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Learn About FreeNet Straight From The Source
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.
How would you feel if you knew that FreeNet had made possible an act that led to the deaths of innocents, or other such atrocities?
3.5. Why Java?
* Java is one of the most cross-platform languages currently available.
i guess he missed C ?!? hello there ?!?
as anyone know, java sucks!!! it's not cross-platform at all, try to compile a MSJava proggy on a sun machine. Java sucks oh my god i hate java it's incredible!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
there's no java on BeOS, no java on QNX, no java on etc etc etc
i'm sorry to tell you that all this FreeNet thing is a joke, with Java it's already dead.
Yeah, and in the same article they quote an artist who complains:
"I know people using Napster are chuckling about kicking big, bad record labels. But as evil as the record companies may be, at least they're paying for your recording budget, and at least they're promoting you, and paying for tour support."
Either this performer got the sweetest record deal in 20 years, or she simply doesn't understand that the record company is NOT paying for her recording budget, promotion, and tour support. In fact, all of these expenses are generally supplied to the artist in the form of an advance, and she won't get a penny from the label until her little sliver of royalties has paid for all of these things that she thinks that the record company is paying for.
The reason she isn't getting royalties isn't because of Napster. It's because she's been completely ripped off by the record company and doesn't understand what is happening to her.
Anyway, this entire article is self-serving record industry propaganda and should be treated as such.
Artists primarily sell their music (or the rights to it) to gain enough fans to host/be a part of a concert. Concerts generate VAST amounts of revenue - $30-40 per person.. multiplied by the tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands of people.
Are you a professional musician? No? Do you know any? No? Then shut the fuck up and read this story (particularly this part of the article it links to). I am an amateur musician and used to think it might be possible to make a living from concerts until I read that story. Then I looked at some of the musicians I know and realized it was impossible.
One of my buddies is an excellent drummer, guitarist and bassist. He played with several big bands, including one band who enjoyed moderate success (10k+ crowds, opening for some pretty big names). They played some pretty big venues. He made no money because nobody was buying their album.
I know another band that has since all but broken up. It wasn't as big as the above band, but they played all the time and made no money because nobody would buy their albums or T-shirts, even though they played at least once a week, each crowd about 30-50 people. It actually cost them more to drive to the venues (read: bars) than they got paid.
I know one guy that just got signed. He's made no money, but is excited because the studios are paying for instruments, back-up musicians and album distribution. More goes into making a song than you might think.
Please read that article. Get this through your head: The GPL doesn't work for music. The important thing to remember is that most musicians can barely afford to get started and that it's honoring copyright that let's them dedicate all their time to the art you claim to love so much.
There is an interview with Ian Clarke at www.olinux.com.br/interviews/ .Before posting questions here you guys should read it first, since it already answers alot of stuff.
I'm not saying that open source is bad. But in this case, it's much easier to spread a trojan that both are "evil" against themself and attractive for folks who are trading illegal files.
All executables got from the net are of course subject to this criticism, but as this from the start has been designed for local disk scanning and network filesharing it would be the easiest application to build the next BO-like from.
Don't you consider this as a risk that should be taken action against?
Does Freenet make a good PGP public key storage?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Including "nazi" in a discussion is not very welcome. Somebody could link to that Usenet law "Mixing the nazis in any discussion is the best way to stop any intelligent treatment".
Anyway, if you think that there should be limits to freedom of speech, then Freenet is not for you. That's a fact.
Besides, my current view is that you combat bad speech with good speech, not with censorship, but I may be wrong.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Another difference of Freenet from HTTP is resistence to damage through replication.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
SPP is the antidote. It's basically the honor system with this twist: the donations are pre-emptive, held in trust by a third party, and when they reach the "price" of the work, it's released into the public domain by the author, and he gets his money.
Thrasher bots fail because of freenet's caching system: continually requesting a file from freenet just makes sure it's at the top of the cache near you; caches near other people will be unaffected. This also has the neat effect that heavily-demanded stuff will migrate to the local machine, thus saving bandwith.
On freenet, there is no such thing as an abandoned file. Anything no-one cares about will simply vanish from the system as other items are pushed above it on the cache. This means that the content of freenet will simply be a plain unvarnished look at what people really want and would otherwise fear to post/read. If it contains kiddy porn and snuff movies, that's because people want them.
Censoring freenet is very simple: you must convince most people not to want to download kiddy porn or whatever. If that happens, it will quickly fall off the system. But it no longer allows you to make-believe by frightening anyone who thinks immoral thoughs into hiding them (which is the basic premise of accountability).
Some replies:
First, if you want to a preview of what will be most prevalent on freenet, take a look at what people search for on google etc. Porn, including very extreme porn, is likely to make up a huge fraction of freenet's content.
Second, flooding fails on freenet because the caching system won't distribute your data any further than the server nearest to you. At most it will jam up one server.
Third, freenet is deliberately reticent on the topic of who is doing what with the data - it's designed to prevent any sort of censorship including blackmail-to-behave. As such, keeping any track of users and queries is specifically against design principles.
It's a design decision.. but an EXCELLENT question.
About two other people and I have worked on Ompages.com for about a year now. It's been slow because we all work full-time. We have software, and when I get around to rebuilding the web-site, plenty of information will be there.
I think these guys at Freenet, Napster, etc., have the right spirit but a completely wrong approach; we have it right.
Our aim at Ompages, is to build a highly scalable VPN that anyone in the public can easily join. It will make the user's host appear has 'host.ompages.com' sort of like dhis.org's client does, but the connections between hosts on ompages' network will be encrypted.
In other words, our goal is proliferate secure communications technology. I view a world where people can plug in their shiny new Linux telephony cards, join Ompages, and start having encrypted phone conversations around the world. Of course file sharing is part of that, but our software is not designed to make that activity easy and anonymous. It's not about anonymity, it's about secrecy...
We need help, the few of us remaining are swamped. We used to play around with shell accounts, etc. That was not a workable model. Now we just want to build a huge public VPN. Our main site has news about stuff related to privacy, government regs, and crypto. Take a look and let me know what you think.
My real, email address is natepuri@office dot ompages dot com...
One of the largest problems that plauged the Napster and gnutella clients (and their respective pipes) was the lack of adequate bandwidth limitations. The unrestricted client was free to saturate the internet connection of its host network. In order for an anonymous distributed information-sharing system to be legitimately installed (as opposed to installed by a subversive hobbyist) on a fat pipe, I believe that there should be precautions in place for restricting bandwidth utilization to an "acceptable" amount.
What methods, if any, does FreeNet use to prevent a node from saturating its host network?
CapnBryYou bring up several intersting points.
Major of this is that the reaction of many when faced with self freedoms is to run and hide from themselves.
I think more people need to think how comfortable they are living in an age where we are free to express ourselves to each other. It seems more and more that a large chunk of the online population is crying for controls and regulations to protect them from the evils of others and more importlantly the evils they could do to themselves,
It just maybe that the mass of the globe is not ready of this level of freedom.
In which case, please report to the nearest detention center and subject your will to the masters. All pain will be taken away, as will all freedoms.
Come JOIN THe LOTUS EATERS
and leave the real world to those that cant take it on.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Ive been on the Freenet mailing lists for a few weeks and have been impressed beyond words. The ways in which you are working witht he participating user base and the speed at which your code is forming up is amazing.
Will you keep this level of user involvement in the future?
Given the amazing impact certian "simple" apps and protocals have had on the way we think and work (mp3, tcp, http) what is your expectation for freenet?
How is the work going on having Freenet spread to non java code? Do you see Freenet as dependent on a particular language or do you see it as being free from such constraints?
When the beast goes offical in a few weeks, I am curious as to how much "moral" constraints youwill hamper Freenet with. Given the posts here on slashdot it seems more than a few people would love to see you add in all sorts of Big Brother controls to stop the spread of warez and other such items.
How much moral bondage will you put on Freenet, if any?
Do you see yourself as being responsible for the actions of the protocals users or do you lay the reposnibility on the users themselves?
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
How does this system compare to Hyper-G ? Hyper-G is interesting because of the highly efficient P-Flood alogorythm used to distribute updates in a push fashion to other servers.
Ross Andersons' Cambridge crypto group have theorised a Steganographic distributed information system along these lines called The Eternity Service. Worth a look.
AsmodeusA recent (and misguided IMHO) court case in the UK ended with Demon Internet (an ISP) being held liable for a libelous usenet post originating from one of their home customers. Demon were ordered to pay a large (I believe about 400K - but this is from memory so don't quote me) settlement. Demon have argued for common carrier status, but don't yet have it. I think the reason for this is that the Government don't understand the technical difficulties in monitoring the volume of traffic that passes though Demon's systems. To link this comment in - I don't think FreeNet stand a cowboy's chance in a nuclear explosion of getting common carrier status.
Asmodeus
I have an idea to make money over FreeNet,
I create some kind of repository of illegal but highly sought after material (for example kiddie porn) under FreeNet.
I create a web site, and for some money I give customer the key which allow them to retrieve the material from FreeNet.
Advantage:as FreeNet transaction are totally anonymous, my customer is sure that someone won't see that they are downloading kiddie porn.
Sure you could still trace the transaction of the web site, but it adds another level of indirection which could be hard to fight..
