
by Cuthalion

Once something is put on freenet it cannot be removed. What does this mean? No censorship, but also misinformation stays in the system just as long as correct information, so long as it can 'trick' people into requesting it (by seeming to be relevant, for instance). This can be exploited intentionally to censor (some things are nearly unfindable on search engines because of 'key' collisions - the band 'Reload', for instance), or unintentionally - I write something, post it, and five minutes later learn that I was mistaken. Oh well! People will just have to decide for themselves what is truth. Even if I DO post a retraction, there is no way to verify that a trusted entity (such as the original author) retracted it.

As a medium for sharing artistic works (e.g., music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts, (e.g., hardware specs, controvertial news items, etc.) this seems a major shortcoming. Is there any solution to this problem in place or in progress? I ask because I feel that this is not adequately discussed in the FAQ.

Ian:

As I mention above we are working on improving the way that people can "vote" for the validity of information - I hope that this will address some of the concerns you raise. Having said that, you can't really drownout information on Freenet in the manner you suggest. If you have the key, you can get the data unless it has died out due to never being requested.

The whole area of choosing appropriate keys for the data you wish to insert is a huge, and ripe for further research. For some things, like MP3s, or poems, choosing an appropriate key is pretty easy ("music/mp3/artist/album/track" or "poem/poet/title" for example). It merely requires a standard way to refer to these things - and since it is in everybody's interest to use the same standard, hopefully good standards will emerge quite quickly. Other things are less easy. When people created the Internet, they probably never thought it might be used the way we are using it now - and they didn't need to. Similarly, Freenet is a platform upon which we hope others will build.

Re: Why compete?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by TheCarp

Actually....the Freenet Has a huge technical advantage over http protocols. The thing is... it's not just hard to track down who wrote it (unless they sign their name...it's only anonymous if you want it to be) and where it's stored...

It has cacheing built in. When you request something, it propagates. This means more copies exist. So if a document is REALLY popular, then no one server is bogged down with distributing it.

Imagine some really popular band that believes in mp3 distribution puts out a new mp3. Now everyone 80% of college students go to download it.

WHat happens? After the first few downloads at each college...the local university freenet server will have a copy of the mp3 and will be serving it to that university.

None of the requests for it will be going outside the local university network. Its the basic equivalent of everyone in the world being behind multiple layers of http cacheing proxy, except somewhat better (its built into the protocol)

Ian:

What can I say? Cool - you get it! Just to reiterate though, Freenet is an experiment. It is quite different from projects like Linux and Mozilla, which are essentially open source re-implementations of technology which has already been proven (and, incidentally, I am a big supporter of both of these projects). There aren't really any precedents which we could follow in designing Freenet, certainly nothing that came close to what we wanted to achieve. The difficulty with Freenet is that we can only *really* test it by encouraging people to use it on a reasonably wide scale. There is much further work to be done on Freenet, it is really only at the beginning of its testing phase right now - so please don't expect it to change the world just yet - but please do try it out!

--------------------------

You may also be interested to note that we have released Freenet 0.1beta.

All the best,

- Ian

On April 5th you asked Ian Clarke of FreeNet many questions about this new project, which is designed to permit almost totally anonymous Internet posting of almost any kind of material. Here are his answers.

Who is liable?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by tcd004

You said that this: "allows information to be published and read without fear of censorship because individual documents cannot be traced to their source..."

I'm all for an open forum for free speech, but this seems almost reckless. In most venues of speech, accountability for someone's words is fundamental. The Internet has opened up the possiblity of free speech without accountability to a small degree, and look at what has happened. Do you fear any legal repercussions to your group for creating this forum based on this fact?

Ian:

Thanks for your question tcd004. The problem is that it is sometimes impossible to have free speech unless it can be delivered anonymously, since the threat of retribution can be a very effective deterrent against people stating their opinions. I would even go so far as to say that a forum which forced people to identify themselves was not permitting true free speech (This is why Slashdot allows "Anonymous Cowards" to have their say). I should further point out that there is no reason that people cannot digitally sign information they place in Freenet to indicate that they are the authors of a piece of information, but we don't force people to do that. Someone could even build up an anonymous reputation by signing all of their work with the same private key.

My personal feeling is that liable, and liable law, assumes that people will believe everything they read. This might, to an extent, be true in this time of centralized media, but my hope is that systems like Freenet (and indeed SlashDot) will encourage people to make judgments about the reliability of information themselves rather than relying on a corruptible centralized source.