For many people, a boycott is a good way to show you are not supporting a particular company or product. But for a few, that is not enough. For that few, the boycott++ is required. A boycott++ is when a person does not only not purchase an item, but goes out of their way to STEAL it. Thereby using a product and denying it's manufacturer of profit. And for those few SUPER hard core protestors, there is VisualBoycott++. VB++ is when you ruin a product for everyone, sell it to other people for cash for yourelf and basically take any measure you can to further your own monetary gain while causing a companies products to fail.
It's funny, laugh.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
I could be completely off base here, but from what I understand both FreeNet and Everything are both places to store stuff, as in whatever you want.
Besides the fact that Everything is centralized and FreeNet is not, are there any other fundamental differences between the two?
---
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese," Wallace.
It would be cool if people on dynamic IP's (who can therefore connect to other servers but can't be found via dns) could be freenet nodes. This would open up a huge pool of people to participate. Any plans in this regard?
jms:
Here's hoping you review your posts for comments...
I am interested in asking some questions about VM - please email me at:
gill at iprg dot nokia dot com
Thanks
This is disussed and answered in the FreeNet FAQ. They plan ensuring that FreeNet is compatible with the alternate Java implementations at all times.
Usually, I'll be very happy with the lack of censorshipability - but there are some problems with this.
1. Some countries has limited the freedom of speech, so if i have any form of "illegal" documents on my server, I could be claimed responsible for it, without me actually "owning" the document. Being unable to find the real "owner" one can be trialed.
2. Some things should be censored, and I'm not talking about the bluebox plans. Nazi sites for example may need some form of censorship, I'm afraid the whole freenet thing could become a nazi haven.
Another problem is the inability to decide which documents to delete in a case of overgrowth, for example i may post a page which may seem irrelevant now, but in 3 years it will be requested, how can i assure it won't be deleted, and if i can, who says people won't use this feature to fill freenet with junk? there are people that like to harm.
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The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck,
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I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
--- snip --- /hardware and see directories like reviews, previews, articles, etc, in the directory, and that's how all directories would work, and thus be searchable? After all, woulnd't someone have to go around giving out the document location anyway? How anonymous is that?
Also, you say it's not searchable? Well, I pictured that with a directory structure like the one outlined, one would be able to load
Well you could have third party indexes where people could post interesting document links. These sites could also have a review/synopsis of the document. Think USENET --> DejaNews. If you were really paranoid about staying hidden, I'm sure anonymous mail gateways/websites will be created. Fill out a form on a website you trust not to log you, then you just register your FreeNet resource with one of these indexes and away you go.
--snip--
You say that there will be no centralization. So how are all of the new servers gonna know where all the other servers are? My point: doesn't it seem like there will HAVE to be at least one mothership of all servers to give out lists of all other servers?
I don't think so. I haven't looked at the protocol, but here's one way to do it:
Node A knows how to fetch data from nodes B,C,D
Node B can fetch from E,I,F
Node C can fetch from A,I,F
etc.
Basicly your requests propogate depth first along a directed graph. Presumably the node that you requested the data from, and possibly the intervening ones would cache the data as it made its way back to you. As long as there exists a tree that spans FreeNet your covered. I'm sure there are ways to gaurentee this, although I'm not qualified to discuss them.
I think the only real way to implement this sort of control would be an equally decentralized moderation scheme (similar in theory to /., i guess..).
Any other way would be defeating the whole purpose of it, for one simple reason. Who's to say what information is correct and what isn't? Or what's malicious? As an extreme example, what if there's a sociopathic cult of chicken worshippers who believe that the RIAA is the end-all answer to the world's problems...don't they have the right to post that information?
Come to think of it, wouldn't any sort information control as you propose have a negative effect? The point of the FreeNET structure is purely for storage and distribution of information. A more logical solution to your concern would probably be implemented in the -gateway- to this information, where you could easily propose moderation of data, and no one would be forced to use this gateway.
Hi.
I am interesting in knowing how much
work it would be to change FreeNet to
another propose: A mirroring network for free software.
When RedHat and others release the latest distributions
there mirror site a slowed down.
if FreeNet could be changes to a generic mirror network
for free software this problems could be eliminated.
The changes it would take.
1) Only the mirror maintainer can file packets on the network.
2) The packets is removed when the traffic for them vanish (self cleaning.)
By make this changes the will help in distributing
free software instead of pirate software.
Knud
I'd invisage people putting in an index when they submit a collection of files, so you'd know where to find related stuff, and publishing the location of this index by other means. People could collect these indexes together into meta-indexes: it'd be a bit like Yahoo or something. It would then be possible to crawl through these links and do an Altavista. It is going to be more difficult than the web though (and the current lack of crypto signed updates would make updating the index impossible: that's a bit of a pain).
If not searchable, how does IT find stuff in itself? (To anthropomorphize a bit.)
RTFM :-)
Costs which will probably run to the hundreds of thousands, of course, barristers costing what they do. Oh well, the rest of my article was right, anyway.
2.3. Can Freenet documents be updated/deleted?
Currently, a document posted to Freenet with the same name as one already present may actually serve to propagate the existing document. There is also currently no means of deleting a document from Freenet. Documents that are never requested are eventually removed through disuse.
this begs the question of document management. if someone posts something that isn't the 'correct' something, can they retract it, change it, modify it? so when somebody posts a file that spoofs another 'real' file (here's the latest linux kernel, but it's only 2 bytes long, or is modified in some way, etc), how can it be maintained or changed? have you thought about how people might 'moderate', ala slashdot, files?
The difference is if you thrash the net it has no effect on the content. Let's say you have a worthy piece of information in freenet. You may feel the need to set up a thrasher bot just to make sure it doesn't disappear. I mean just because Shakespear's sonnets are not accessed regularly doesn't mean they are not worthy.
Freenet would seem much more interesting if it had some method to allow really interesting information to stick around forever.
Ok I'll admit it right now, I didn't read the FAQ. ;-) (But it's because I couldn't find one.) I did find the papers, but those will take a while to read I'm afraid.
Now, from your text above I assume that Ompages are supposed to provide 1) an easy way to find someone 2) an easy way to communicate with high security with that person/computer.
Freenet/Napster aim to provide an alternative protocol (alt. to HTTP/FTP etc not TCP/UDP). It doesn't seem as you are really aiming for the same thing. Freenet is about information, while Ompages are about connectivity. Is that a fair summary, or did I miss something crucial?
I do say that this type of research is very interesting however.
And what's to stop the same Trojan from posting the information on Usenet? Or IRC or whatever.
;-)
As thecap said, don't use trojans.
From reading the FAQ/paper on Freenet I've gathered that the point would be that all nodes should be equal.
/dev/null.
;-)
Have you considered using different types of nodes to better optimize the network. And if that would actually work.
I.e., have some fast caching nodes with little data to make searching fast, and instead aim for high throughput. While other nodes have higher capacity and don't delete any information. (Storage sites like those in the Eternity project.)
I recon that since the source is free it would be fully possible to implement, but for it to be well used you would need to be able to send the deleted data to these storage nodes instead of just rerouting it to
Which kind of brings me to my second question.
Have you considered opening up the data on the nodes for agents/crawlers etc. AFAIK there are some API's for creating both sandboxes and agents in Java so that they would be secured. I recon this could greatly help for indexing or storing data (as noted above).
These agents could also be used for housekeeping such as updating documents, doing checksums on files to see if they were identical, deleting spam. (If it became a large problem.)
Perhaps I should join that Mailing list and lurk for a while.
I'm sorry to say this but, RTFM!
This subject is explored to some point in the FAQ, and if you read the paper there is a more thurough analysis. (And it's quite interesting I might add.)
The short answer is that queries are re-routed if the first servant (client+server) can't find the info. It makes a "quess" (based on the key) on to which server it should send the query and then waits for an answer. If it fails it tries the next best quess. (Life limits and attempt limits are in effect, so it's won't completely bog-down the network.)
But it may be that I misunderstood your question. Perhaps you ment that you wanted to be sure that the info is infact kept somewhere? Or that you will always find the information (provided it exists) AFAIK you can't.
Can you describe how vulnerable Freenet is to distributed input flood attacks? I'm particularly concerned about coordinated attacks using large numbers of submissions (to large numbers of Freenet hosts) followed immediately by requests which bump those submissions to the top of the stack. It seems to me that it would be fairly easy (comparable to DDoS attacks we've seen) to completely flush the system of any old submissions in this way.
The FAQ doesn't go into detail about this, nor could I find a discussion in the archives that fully answers this question.
Also, what do you think about this possible solution: a system which offers a fixed amount of storage space to those who provide servers. For example, if I added a server with 4 GB of storage to the Freenet then I would receive a cryptographic token which would entitle me to anonymously store 4 GB (minus quite a bit of overhead) in the system.
There are some obvious hurdles to overcome in order to implement this idea (such as what to do when servers disappear), but I think that the basic idea of tying submissions to storage quotas based on actual storage availability is worth considering.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Mike Ossmann
"IF YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR THE MUSIC, DON'T LISTEN TO IT"
I'll start paying for songs when record companies stop forcing me to buy a lot of songs I don't want for each song that I do want. It's that simple. The same goes for the practice of making you pay for songs twice (i.e. if I want song "a" on CD1 and song "b" on CD2, but song "C" .. many "collection" CD's are made this way - mix old songs with new songs.)
is on both
P.S. I do have a legal CD collection of around a dozen CD's, but it is limited to a small number of artists for which I like nearly all of the songs.
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?