Why the name FreeNet?
(Score:4, Insightful)
by K8Fan

Maybe I'm just showing my age, but to me a "FreeNet" is a local free Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a bad idea to take the name of an existing and quite venerable free service?

Here is part of the Detroit Freenet FAQ:

* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net is a free, public-access community computer system. Free-Nets can serve populations of any size, from large metropolitan areas to small cities and towns. They offer a wide spectrum of on-line information services to the public, including community and government databases and worldwide electronic messaging. They don't charge for their services, so everything on them is free. Free-Nets also have an interactive aspect, in that users can dialogue with information providers. While there are many Free-Nets around the world, each Free-Net is tailored to meet the needs of the local community, so no two Free-Nets are identical.

Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.

Ian:

Basically our experience is that while other systems and projects have used the term "Freenet" in the past, for the most part it had fallen out of common usage (if you don't believe me just take a look at the current contents of alt.freenet - which is primarily spam). We believe that since we are developing a "Free Network", the abbreviation of "Freenet" is too good not to use, and since it isn't really in common-usage anywhere else right now, we have resurrected it.

Poisoning the waters
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Mike Schiraldi

What protection is there against someone poisoning the system with malicious data? For example, let's say MPAASoftRIAAOL Corp. sets up a system of computers all over the place with wildly different IPs, and they feed either random or specially crafted bogus data into the system.

This is sort of analogous to renaming Barry_Manilow.mp3 to DaveMatthewsBand.mp3 and putting it on Napster. How do we prevent it? Some sort of decentralized, everyone-is-created-equal moderation system?

Ian:

You raise an interesting point, and one which has created much discussion on the mailing list since these "cancer" attacks are probably the most difficult to defend against in any system, particularly if it is decentralized like Freenet. Right now, the way Freenet works limits the damage that can be done with such a node, but in the future we plan to implement mechanisms which will make such an attack even less effective. Basically Freenet avoids becoming dependent on any particular node since requests will be spread almost equally among all Freenet nodes (by the nature of the dynamic caching and mirroring). This means that even if 0.1% of the total number of Freenet nodes are corrupted, at most about 0.1-0.4% of requests will be affected by it. Right now whenever someone requests some data in Freenet, in a sense they are voting for it, and all of the nodes which were involved in retrieving it. This is less than ideal since you don't actually know what you will get until it is too late (much like voting in the real world!). We plan to implement a mechanism to address this, where you can "undo" your vote if you aren't happy with the result, and thus Freenet gets a much more accurate idea of the quality of different types of information, and the quality of the nodes used to retrieve it. This will mean that a malicious node of the type you describe will eventually be ignored by the rest of Freenet, so hopefully the threat you describe won't be an issue when we release Freenet 1.0.

Bandwidth and Piracy
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Valdrax

In your own FAQ, you pretty much sidestep the entire issue that FreeNet would become a humongous "warez" distribution system by saying that it's merely a more efficient means of doing what others have been doing before. Ignoring the seeming subtle endorsement of piracy through the system, I'll raise an important question for adminstrators of FreeNet nodes.

In your FAQ, you say that it is very hard for FreeNet node admins to know what is on their site. With the inevitable proliferation of "warez" on the site, how will the system avoid getting bogged down with hundreds of illegal copies of popular pieces of software?

For example, when Diablo 2 finally comes out in the stores, what would prevent servers from being overloaded with:

/software/games/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/RPGs/Diablo2.iso
/software/games/rpg/Diablo2.iso
/warez/l337gam3z/Diablo2.iso
/fr33gam3z/war3z/rpg/diabloII.crack.iso
/mywarez/ObfuscatedDistributionKey/Diablo2.image ...etc.?

You could literally have hundreds of 650 Mb images of games floating around jamming up everyone's nodes. With the lack of searchability, no one would know what keys hook into what files. Without this knowledge, warez people might keep uploading copies to different keys, thus flooding the system. In essence, does not the lack of protection against piracy and the seemingly intentional goal of keeping admins from controlling their system threaten to bring down the entire network under the burden of warez and junk?

Ian:

The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie. restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons), and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce copyright. As for whether Freenet will be "overloaded" with Warez junk, well current methods of distributing Warez work fine already, but as for Freenet - the system will contain whatever information people request. If people request Warez, then there will be Warez on Freenet, if they request pornography, then there will be pornography on Freenet, and if they request political documents then there will be political documents on Freenet. Freenet makes no distinction, and if it did it could not claim to permit true freedom of information. If you want to know more about why we just might be able to live without copyright take a look at our philosophy page.