I don't think this is the case with the freenet system. If a "thrasher bot" requests information, that information will be brought to the nearest node so that the entire network is not searched for that one document. There are probably quite complicated and wonderful methods of actually thrashing the net properly, but you can do that on the web too.
^Z
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
I'll think about that while I spam usenet with faked naked pictures of your mom. Perhaps I should also drop tips to your boss about all those drugs you use. Who cares if its true or not, I'm anonymous, you can't hurt me. Or maybe I'll just send out some anonymous mail bombs, you know, like crazy uncle Ted.
Anonymity is a great way to protect oneself from retribution. Of course, there is a time and place for that. As I have demonstrated, a lot of people who wish to be anonymous actually deserve a great deal of retribution.
Think of it this way. Of every evil committed in the world, how many are lessened by the perpetrators being anonymous?
Besides, Big brother laughs at your feeble attempt at anonymity. Big Brother already knows all about you. And while you were so busy playing secret agent man, Big Brother took all your rights away. Because everyone was trying so hard to hide, nobody spoke up to try and stop it.
If a user can see/hear it on their computer, then there is a way they can copy it too.
There is no way to restrict information once it has been disclosed. There is no way to enforce payment for static (non-interactive) information. Once one user gains access to it, they can distribute it in raw, un-restricted form.
This is the problem with Copyright. With the current technology, Copyright is unenforceable without gross violation of privacy.
You seem to be missing the point. You're talking about freedom of speach
...
as a right *granted by a government* (or recognized by a government).
One of the fundamental ideals of Freenet is that freedom of speach is a
*human right*.
This is an important distinction. A right granted by a government is just
that: granted by govenment. If you live in a democracy, this means a right
granted by your fellow citizens (the population at large). If you live in
a monarcy, it is a right granted by the ruling family. These are more
like priviledges than rights. And they can be taken away. A human right,
by contrast, is independent of any govenment (or organization). If you
believe in God, it means a right granted by God to the individual. If
don't, it is a right granted to you by virtue of the fact that you simply
exist.
In the United States Constitution, freedom of speach is presented as a
*human right*. In fact, the entire Bill of Rights is presented this way.
The Constitution doesn't grant any rights. Instead, it recognizes rights
that you already have *(hman rights). It basicly says: The United States
officially recognises the following human rights:
Back to the point, Freenet is designed to enforce freedom of (anonymous)
speach *as a human right*. So you are correct when you suggest that using
it for anonymous-free-speach could be illegal under some governments.
That's the point.
Now before anyone starts bitching about the US trying to enforce it's
beliefs on others, I remind you: this program (freenet) is not connected
with the US government (in fact, the very idea of freenet probably scares
the hell out of many government folks). It just happens that the
authors-of and contributers-to Freenet happen to have the same beliefs as
led to the US Constitution (or at least the parts concerning the First
amendment).
You have IMHO gone to the crux of the matter. I applaud you. But to me the next question is so what?
Because of this, we face severe restrictions in our net freedom driven by the music and media companies.
On the surface this is logical but take a step back. This country was founded with a "thumbing your nose at the status quo" mentality. Although it may have not been a pure and unified movement it was illegal(at the time) and effective. Another foundation of this great land of ours is capitalism. There is one rule of capitalism that I think must be immutable: some one must lose. Why not some huge, uninspired, and hugely inflexible, companies?
An example may be companies who have practiced illegal hiring. They have effectively endangered(with govt. involvment) lots of other companies that are selective for what may arguably be "good" reasons. Society as viewed by me is uncaring. So it would not to appear to be about right or wrong. Apparently there are lots of people that like trading mp3s. Are they all pirates?
If the record companies lose money or go belly up, who cares. Would they care if I lost my job? Certainly not. Is it their problem? I doubt it.
So it is the record companies problem that people do not appreciate their services and if given an option they opt not to support them monetarily.
Intel got shafted in the memory war with the Japanese memory companies an had to reinvent themselves. Maybe the big five need to get another business model, reinvent themselves, and get over it.
I know this may seem radical but maintaining the status quo is a hazardous occupation. The other side has a star talent and it's called the universe. That's the thing about change, as we see it, it doesn't need us!
Such is life.
nothing excels in every environment
This doesn't quite work.
...
Serfs 'paid' for their land rental with a portion of their output.
The alternative was to starve to death.
You may argue that their life was 'worth' the crops they handed over, but they had very little choice in the matter.
Hence, I suppose, the microsoft trial
Its written in Java.
John
IMO this system can not work without true cryptographic level anonymity, or at least a continuous distribution of data wherin it would be impossible to ever determine where a message is being stored or has been originated.
How do you propose to solve this problem?
That works unless the files are encrypted (presumably with different keys), and if they're not encrypted, it's pretty hard to maintain plausable denyability as to the contents of a node's cache (which is one of the project goals).
Er, why not? They're clearly separate acts, in their nature and in their consequences. You yourself are discussing them separately. There is certainly a connection between the two, but they are not the same act.
I have some sympathy for the victims in this case, but I reject the idea that they have a privacy right so strong that it overrides anybody's right to free expression or to freely seek information. I would reject the idea of such a right for adults who had not consented to being photographed, and I reject it equally for minors.
It may or may not be a really good propaganda tool... but saying that it's not important because it's not a "killer tool" is bogus. It's still a tool they may find useful. Anyway, I could say that the Worldwide Web didn't give catalog retailers any new "killer tools", either. They could always get their word out through US mail...
Ignoring the issue of distributing software tools, I must disagree with your claim that media other than text are not important modes of expression for thoughts... and even more important modes of expression for persuasion. Nobody denies that movies, for example, are an effective propaganda tool. Whistleblowing, as another example, frequently involves distributing long documents, and could easily involve multimedia in the future.
It undoubtedly will make their lives easier... just as it will be an easier way for "positive" users to do things.
A good point. I'm not used to arguing utility, so I miss things. However, in a pure utilitarian system, this still wouldn't matter if they didn't know about it. Whereas in my real system, which is not utilitiarian, I see the right to privacy as distinctly inferior to the right to free interchange of information.If it was me, I'd honestly find it pretty amusing. In the other cases, I'd probably be awfully angry, at least if the victims were angry as well. I hope I would still not be asking for the network to be turned off, nor for anybody to be thrown in jail for posting the video (as opposed to for participating in the rape, assault, etc.).
I believe that they have every right to swap whatever information they can collect on me, at least as long as they haven't agreed otherwise. I personally do not support any restrictions on them whatsoever. Where do you get the idea that I do?
I, of course, have a right to attempt to stop them from collecting information, and I am open to the idea that I might have a right to restrict them by contract from distributing that information.
I was presenting a utilitiarian argument because I was asked for an argument by somebody whom I perceived to be a utilitiarian. By the way, I use the word "utilitarian" in the strict hedonistic sense.My own personal position is that the most important human activity, and the most important human right, is to think and feel freely. This is a moral postulate for me. I see freedom of information interchange (meaning information in the broadest sense, not just data, but art as well) as derived from that; one cannot think and feel fully without both receiving input and expressing output. Freedom of speech is a special case of the freedom of information interchange.
I believe that one should be able to interchange information an absolute minimum of restriction... usually none at all, because that's a part of the process of thinking and feeling, which is itself an unqualified good. I am prepared, for practical purposes, to accept a very few restrictions if they can be shown to be absolutely necessary to the survival of the species... and even then I don't feel good about it morally.
As far as anonymity goes, I believe, first, that the burden of proof for restricting any form of activity lies on those who would restrict it. I don't have to show the good of anonymity. You have to show the evil.
Furthermore, once you do that, we get into what is in fact a quasi-utilitiarian argument. You assert that anonymity should be restricted because it damages certain rights. I claim that it should not be restricted because it encourages the interchange of information, and therefore free thought and feeling, and is therefore good.
It's nice to say that we should all stand up for our beliefs, but remember that people have been killed for that, and still are being killed for it. If there's a way to reduce that, I think it's a good thing.
But effectively, all those millions of free (as in beer) webpages and free Usenet posts out there are riding on the coat-tails of the Internet money bandwagon. And with server costs, bandwidth etc. you're just getting better and better value for money, because of technological advances. (With molecular nanotech, you're going to get stupendous leaps forward in Internet capacity and tremendous drops in costs.)
Anyway, if this gets big, and ISPs can see added value in adding FreeNet to their list of services, they may eventually do so. The more interesting question is what will be the attempts to supress this technology, and will we win? - because there surely will be many, on many fronts.
Female Prison Rape in NY
RTFAQ! They disappear.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Careful. RTFAQ. Your files will be dropped on the floor if you don't access them enough.
(How much is enough? If there is a large malicious request flood, could it be that no amount of "keep-alive" requests are enough to keep your files in existence?)
Female Prison Rape in NY
That's total and utter rubbish. What about use value?
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
That's a reasonable, what's not reasonable is Signal 11's instance that all music becomes free advertising for the concerts.
If all music is free there is no album to promote by giving away mp3s.
-Rob
Bang! You've just made it impossible for many studio musicians to make a living.
Boom! You just killed off Techno and Industrial and any other form of music that's hard to play live. I mean really, I love Kraftwerk, but I'm not about to pay 20 bucks to see 4 guys on stage press play on a DAT machine.
There has to be a middle ground that continues to make it worthwhile for people to make these forms of music.
-Rob
The only way "free music" could ever work is by the honor system - you listen to one of their songs, you give them $0.50 for each song.
No, this is not the only way free music will work. There a million "partially" free buisness models.
My personaly favorit is "music as a service," i.e. people subscribe to songs of the week services (with an archive and a way for members to review and discuss songs). Now people would pirate these things like crazy, but who cares.. it's free promotion! Your real fans will pay for access to your whole archive (with song reviewes from fans).
There would be too damn many songs in the archive for 99% of pirates to carry. Now a very small percentage of pirates would try to pirate the song of the week and the whole archive, but there would be few of these people, so you could sue them.
Anyway, lets say 1% of the people who would buy your CD pay you $20 for a year of access to the fan club song of the week service. If you did your own web page and mixing then you don't need to give this money to anyone else, so your making the same ammount of money as you would selling the CD. Plus, you have a captive audience of lisseners who visit your site every week who you can try and sell more stuff to!
Now It's a lot of work to put out a song every week, but you could get a group of musicians together to share the site. They could all put up live preformances, good jam sessions, etc. People love that shit and it don't need to be perfect, your giving them a new batch of songs next week! You sell them the perfect songs on CD from the site. There will already be 50 million songs of the same name floating arround on the pirate sites making it impossible to find the one from the CD, so they will need to buy your CD.
So please buy the CD - pay the people who deserve to make a living.
Oh yeah, buy the CD, give the music industry $15.90 and give the artist $0.10. That's really an efficent way to reward creativity.
I think it's morally reprehensable to buy a CD and support such a corupt industry. If it's a choice between riping the artist off and supporting the industry then I'll choose to rip the artist off period. Now I don't mind buying an Ani Defranco CD since she did it her self and dosn't support the industry.
The fundamental truth here is: there is no music without artists and lisseners.. we can have music without labels, music investors, CD pressing plants, busses, clubs, lighting crews, T-shirts, but we can not have music without artists and fans period. This means that no matter what kind of piracy we do the smart artists will eventually make money.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Promotion is the real monopoly of the music industry, so we hope that online promotion will allow artist who are not industry-ass-lickers to get big without the industry (ala Ani Defranco before the internet).
Unfortunatly, the artists may miss the opertunity to throw off their industry masters and control their own lives. Remember, the music industry got into this sorry shape because the artists were not goo buisness men and/or did not effectivly unionize. It's really hard to say what will happen.
I'd like to say that all our retorc about how evil the music industry is wil influence fans to move to non-industry on-line bands, but it's way too early to tell.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
freenet is being developed in java. java runs on macOS (about as well as it runs anywhere else...)
--
Smokey the Bear says, "Strip mining prevents forest fires!"
first of all, read the FAQ. it's sort of covered in there (see 4.2)
basically, spam is a concern but not as much as might be thought since the caching that the nodes do eventually dumps unpopular information. if the spam isn't requested, it goes away. stuff that people actually want will eventually replace it.
--
Smokey the Bear says, "Strip mining prevents forest fires!"
It seems to me that if you allow people to post with (almost) total ananomity then freenet will
will become the defacto standard for accessing warez, child porn, illegal MP3's etc. [insert your favorite illegal thing here].
I read your FAQ's
"1.5. Won't Freenet be a haven for criminals and pirates?"
It does touch on this but does not cover the problem of Freenet becoming over run with warez, porn, etc.
It would be sad if any gains you made in promoting freedom of speech were overshadowed by these problems.
Do you have any plans to deal with this?
AdFuel
Why can't it evolve? Why doesn't anyone seeem to see this for what it is. It is for the first time ever, a truely distributed file system. To wit:
/minswebserver/ and go. What does this buy me? Only the best redundant file server in the history of the world. Who cares about RAID 5. So what if my house gets hit by a tornado, I get a new computer, set up the web software and point it to /minswebserver/ and away we go.
What is there to stop me from writing a web server that stores info in the distributed file system? Nothing. I just set up a key
How long before someone writes a file system shim for linux?
Everyone seems to look at it as an end in and of itself. I see it as no more then a massive storage array that I can pull stuff out of.
Think of it, wherever you go you have your bookmarks at your fingertips, cuz you stuffed your bookmark files into the filesystem.
Take it to the next level of abstraction people.
Minupla
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Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Er, all your arguments apply to the current role of the ISP.
Why should I, as an ISP provide bandwidth to you when (lets face it, avgs here, and I ran an ISP, so I can speak to it) the collective you are probably using my bandwidth (at least part of the time) to look at porn, download warez, download MP3s you don't have IP rights to. I'd conservately estimate that 60% of my packets were related to one of those activities. (let's face it a few 650 mb CD-roms outstrip most people's legit websurfing for a month).
So why should I? Because some of you are doing Good_Things with my bandwidth. Because when I was 13, among the flames and the warez of the BBS scene I found a very compelling first person article from someone who was there when The Wall fell. It was propogated over fidonet, which for those of you without my long past was a network of home users with dial up modems who exchanged mail via packet transfers at 2am. I argue, and will continue to argue to my dieing breath that articles like this outweigh all the porn, warez and anything else floating through the net. And if just one person uses Freenet to store an article like that, or any of a number of stories that allow us to understand one another better, the IP abuse that would have occured anyways (does anyone here seriously expect that alt.binaries.* is going to vanish?) is excusable in the greater scheme of things. I will run a freenet. I will encourage all my bandwidth rich friends to run a freenet.
Untill you are willing to forgo your internet access because of the other abuses of that bandwith that are going on all around you, you sir, are a hipocrite, as you are asking your ISP to do something you are unwilling to do.
Minupla
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
*sigh* You're making me think here, hard and long. That's a GOOD thing, but it's the middle of the work day, and it's distracting. :P
*grins* good.
Ok, the difference between a 'FreeNet' and the regular net, in terms of why I feel I can justify my personal participation in the 'net, is that on the Internet there is a modicum of personal responsability.
Doesn't wash. You can make your surfing on the i-net anonymous, use mixmaster remailers, and an anonymous surfing engine, which are of course popular among those who need anonyminity for one reason or another. Conversely you can sign your name to a freenet submission.
The way I see it, what changes is the inital assumption. On the i-net you initially have no anonymity, and have to work to achieve a varying degree of it.
On the Freenet you start with that anonymity.
What's the big deal about that?
Simple, on the i-net people have to be fairly technologicly adept to obtain a comfortable degrree of anonymity before being a whistle blower (I have some experience in having done this once or twice.) On the Freenet, anyone who can run a client gets a degree of anonymitity out of the box.
Why should only those of us who belong to the technological elite benifit from anonymitiy in our actions.
And with anonmity moving to the lower classes you will see more whistleblowers, who tend to have jobs other then "Lead Systems Admin" being able to use the system in some comfort.
Freenet isn't perfect ethier. By their own admmitions, they don't offer an ideally anonymous environment.
Just because I have the freedom to own a knife and use it to cut things, does not mean that I have the right to slash up my neighbour without danger of reprisal.
At the risk of belabouring the obvious I'll point out that we don't ban knives ethier. Knives like freenet is a tool and is not inheriently good or evil. It can be used in ethier way. If you want to help ensure it gets used the way you want, get involved. Help shape the project. That's what I've done.
As for how info is useful without the ability to back it up. Consider the following.
In my case I was requested by someone to do something illegal against someone else. I had no evidence and the local law enforcment officals weren't at all sure they could do anything, infact suggested that I'd probably end up getting sued for liable out of the mess, since it was just his word against mine. So, using my technological skills, I wrote an anonymous email to the party affected, so they could take measures to protect themselves, and absented myself from the situation. Result: the attempt failed when someone else was cohersed into doing it.
The victim entity in question didn't need to know who I was, just that they needed to protect themselves.
This wouldn't have been possible without anonymity tools.
There *is* a place for anonymity. In cases where someone's freedom is being abused by an oppressor, and they want to get the word out about that abuse, anonymity makes a great crutch. It's a tool. But it *should* be a little difficult to do things %100 anonymously. Those who *need* the anonymity will ferret it out. When you make it this easy, all you're doing is making it simple for all those who *want* to be anonymous.
*grins* so now it's OK for me to be anonymous, but some factory worker in cuba shouldn't get the same protection? I think you've shot your argument in the foot, because most script kiddies and warez traders are more able to use the current anonyminity tools then 90% of the rest of the world.
Glad to hear I got you thining. Got me thinking too, I joined the Freenet project this morning and offered to do tech writing for them.
BTW
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Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I've read the original white paper, and it's clear to me that most of the obvious problems have been solved with FreeNet. The combination of decay and a pull-oriented replication model prevents most simple forms of spamming and flooding the network as a whole, although individual servers may be at risk. DDoS attacks seem like a potential problem, though this is hardly unique to FreeNet. Also, clearly, the system presents good scaling behavior. I remain unclear on a few points, though.
One question is how people attempting to use FreeNet in oppressive societies might be able to hide its presence from their oppressors? This appears to be a vital component of succeeding with FreeNet. Is there a way to obfuscate the FreeNet request traffic which will make it difficult to discover that a server is being run at a given site?
Second question: One of the useful characteristics of the WWW is that it is reasonably "ennumerable", meaning that it is possible to build web crawlers which index the web and provide the major search engines that have made the web so useful. Can such elements be found in similar ways using the FreeNet protocols?
Third question: Have you decided on a URL scheme so that Mozilla can be made to browse HTML etc. provided via FreeNet? It would be an ideal addition to the protocol suites supported by Mozilla.