Regarding your comment about large files clogging up Freenet, right now, inserting a huge file into Freenet probably won't work, since a node won't store a file which exceeds its disk-cache limit. We also plan to make large files need to justify themselves in-terms of the number of hits they receive, so that they don't displace loads of smaller files.

Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by griffjon

It's pretty scary when Wired slams you with the headline, "Alternative Net Protects Pirates", which contained in the story gems such as:

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and "privacy nuts."

And, failing Monday's piece in the Nando Times , that's actually been the best article so far. The New Scientist is running "out of control: The Internet is about to get even harder to police" in their current issue, and ABCNews.com did a one-paragraph style summary of this article, with the lead of "An Internet system designed to guarantee anonymous free speech on the Web could be used by child pornographers and terrorists, according to New Scientist magazine," which then proceeds to all but call you and the other programmers pedophiles in a grammatical burp.

My question is, if this is to be successful (which I for one am all in favor of, I'm in close contact with Brandon and Steven, two of the FreeNet programmers, and am very much in support of the existence of this), FreeNet can't come off as a tool for criminals and miscreants, lest you attract more attention than you'd like from the Fed-types. Now, you may say that because it's open-source and already available, etc., that the Feds can't put it down, but if it is branded as an evil tool for child pornographers (like it is currently), it will never gain the popularity and user-base needed to make it sufficiently robust against machine removals.

To get something called a tool for privacy nuts by Wired is pretty bad--and the rest of the press has been worse; is there any plan to get this project out of the gutter?

Ian:

Well, we actually have had more good press than you suggest, the recent Wall Street Journal article was very positive, as was an early Brave GNU World article (see our publicity page for links). As for the bad press, well I think whenever you do something really new you are always going to encounter resistance. I think most of these journalists were trying to stir up some controversy, which is what journalists do. Interestingly many of these journalists have explained that they are often given a brief by their editors before they have even spoken to me on what tone the article will have. You rapidly develop a thick skin when you are involved in this kind of project, although for the most part I have been reasonably happy with the press coverage we have received.

Re: Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Eric_Scheirer

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and 'privacy nuts.'"

I stand by my quote in that article, although naturally it's a little short on context. Let me make clear that I am in favor of privacy, security, and anonymity when appropriate, and I despise the current attempts to make the WWW more corporate-controlled via both code and law. I don't think there's anything wrong with Freenet, I just don't think it will ever take off in the mainstream.

The fact is that most of the things that most people like to use the WWW for--such as e-commerce and Slashdot--cannot be built on Freenet, since it has no cookies and no memory. Given this, I can't see anything happening with Freenet except that it becomes a huge storehouse for illegal porn, pirated MP3s and 3l33t w8r3z.

It's a shame, because the potential political benefits that it raises, by allowing dissident speech in repressive countries, is great.

I guess my question for the Freenet developers would be: I am not a pirate, a privacy nut, a political dissident, or someone trying to spread illegal trade secrets. What does Freenet offer me? And are these benefits broad enough to a broad enough segment of the world population to create the momentum needed for Freenet to work sociologically as well as technically?

-- Eric Scheirer
MIT Media Laboratory

Ian:

Brandon (one of the other core Freenet developers) did e-mail you twice to answer the comments you made in Wired, he still awaits your response on the matter. Ok, what does Freenet offer someone who doesn't care about anonymity? One point that many people miss is that it is actually a very efficient way to distribute information due to its dynamic caching and dynamic mirroring. Freenet will move information to where it is in-demand, and will duplicate popular information automatically so that you should never encounter "The SlashDot Effect" with Freenet. In other words, your ability to publish information is no longer limited to the Bandwidth you can pay for. Because of this it should actually be a better way to distribute information than, say, the WWW or Usenet, even ignoring the fact that the information can't be censored. TheCarp mentions this below.

Wireless Freenet
(Score:4, Interesting)
by john187

I think Freenet would dovetail nicely with wireless network technology. I system of Freenet servers 1-2 km apart could blanket metropolitan areas and eliminate dependency on ISP's for network service.

What are your thoughts on this? Are any hardware people interested in looking at this problem? Building some prototypes?

Ian:

I agree completely, we have actually kept the protocol packet-based for just this sort of reason. I think Freenet would be perfect for a distribute decentralized radio network, and it would be a very exciting project.

Reversed priorities?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mattr

If files live longer the more they are thrashed, will this not just breed thrasher bots and crowd out data from clients with less connectivity? How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.