FreeNet sounds to me to be very similar to usenet. It allows you to put documents in it that are held at different nodes all connected together. you can grab documents off of it without really having to pay much attention to the particular server that they are posted on. You can post semi-anonymously to it. Your documets go away after a little while, and so on.
What are the differences between FreeNet and UseNet?
How do you anticipate FreeNet will be used differently than UseNet?
What makes you think FreeNet will not become as useless as Use(less)Net after the spammers and other miscreants start (mis)using it?
Hi there,
I was wondering if you could comment about the Freenet mission: how do you see this software affecting the world. I notice that files on freenet will disappear after disuse, for instance, since it is more of a distributed file cache rather than a data haven.
Some similar projects are clearly aimed at the distributed data haven issue, such as The Eternity Service, which due to nigh permanent cacheing is clearly aimed at a distributed data haven type problem domain, or intermemory which takes an approach somewhere in between the cache/haven solution.
So what all do you expect to see the distributed file cache used for?
Great work...keep it up! (BTW, if readers are interested, there exists a nice collection of information on these projects)
Mojotoad
Exactly how do you go about making sure that data is not lost when a node goes down? I am picturing something like a raid array where you divide data into N blocks and have an additional block which is just parity calculated across the other blocks. (thus allowing you to regenerate any one block that fails)
But, is one parity block per N data blocks sufficient? Or have you come up with something clever that somehow uses 2 extra blocks, and allows you to reconstruct any 2 failed nodes.
Have you done a probabilistic assumption of the likelyhood of enough nodes failing simultaneously such that data is irrevocably lost? If so, what is that probability and how does it compare to the probability of losing data that I have stored on a regularly backed up web server?
One last thing (i promise) do neighbor nodes attempt to rebuild the data on a node that fails after a certain period of silence from aforementioned node?
Thanks much!
Mark Logan
mlogan@ccs.neu.edu
I have to add that techno/electronic music never had the support of the big record companies to start with, but succeeded despite them...
For this genre, I don't see any diff between MP3 distribution on Napster and the tape swapping that everyone in the scene has always been doing since the 80s.
In fact, there is a valid argument for saying the scene might not have spread out of Chicago, Detroit and enclaves in Europe as quickly and comprehensively without it - espeicially since most majors wouldn't touch them unless they already had a huge underground following, or made good old fashioned rock n' roll style 'big beat' pish that they find easy to market and understand.
I'm also sure more than a few 'illegal' songs appeared on Ron Hardy, Electrifying Mojo and Wizard tapes that got passed about in the 80s and inspired a lot of the artists and DJs you hear today.
I know for a fact that most underground DJs dont go to the trouble of clearing copyright on the records they play. Yet they are doing the artists a favour by generating demand as effectively as any concert - but playing to many crowds everywhere at once. Of course they have to buy the records themselves to do this. In the old days you would hear stories of indpendent producers begging or bribing DJs just to get their record in a set. Lots of promos are given away today to get the same effect.
Why not let everyone be their own DJ, selecting and passing on the best tracks as a quality control mechanism? (They do say these days EVERYONE is a DJ!).
This is the embodiment of 'Viral Marketing' which seems to be in vouge these days, and its quite amusing that record companies are trying to trigger this effect whilst keeping cast iron control. They'll never do it unless they embrace reality.
If I hear some amazing music on MP3 (such as Transmat's Tour highlights on MP3.com - I encourage you ALL to check it out) I will generally buy the vinyl (because I can spin it in a set) or the CD (because the quality will always be better).
In short, napster and freenet might actually accelrate the growth of innovative scenes and acts without having some idiot in a suit decide what we like for us.
I have been thinking about what our society has turned out to be like as of late and I find that I almost can't see why the world would be that much better off with things like these and all sorts of vague hard to impliment and hard to use tools.
Could someone actually inform me as to how the actual man on the street has any input to the future with this or any other tool that has been developed.
The main idea behind this is supposedly that people can run a server and act a s amedium for things that others would like the world to see. But then why do most ISPs that allow for cable modem access not very willing to let people run servers on them? All this is essentially doing is basically making data hard to reach and hence hard to utilize. I think I can safely say that a voice in this world is fast becomming impossible to gain. All of the programming that I have done in the past oh cumulatively about 3 years and I still can't write one single thing that anyone would give a damn about. Not to mention how steep the learning curve has become for almost any topic under the sun. All these people have to do to actually ruin this idea is real diabolically simple. Oh well you have to run an efficient network right? Well then you have to pay for some massive pipe into your house. I have yet to see one ISP in all of the USA let alone any region that I live in that would offer at least the option of running any
server code what so ever. Then do you know what people do? They have the equivelent of T-1 access and all they do is just sit there on it and do relatively nothing. Prices are still too high to do almost anything interesting or fun. And from what I can tell the job markeyt is slowing for all the realy cool stuff. Also one of the things that also really scares me is that the use of java to impliment the client: well it's portable but then why do I have to use something that is totally geared to just doing networking and graphics.
What I eventually see if that people will have to go to school for 20 years and design some massive project just to get a place of decent employment. That is the scary thing. All people in this world have to do to really screw you is to eliminate choice and the rest of the general black pillar of misery will follow.
People want to control little fiefdoms and ruin the little guy's chances of doing anything. Not only that but the sheer contempt for the learning is apaling from what I have seen.
So I really would like this question answered instead of the standard kettle of flames:
In the most cost effective manner possible what is the best way to gain true power for a communications medium. In otherwords for the lowest cost how can I have my own machine running one of these fandangled servers under very low system requirements and for little problem. I want to just basically get a medium that can't be stolen from me or used as another example of why the even slightly less endowed are going to get screwed over.
No I don't like the concept of another taking editorial control over me and I don't like the concept of being forced to pay thousands of USD each and every month for the right to publish ideas.
One of the main reasons I even give a rat's ass about most of the developments that have even happened (including this one) was that I had some folorn hope that I a human who has pretty much lost the ball game and never really hit a home run be able to actually get some pride and do something that was worth anything.
However these technologies take things for a given which I find scary.
The idea that you must rely on a third party to communicate and constantly rely on external computers and the possibility that those computers may be more unreliable than your own. The fact that you may be without any chance to do something when the sticking point really gets there. Until internet access is always on and always there like a simple telephone I think I can say many, many developments and ideas may be left out in the cold.
I think that saying something is more of a right than a priviledge in this world and I for one would be more than happy to stand up for that belief.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Such as in voting, for example?
>Your freedoms end when they infringe on the rights of others. This includes your freedom of speech.
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, but I cannot see how my freedom of speech can infringe on your rights, unless I do something like set up a loudspeaker outside your home. The freedom to publish on the internet doesn't seem like a clear example of impingement upon human rights to me.
People in power will always seek to censor, if they are able to. One of the easiest ways to do this is to go after people who say unpopular things. As long as this is possible, free speech will be in danger.
Equating freedom of speech with child pornogragphy is, in my opinion, one of the least responsible uses of free speech that I can recall seeing recently.
****
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I just read today a paper buy some Bell labs guys, which talked about one peculiar aspect of real world files and file collections. It was in a recent conference proceedings of some Data Compression folks. I'll get the reference, if anyone is interested. Anyway, the point was this: in many situations a large cellection of real world data has long repating sequences, which are ralatively far apart of each other. Thus sliding window dictionary compression protocols like the zip-family fail to notice them. They researched some real world data examples and found, that if a simple 150 line C program is used to pre- and post-process gzip compression, in many cases the resulting added compression can be significant. The pre-processor scans the data for long, faraway repeating sequences and replaces them with simple references to earlier instances. I think that even a regular file system of any multiuser computer tends to have a lot of this kind of redundancy: same pieces of statically linked code in executable, same or almost the same text in different version of documents, not to mention almost or total dupilicates between different users of the same files. If the file system itself, or in the case of the Freenet project, the document database, could use this kind of high granularity redundancy checking and compression, it would not matter at all, whethet a server has millions of copies of the same data in different files: the total disk space used would be in the order of one copy only!
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
http://computer.org/proceedings/dcc/0096/00960287a bs.htm
The article was
"Data compression using long common strings"
J. Bentley and D. McIlroy
p. 287 in the book
"Proceedings - data compression conference DCC '99"
Edited by James A. Storer and Martin Cohn
IEEE computer society
Los Alamitos, California, 1999
It is available in the link above for a price.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
In good or bad, it might be so that scarce disk caches for material will exclude distribution of all but the most requested material. This might exclude minority harms like kiddie porn, harmful facts/lies about individuals, etc... in practice.
This also brings flooding threats. Anyone can flood the servers with pseudorequest to populate the caches with material they desire. Here the sytems could use a general technique for service denial and flooding prevention: associate a cost to a transaction, whether it be just a longish delay or perhaps a "fee", e.g. an identified account which keeps no track of what data you fetch, but logs the amount of traffic you generate and limit it.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
That's the point! (And how/why it won't be used for very long as a pirate distribution channel).
As soon as the copyright owners get a clue (When? I don't know), they will start legitemate Freenet servers, and start distributing bogus copies of their materials (SW/Movies/MP3s, etc) Once Joe User gets burned too many times when downloading "This weeks popular artist", but in fact gets an Oral Roberts sermon on theft, they will stop using it and go back to their old/trusted distribution schemes
Why isn't Warner Bothers, etc. Doing this already?
CSG_SurferDude
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Don't you think the amount of information on FreeNET is going to be so unimaginably huge that it will be impossible to find anything interesting? For example: in the FAQ, you talk about a key named "/text/philosophy/sun_tzu/the_art_of_war". How would I know this key existed (as no searchengine would exist), and, more importantly, how would I know the information stored there would be interesting, and not be advertising, spam or just something that isn't related to sun_tzu at all?
If goverments decide this is a Bad Thing couldn't they just pass a law saying all routers/gateways/whatever are not allowed to forward Freenet packets? I didn't read all the technical docs but it seems it's not tied to one port number which is good but:
- ----------
It would seem to me that when one node is talking to another it should try to hide the data - like wrap it up in a gif? Get some mathemiticians to work on this and the "wrapping" algorithm should be changeable (let any pair of nodes use whatever one they want).
My hope is that it should be impossible for an eavesdropper to tell what are Freenet packets and what aren't. So that the only way to shut it down would be to shut down the whole Internet!
--------------------------------------
"If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists" -
The idea is all well and good, but how far can this really scale? Gnutella has a feature that lets you watch all the searches that flow though the network, and with only 900 users connected right now, the rate is approximetly 2 per second. I don't see this being scalable. At 900,000 users (not an unreasonable number), you have 4,000 searches per second, that have to be relayed between all 900,000 nodes. Peer-to-peer uncentralized networking sounds nice, but it simply can't scale.
To publish information on Freenet, you don't need your own node. A citezen in the hypothetical country you mention could use the Freenet client software to post whatever they want on other nodes. Then, human rights advocates, govenments who do value human rights, etc. can find those reports and try to stop the country from abusing the rights of it's citizens.
It is also impossible to know what information exists on a node (without testing all possible keys or doing traffic analysis or something of that type). So even if the information you happen to have on, or send from your node is illegal, you cannot be held responsable for any of it (theoretically at least, IANAL).
That is really the point of Freenet, that you can publish information, without letting anyone know who posted it or where exactly the information is located.
Steve
The possibility of rouge nodes certainly exists and could cause a problem. Hopefully most (>90%) nodes will honestly store and return data as expected.
Java is just being used in this first test implementation of the freenet node. The Freenet network protocol is (somewhat) documented and anyone is free to write a server in another language. Freenet will release client libraries with an API in many languages once the protocol stabilizes.
You could artifically keep it longer by requesting the data yourself, but since you can't generate a list of most freenet nodes you can only force the data to stay in the part of the network you have access to. Also, the network will drop your data when you stop dedicating your resources to requesting it.
If you unwittingly let your /etc/passwd file (you do use shadowed passwords don't you?) get into freenet and people decide they want to request it there is nothing you, the government or even the freenet developers can do. That's why we love freenet :-)
It's fairly trivial for Spam Inc. to deal with decay - they can simply put their 2000 Mb of garbage into Freenet, and then request various bits of it repeatedly. If they're smart, they'll request it from different Freenet nodes each time, ensuring that the data appears to be in higher demand. They just need to make sure that they use keywords that people are likely to guess. If we're lucky, the spammers will be competing with the warez/pr0n folks for their keywords....
Information wants to be free
Information wants to be free
So what? Guns want to kill, but we have laws against that.
I will not focus on the trust of your argument about the value of FreeNet. Instead it is the idea that Anonymity is the precursor of free exchange of ideas.
Let me begin by stating that I agree that thinking, is one of the intrinsic goals of man. That part of the goal of man life should be to live consciously. If this is true then the sharing of ideas is fundamentally a moral imperative.
Part of the correct exigi of any book, is to consider the context the author was writing in, and the type of writing they have done. I would hope one does not read Sci Am for politics. To continue this principal part of the parsing of a thought is to set it in the context of the speaker.
Anonymity prevents this from happening. You cannot parse the thoughts fully. The value of sharing information, the reason for a moral imperative, is the benefit to those who communicate. If this value can't be attained, is anonymity an evil?
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
In the age of RIAA, MPAA, and DCMA, who do you expect to run a freenet server?
Busniesses and universities probably be opposed to it, if only beacuse it could be a haven for pedophiles and pirates. Or could dialup users, and cable modem users bear all the load?
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
I think your right on. Warez and Porn are going to be jumping all over FreeNet in a heart beat. If your familar with the land of IRC you know just how many people this attracts and how much bandwidth it uses. Considering programs (games especially) are frankly, getting huge, if a copy of Diablo II(in the far future) gets posted on FreeNet you'll have 50+ people downloading a 700meg file in a matter of minutes, easily! I hope that FreeNet does not become Chaos theory in action and at least minimal controls are there so that the value of the information can be mantained. Maybe if FreeNet only allowes source files(text)? It's a tough problem to solve without limiting FreeNet's usefullness.
It's odd that you mention that because I actually do keep a copy of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and Huckleberry Finn in freenet at all times (bible, u. s. constitution, hfinn). I really do believe that we should use Freenet to spread good ideas that people want and that's why I ensure that there are always some good things in Freenet.
Freenet runs on MacOS. It's in Java and Java is available on MacOS. There are also perl and python clients.
I am one of the Freenet developers. Here's a copy of the letter I sent you in response to your comments in Wired, to which you never responded.
:-)
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Hi! I'm Brandon Wiley, with the Freenet project. I was wondering if we could discuss Freenet a bit in regards to your comments in the recent Wired article.
I don't think Freenet is only for clandestine activities and privacy nuts. I'm interested in it mainly because its a distributed caching datastore with content-based indexing. With Freenet you don't have to know where something is stored in order to retrieve it. You don't need a DNS address or a permanent internet connection to publish information.
Local is no longer an issue. You request information by content and as it travels through the network to you it leaves behind cached copies. So, if you request it a second time, it will load faster. Information migrates to where it is desired.
It's kind of like combining an unlimited number of search engines with an unlimited number of mirrors.
It's more than just that, though, because the infrastructure we're creating can support things other than just web-like documents. It can support e-mail (without a site-based e-mail address) and teleconferencing.
Of course, there is anonmity built in because people like anonymity. I for one and pushing for not making anonymity a necessity when it will get in the way of useful features (such as searching).
There are some idealistic people on the Freenet project. It attracts such people. However, I am not attempting to promote illicit activities. I'm trying to make something useful for the world. I'd like to hear any further thoughts you have on Freenet.
Have a nice day.
Freenet was tested on a mac recently and has been modified to run just fine.
No, not my right to be free of them, but the rights of the victims. The act of producing an illegal movie can't be divorced from it's distribution. In fact, distributing erotic pictures and movies of minors who can't or haven't legally give their consent is, in my mind, unquestionably a violation of their rights.
The opressed, whistleblowers and activists can generally contact someone who's sympathetic and out of harms way through PGP'd emails or some other method. This network will not give them any new killer tool to get their word out. This network is overkill for the sharing of thoughts, which is generally through text. On the other hand, it *COULD* make the lives of those sharing illegal multimedia files much easier. (As Napster made the sharing of .mp3s easier than using usenet or the web)
You forget about the right of privacy of the victims. What if it was *you* as an eight year old child on Usenet? What if it was a daughter or son? What if it was your best friend getting assaulted in an .mpg? None of these people gave consent.
How are *you* damaged by Proctor & Gamble selling your personal details to American Express without your permission, even if you don't expressly know about it? Why is it ok for an individual to violate the right of privacy of another individual, and not a company?
What is the essential GOOD of anonymity? You claim not to be a utilitarian. Arguing that whistleblowers and so on won't come forward without an impenetrable shield of anonymity is a pretty utilitarian argument. Ideally, shouldn't people stand up for what they beleive in with or without the fear of reprisal?
*sigh* You're making me think here, hard and long. That's a GOOD thing, but it's the middle of the work day, and it's distracting. :P
Ok, the difference between a 'FreeNet' and the regular net, in terms of why I feel I can justify my personal participation in the 'net, is that on the Internet there is a modicum of personal responsability. If I do something to hurt someone, violate them in some way, I can be held responsible to a certain degree. That's a concept which I hold fairly dearly. My actions, thoughts and feelings are *MINE*.
The degree of personal punishment pretty wide ranging, from imprisonment to account removal to reduced access to a particular resource.
If you were to extend the FreeNet concept into the real world, you have a place where noone can be held accountable for anything.
Just because I have the freedom to own a knife and use it to cut things, does not mean that I have the right to slash up my neighbour without danger of reprisal.
You keep pointing out the free exchange of information as a 'good'. I wholeheartedly agree with that in principle. But how meaningful is information which you've acquired with no way to back it up? It's like scribbling on the bathroom walls.
Being able to associate information with a source *is*, in my mind, critical when you decide to evaluate that information and choose to accept it or reject it.
There *is* a place for anonymity. In cases where someone's freedom is being abused by an oppressor, and they want to get the word out about that abuse, anonymity makes a great crutch. It's a tool.
But it *should* be a little difficult to do things %100 anonymously. Those who *need* the anonymity will ferret it out. When you make it this easy, all you're doing is making it simple for all those who *want* to be anonymous.
Greg (who's still thinking long'n'hard about all of this)
Hey, I'm all for it. I'm not saying people abuse anonymity either. I'm just saying it is one of the most debated, most troublesome (to the legal system) issues in the books. My question is: Whether it is abused or not, would the freenet people feel liable for granting that anonymity. tcd004
I agree, actually. That's as far as I've gotten in my contemplation. Live with the risks. I am kind of selfish in the sense that I'm willing to risk damage to the world for things that I think will change it for the better, if successful.