Also, I take it you are comfortable with already having divulged the identities of the entire first wave of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems like your most vulnerable time is now.

I've long considered the value of a peer to peer system for countries underdeveloped in the areas of infrastructure and rights. Unfortunately it seems that social engineering is steadily on the side of repression. Wouldn't the best way to get FreeNet into such environments be to make it a source of economic strength? In other words, your growth metric might look much better if you include authorship, copyright, and microcashpayment management. I can't see the Declaration of Independence sticking in the current system for long.. but it is in both a good library and a good bookstore.

Basically you have built a distribution system which in its optimal configuration has no delivery time since you already have the commodity on your hard drive... make it work for business as well and it may reduce prices and take on a life of its own.

Ian:

Well there is certainly more than one question here!

Firstly, the issue of "thrashing" or flooding Freenet is covered in the FAQ - I refer you to section 4.2. To summarize, the dynamic caching mechanism makes it very difficult to artificially make data more popular (since Freenet will just cache it on a node right beside you, and all of your requests will be soaked up by it).

As for divulging the addresses of the first few people to set-up Freenet nodes (I assume you refer to our "Inform.php" mechanism) that is merely a mechanism to "boot-strap" Freenet for testing purposes. Once Freenet is up and running properly we will have no need for such a mechanism, but it is useful in the early stages (and people have the option to switch it off in the config file if they really care that much). I should make it clear that Freenet now is still at an early stage of development. The project is lucky to have some very talented and hard-working developers, particularly Brandon Wiley and Oskar Sandberg who have really helped turned this from a dream into a reality, but we still have much work to do. Data modification, Content Hashed Keys, local data encryption, the list of ideas which we want to implement before a 1.0 release is long - but this is indicative of the cutting-edge nature of the project.

In terms of making it possible to sell information using Freenet, or a Freenet-like system, I suspect that might be missing the point we are making! Never say never though...

Kiddy porn, rape movies, snuff films.
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jinker

No matter what zealots tell you, no freedom is absolute. Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.

My thoughts when I first heard about this project were extremely positive for the first five seconds or so. I was going to set up a server, and suggest all my other bandwidth-rich friends do the same. Then I thought about what would be going to and from my server.

Anonymity has its place from time to time, but usually in the cases of an abuse by a higher power against an individual. But in the general case, I feel that freedom of speech entails the responsability of accountability.

If I'm going to say that I hate Virgos, and all Virgos should be locked up and treated as the inhuman beasts that they are, I should have the conviction to do so without a pointy hood over my head.

If I'm going to be distributing porn, I should be able to do it with a clean conscience. If I wanted to post naked pictures on a Web site, I'd be in some way traceable. And if I wasn't identifiable, there at least would be a mechanism in place (an e-mail to my upstream provider) to curb my freedom of speech if I was posting vile material.

The ideal of individual freedom falls apart in the environment of actual individuals who abuse it.

I'm not saying in any way that this should be a legal matter, or that the product should be banned, just that in the case that it turns out like I expect it to (the majority of traffic for illicit files, both violating copyright and basic human decency) I will have no respect, even a measure of contempt for the people that do run the servers. THEY will be the ones I will hold accountable for the 'free speech' being exercised on the network. And if they were to be sued off the net by the RIAA, Church of Scientology and MPAA, I can't say I'll be surprised, or all that upset.

What arguments can you make FOR free, anonymous access to kiddie porn, snuff films and rape/torture erotica? Why should *I*, a server operator, nurture these sorts of activities in an ideal environment?

Ian:

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you. On the other hand, if you want to help build a system which will help humanity share information, even though some of that information will be distasteful to you personally, then set up a Freenet node. See our philosophy page for more information on this.

some technical questions.
. (Score:4, Interesting)
by Cuthalion

Once something is put on freenet it cannot be removed. What does this mean? No censorship, but also misinformation stays in the system just as long as correct information, so long as it can 'trick' people into requesting it (by seeming to be relevant, for instance). This can be exploited intentionally to censor (some things are nearly unfindable on search engines because of 'key' collisions - the band 'Reload', for instance), or unintentionally - I write something, post it, and five minutes later learn that I was mistaken. Oh well! People will just have to decide for themselves what is truth. Even if I DO post a retraction, there is no way to verify that a trusted entity (such as the original author) retracted it.

As a medium for sharing artistic works (e.g., music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts, (e.g., hardware specs, controvertial news items, etc.) this seems a major shortcoming. Is there any solution to this problem in place or in progress? I ask because I feel that this is not adequately discussed in the FAQ.