I've come to this conclusion, just now. It's not the system (of anonymty) that has the fault. The fault is in other people. It's been too long that people can blame the environment for people's actions, and not the people themselves.
What actions are agreeable or not is in the eye of the beholder.
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script-fu: hash bang slash bin bash
[ approaching AI ]
No, I don't. I'm looking for a mechanism that would prevent a specific act. I understand that this is double edged, since if said mechanism is possible, then it could be used to censor.
It would be great, in my mind, if there were no laws at all. Can you think of the inherent problems that causes?
People assume too much.
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[ approaching AI ]
As much as this is flamebait, it is a question that needs asking.
Child Pornography is already a problem, predominantly on news spools (so I understand).
The design of FreeNet suggests that it could be used to publish some simply nasty stuff. I don't agree with censorship, I don't agree with the majority of laws, but I definitely don't agree with that kind of exploitation.
Is there any mechanism in FreeNet that will prevent this?
I'm asking this question for two reasons, first I believe it needs answering, and second, I'm developing an anonymity cooperative which will make it even easier for that sort of thing than FreeNet does, and if you have a solution, maybe it will work for my system also.
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script-fu: hash bang slash bin bash
[ approaching AI ]
Before we decide where we get everything we have to settle on what everything is. Here are a few that puzzle me, possibly because of my only rudimentary understanding of FreeNet nodes and how it all works.
Should it include commercial things (advertisments, stores, etc.)? Personally, no -- companies involved means governments involved, governments involved mean regulations, and regulations are a Bad Thing for a network.
What about enyclopedias? What encyclopedia publisher would volunteer to have it's data available on FreeNet, for nothing in return?
FreeNet is a new beginning. While FreeNet would reside on the Internet (fabricating a network, even with Iridium, would be difficult), I think it would transcend it. The only way for that to happen, however, is if the golden rule is 'there are no rules.' Any sort of guidelines lay precedent for more, stricter guidelines. Any censorship would be disastrous. But we know that, we're /.
Finally, I'd just like to say that FreeNet seems great, so much of it because of the community participation aspect, much like that of Napster. Being part of a scheme so large and amazing has quite an allure to it, and I must say: I can't wait. Mikey G.
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http://www.yourmothernaked.com
Still, I'm not saying that I like record companies or dislike Napster. As a matter of fact, I wrote the NHF on using napster and playing mp3s under linux for linuxnewbie.org. And I agree with you that that Salon article was just the RIAA party line (although they have also written several pro-Napster articles). I was merely pointing out that the Signal 11's post was incorrect on the issue of touring.
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.
MP3.com tries to make money off of artists in ways that are at least as bad as any record company. I don't remember details, but I have certainly read about that and it does seem to be the case. If anyone can post specifics or links to anything on that topic it would be appreciated. None of us like record companies, but that doesn't mean we must embrace MP3.com as the solution.
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Not at all. The only people who actually do better than break even on the road are a few bands who are huge draws. Almost all artists break even or even lose money on tours as a way of generating interest so they sell albums. In the article Artists to Napster: Drop dead! the argument that people trading copyrighted mp3s is ok because the artists can make the money back on the road is discussed and one singer says:
"It's laughable. Those people have no idea how the music business works. Because unless you're Alanis Morissette or Dave Mathews, you're not making money on the road. It's all I can do to break even on tour. And the only reason to tour is to promote the sale of my CD."
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.
What's overlooked in this argument is this -- the record industry, regardless of so-called piracy, is making more money than ever. If MP3 sharing is taking a bite out of their profits, as they claim, it sure is not showing up on the balance sheet. If anything, freely distributed MP3s are a perfect vehicle for promotion. How many people have gone out and bought a CD after listening to an MP3? A lot, I'd venture. The orginal post misses the point -- this whole thing is about control, who will control the distribution of music. It has little, if anything, to do with stealing material. It's the music industry that needs to change, not the behavior of so-called thieves (actually, music fans). Instead of alientating and pissing off a large segment of customers (MP3 downloaders buy music too), the industry should embrace new distribution models and stop whining. Period.
Centralization is *not* absolutely neccessary. It is not trivial to implemented distributed distribution of DNS, but not impossible. Distributed protocols are a big area of research for fault tolerance. If you central server dies, the entire system crashes. One approach that a team at OSU has taken is implementing protocolls that stay relatively stable even if a number of servers go down at once (say massive crackdown on nameservers.) Then the issue becomes, can we bring enough servers up fast enough to replace the ones taken down that the system will remain intact despite losses.
for those interested, the site is http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~anish/group
The number you have dialed is imaginary, please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Many of these moral questions are already answered in the Freenet FAQ or mailing lists. Here's a more technical question. I'm concerned about the scalability of the distributed network. A lot of experimentation and parameter tweaking will need to be done before the system enables popular and useful files to be quickly accessed from anyplace on the net. How confident are you that a Freenet network will actually function in a useful way? What experiments have you done, apart from the one in the white paper? Have you performed a mathematical analysis of the protocol? I believe in the ideas behind Freenet. Now convince me that the software will work.
Are there plans to integrate the freenet protocol into web browsers (like lynx and mozilla) so that people can browse freenet? This seems necessary to group collections of related documents togeather and help people find what they want.
Could this be a form of attack? Submitting lots of documents that are deceptively similar to the one you don't want people to see?
...that the only motivating factor for musicians is money? If you want a secure lifestyle, the last thing to be is a musician. People do it for the music. (Well maybe the groupies too.)
I'm not saying 'let em all starve' but there must be some way for them to make a living in the new world. Maybe in future touring _will_ be profitable. It'll be done in a different way, instead of as a teaser for the album which is how the real money gets made.
dave
Scornful, are we? I [unfortunately] don't see that happenning here...
Will it be possible to build a web-like text retreival system on top of freenet, or an HTTP/FreeNet gateway? How wil freenet hyperlinks be implemented?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Didn't you read his .signature?
:)
Everyone knows that the Discordians FOUGHT the undead Nazis led by the Illuminati during the rock concert!
Unfortunately, it's been a while since I read the Illuminatus! trilogy, or I would remember where the concert took place... (somewhere in Austria? or is that where the AMA was from? one forgets so quickly...)
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I'm testing Netscape 6.0 preview. Either they accidentally compiled with debug code and symbols turned on, or this thing is a real bitch of a memory hog. I've got six Netscape windows open, and I'm swapping like there's no tomorrow!
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
Is any work being done on GUI servants, particularly for Windoze?
FreeNet would ideally be considered a "common carrier", like a phone company. You don't sue a phone company because someone used a phone in the commision of a crime. Unfortunately, the phone system is not designed for anonymity or security (phone taps and traces are made easier every day), so its not a perfect analogy.
If their system was well designed, there would be no way of telling if a particular web page was on a server, even by the administrators of that server.
Slashdot has always had a dim view of anonymity, and would pejoratively label anyone who publishes via FreeNet an "Anonymous Coward".
This was the subject of a Suck parody a couple of weeks ago. Check out project Crapster which is exactly that. The full article can be found here
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
who wrote it or
where it's stored
I can see this being useful for the sort of free speech governments and corporations want to stamp out. But given that the Web is already very entrenched despite numerous flaws, how do you expect your FreeNet protocol to "compete?" Wouldn't a system which integrates with the Web (a method for hiding existing sites in the same manner you hide your FreeNet nodes) rather than competing with it have a better chance of surviving?
Maybe this is superficial, but the question that has been nagging me is... How will the information on freenet be presented to its users?
Will clients be plaintext, FTP-like in that retrieval of a key will net the user a file, or akin to a web browser capable of understanding hrefs to freenet keys rather than URLs, etc?
Reading the information on the protocol left me with a few questions, but I think this one is foremost amongst those I don't think anyone has brought up yet. This may determine, at least in part, what is possible using the network.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Why do you think that Adaptive Networks haven't been implemented before now, at least on the scale that you're suggesting?