Ian:

As I mention above we are working on improving the way that people can "vote" for the validity of information - I hope that this will address some of the concerns you raise. Having said that, you can't really drownout information on Freenet in the manner you suggest. If you have the key, you can get the data unless it has died out due to never being requested.

The whole area of choosing appropriate keys for the data you wish to insert is a huge, and ripe for further research. For some things, like MP3s, or poems, choosing an appropriate key is pretty easy ("music/mp3/artist/album/track" or "poem/poet/title" for example). It merely requires a standard way to refer to these things - and since it is in everybody's interest to use the same standard, hopefully good standards will emerge quite quickly. Other things are less easy. When people created the Internet, they probably never thought it might be used the way we are using it now - and they didn't need to. Similarly, Freenet is a platform upon which we hope others will build.

Re: Why compete?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by TheCarp

Actually....the Freenet Has a huge technical advantage over http protocols. The thing is... it's not just hard to track down who wrote it (unless they sign their name...it's only anonymous if you want it to be) and where it's stored...

It has cacheing built in. When you request something, it propagates. This means more copies exist. So if a document is REALLY popular, then no one server is bogged down with distributing it.

Imagine some really popular band that believes in mp3 distribution puts out a new mp3. Now everyone 80% of college students go to download it.

WHat happens? After the first few downloads at each college...the local university freenet server will have a copy of the mp3 and will be serving it to that university.

None of the requests for it will be going outside the local university network. Its the basic equivalent of everyone in the world being behind multiple layers of http cacheing proxy, except somewhat better (its built into the protocol)

Ian:

What can I say? Cool - you get it! Just to reiterate though, Freenet is an experiment. It is quite different from projects like Linux and Mozilla, which are essentially open source re-implementations of technology which has already been proven (and, incidentally, I am a big supporter of both of these projects). There aren't really any precedents which we could follow in designing Freenet, certainly nothing that came close to what we wanted to achieve. The difficulty with Freenet is that we can only *really* test it by encouraging people to use it on a reasonably wide scale. There is much further work to be done on Freenet, it is really only at the beginning of its testing phase right now - so please don't expect it to change the world just yet - but please do try it out!

--------------------------

You may also be interested to note that we have released Freenet 0.1beta.

All the best,

- Ian

We've been hearing plenty of discussion about FreeNet lately. Instead of speculating in the dark, we might as well talk directly to the project's founder, Ian Clarke. Obviously, before posting a question, you'll want to read the FreeNet FAQs. We'll send Ian 10 - 15 of the highest-moderated questions tomorrow and post his answers sometime within the next week.

We've been hearing plenty of discussion about FreeNet lately. Instead of speculating in the dark, we might as well talk directly to the project's founder, Ian Clarke. Obviously, before posting a question, you'll want to read the FreeNet FAQs. We'll send Ian 10 - 15 of the highest-moderated questions tomorrow and post his answers sometime within the next week.

Frater 219 writes "The censorship-resistant systems Gnutella and Freenet got some reasonably positive editorial coverage in the Sacramento Bee and Nando Times today. Here's the article. It's rather good stuff: 'Echoes of the old hacker manifesto begin to ring loudly once again: Information wants to be free.'" Good piece, go read it.

bero-rh writes: "We have just launched the UFO (Unmaintained Free software Open source) project -- an attempt to fix one of the very few problems with open source: People who used to maintain a package and can't do it anymore can leave it to the project where at least basic maintenance work is done. We'll also try to find a new real maintainer for the packages."

I think about 20 million of you that have written about the Save Iridium Web site. A band of folks have gotten together to try to save the satellites and "Open Source" the network. I'm not sure what uses it will put to, but maybe they should hook up with the Freenet folks.

Rockhead writes: "Just saw this over at MacWeek. It looks like Deneba will be porting Canvas, their graphics, layout and kitchen-sink program, to Linux. The free beta is expected on the Deneba Web site early next month. Whoopee!" Let's hope that the release of free-beer proprietary vector programs spurs, rather than impedes, progress on KIllustrator and Sketch, both of which look great but incomplete at this point, but hold great promise in expanding Linux's meager selection of vector-drawing tools. Canvas also has some page-layout abilities -- looks like Deneba is seeing Adobe's free FrameMaker download for Linux, and raising.

HeUnique sent us the NewsAlert press release regarding SourceForge's new compile farm. For the projects hosted there, it means that they will be able to do test compiles on both Linux and *BSD systems.