Hi. Wow. I didn't know this one before... I'm ashamed. Honest. Ever since I learned to spell 'PC', I've been into distributed storage systems. When I was a kid, my friends and me used to trade toys; and whenever one of us nodes couldn't satisfy a request she would try to locate it elsewhere and tunnel it back to the originator. By the way, our Toy exChange Protocol (tcp) supported hardware handshaking and sophisticated dynamic routing (Tim, pass this car on to Chrissi and tell her it's for George; if he isn't available just have her keep it until Janie comes by, who is the mother of Alice who is the daughter of the uncle of the grandmother of the best friend of George's.) And of course we were as nuke-proof as the ARPAnet as one failing node could do little harm to the network as a whole. Soon after I got my first computer I got interested in BBSes. You know, some of those old-fashioned bulletin board systems are still around and some freaks still regularily download any kinds of information, fun games, hardcore lowest-legal-age teen porn,... eventually, they later upload their stuff to some other BBS to get credits or stuff. It's just cool. A distributed storage system where the originator of a file is veiled in darkness and requests can't be tracked. And of course there also still are some of the old BBS networks like the MAUSnet in Europe; consisting of nodes that regularily exchange their message boards, electronic mail or even software. Then there's the internet. The big hit of the 20th century. Millions and millions of hosts. No centralized brains. Total freedom of speech. Cryptography where cryptography is due. And last not least I can order pizza online :) "The internet is not decentralized enough," you say? Of course it is. Even the www, the part of the internet *everybody* knows (tho some primarily associate it with MicroSoft's Internet Exploder or "download"), is a decentralized storage system. Web sites link each other by topic and frequently requested information is replicated (mirrored). Then there is the USEnet, thousands of news servers all over the world linked to each other exchanging articles written by authors from nations from A to Z, plus some weird characters my keyboard doesn't support. Articles expire, but can't be removed from the system forcefully (except, of course, from servers that allow cancellation of articles). Encryption may be applied - but doesn't protect node owners from the law. Just look at good ol' Germany where they try to censor everything, including news feeds and offensive haircuts. Now that ought to be enough on news. Let's get to the other oldies, such as IRC. I guess some of you will hit me with a very big stick when they have read this comment but who cares? I'm a distributed system too, you know. This is robot-node-#3141 at the #con. Hit me! Go on! Have my l4m3r_k1LL4h robot put a finger trough your #eyeballs and stir your brains! (Won't kill you by the way, but we all know how disgusting the smell of stirred brains can be.) ...I seem to have gotten a little off track. Anyway, the point is, Internet Relay Chat is yet another decentralized communications network... one of a billion of such systems... it's "billion", right? I simply guessed that there are billions of such systems around, each serving a different purpose. (OK with me as long as the word "billion" isn't filtered... billion, billion, billion!) And now here comes FreeNet. Wow! Number Freaking #Billion plus one. I'll just *have* to be on this network. I bet it's as cool as all the other ones. Finally, I have found a use for that extra hour we get from dailight savings time (by CReative adAPtive redundant clock reconfiguration (CRAP)). I know I'll spend days surfing the free net. It's the striking similarities to all them other gizzmos I love so much, that makes it unique. -- By the way, freenet (mobilcom) is also an ISP in Germay which is known for overpricing, censorship and being extremely unreliable. cya -lite-
We've all seen "freenets" before - consider USENET back in 1990 before anyone in authority really knew what it was.
Sure, the potential for really useful information arose, but let's face it, if something is legal and useful, the author will put it on the web.
Does anyone remember early USENET? Or IRC? You had to crawl through so much spam, porn, warez, trojans, flames, ads, misrepresented files, files that didn't work, and just general nuisances, that unless you were there specifically for one of the above-mentioned reasons, it was useless.
I have no doubt that the first file I downloaded on FreeNet would actually be an advertisement for alladvantage.com... grrr
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I know this might be covered, but I gotta ask.... Looking at a few of the documents on the Freenet page, it's clear that you've considered some of the implications of uncensorable speech. However, I noticed one class of abuse/use you did not mention: the release of personal information. Social Security numbers, medical records, credit histories, college transcripts, e-mail/instant messenger/online banking accounts with passwords, current addresses and unlisted phone numbers -- not to mention your shopping and browsing habits, when someone cracks Doubleclick's database -- are information that can (i.e. will) be spread via Freenet. So far it looks like you're willing to facilitate the end to everyone's privacy in exchange for complete freedom of speech -- or at least fail to acknowledge the conflict inherent in the situation. I'm curious: What will be your reaction when "ian_clarke_info.txt," with every concievable scrap of data on your life, ends up on Freenet?
However, I have wondered for a while now about what might be called the kiddie porn attack where individuals, organizations or governments who have an axe to grind with FreeNet start inserting material such as child pornography, confidential patient medical records, prose of racial hatred, etc.---short, stuff that most people would have a hard time defending---into FreeNet servers in a certain geographical area, and then tip off to produce a public outcry. Would enough people be willing to ride this out to make FreeNet viable in the long run?
My personal opinion is that it is a waste of resources to put up a fight for free speech when your opponent has it so easy to drag the discussion into such muddy waters. If you want to fight, for example through the courts, do it on a topic that is sure to embarrass them, not you.
So I'd like to make the following suggestion: Create a virtual network---virtual in the sense of mindshare, with absolutely no logical connection, links, etc.---where the site operators monitor each others' sites, and mirror documents that are currently controversial.
The point is that every site operator makes the decision herself to post a particular document, based on her personal opinion about the cause. The importance of the network comes in when a document is attacked. When targeted, every site operator has two choices:
In the exceptional case, when the cause really strikes her self, provided the conditions in her jurisdiction are favorable, she would keep the document up, with a notice that it's under attack, and fight the attack in court.
In the normal case, the operator would immediately comply with all demands, and put up a notice that a document has been censored. She would also provide, if possible, the name of the attacker, all the notices and paperwork, and an MD5 checksum of the document. Since other operators would constantly monitor their peer sites (or have software do it for them), people in a different jurisdiction would come in and put up more copies of the document that are still around somewhere.
This is pretty much how the internet works anyway, but I still would find it useful if open guidelines could be developed and optimized, and some simple(!) software could be developed to make this process extremely simple and low maintenance, so that many people would engage.
Further, I want to stress that, in total opposition to FreeNet, it is important that there is no network besides the internet, so that any legal attack would be very very hard, even for multinational corporations because they are dealing with concerned individuals. Also, this would have a build-in moderation mechanism, hence is immune to the kiddie porn attack, and will also filter important stuff (like slashdot is doing every day, but I can see the day when Andover will cease to be the impartial party). So the sites in this "network" will become the sites where people turn for "news that matters" (TM).
That is a largely meaningless statement. You say that my freedom of speech ends when it interferes with your right to be free of "kiddy porn, rape movies, snuff films". Well, I say that your freedom to remove those things from the Net ends when it infringes on my right to free speech. One or the other is obviously going to have to take priority, and the real question is which is more important.
That question assumes that you can separate the things you mention from the other things that the service might be used for. That does not seem to be the case.
It turns out that, in order to suport whistleblowers, freedom fighters, and the generally oppressed, it helps to create a system that doesn't let server operators know what they're carrying, and that doesn't allow anybody, server operator or otherwise, to remove anything. Once you have such a system, it's going to be used for things you don't like as well as for things you do like.
If you allow anybody to remove anything, then that person can be put under pressure by Bad Guys, as well as by Good Guys. Admittedly, it's possible that the Bad Guys will nail operators anyway, but it still helps under some circumstances.
Therefore, the question for a utilitarian (which I am not, but you seem to be) is whether the positive impacts of the system outweigh the negative impacts. The positive impacts are pretty obvious, so let's see how much actual harm there is...
On the face of it, the distribution of the stuff you list does not, in itself, seem to harm anybody much... nobody is damaged by somebody else looking at a picture, especially if they don't even know about it. It may be that the production of the material harms somebody, but not the distribution.
People often claim that allowing distribution encourages production, and therefore creates harm. There are two big problems with that argument:
New technology has made it easier to fake things. As fakes become easier, it seems likely that real victimization will die out. It is, after all, illegal and therefore dangerous.
We therefore have hypothetical and easily reduced harms, stacked up against very real gains.
Because that environment is also ideal for other things... things that are valuable and more important.
I'm more worried about the "abusive" material overloading the system than I am about the system being used for those things at a moderate level.
Ummmm....if you really dislike the current music-industrial complex - for which I do not blame you - then stealing and breaking the law is not the answer. Simply don't buy the music. Go download from artists at MP3.com or somewhere that do want to put there music out to fans without the record company whores controlling it. All the 'they charge too much so I'm just gonna take it' excuses are just that, excuses. If you think M$ stuff sucks and is overpriced, don't steal it. Go use Linux or BSD, learn to program and help develop new software, or just support the open source movement or companies that do make decent products at a legit price.
Do you plan to actively support the use of FreeNet using free Java tools (like kaffe, japhar, gcj)?
FreeNet is free software.
How do you pay your bills?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Since It will be virtually impossible to forcibly remove a piece of information from Freenet, if a Trojan horse manages to run in my system and it is programmed to silently broadcast sensible information (my /etc/password, email directory,...) on the Freenet filesystem, any attacker can read this information from anywhere in the world without anybody knowing who was the perpetrator.
In current schemes, the Trojan sends the info to somewhere and you can watch this somewhere and deduce who gets profit from this.
Is there some provision against this?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Suppose that, for some reason, you decide that Freenet is a bad idea and you want to kill the project.
Given it is free software and the current state of the development, could you stop it? Could anybody? And a natural disaster?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Is it possible to measure the popularity or difussion of a Freenet document?
Maybe sampling time to reception from widely-sparse nodes?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Well, in my understanding, if Spam Inc. puts 2000 MB of garbage into Freenet, if that garbage is not demanded it would be only stored once and not replicated, and if it is demanded, it is not garbage.
Then maybe a programmed decay or node faults without backup would remove randomly information scarcely stored.
Innit?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Once some info enters Freenet, nobody can control it.
Do you value privacy?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
You say that Freenet can people freedom of speech.
:) ). Freedom of speech is not a right in this country.
:), if they find you using Freenet, you can always plead freedom of speech or not knowing what is passing through the server, but there are places where this is useless
Let's imagine a country with an authoritarian and powerful enough government (suppose that penguins carry red flags there
How would you justify using Freenet in this country for ~good~ uses so that this government don't decide to make a crime to be a Freenet node?
I mean, in the ~free~ world
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Some background about this - A network dedicated to preventing any one entity from shutting it down (such a network would naturally be a target for legal action) needs to have a decentralized yet easy to access repository of information. Since the volume of information would quickly rise beyond the point of any one system to host it, a method needs to be created to redirect clients/queries to system(s) which have the material. Think of it as a super-DNS system similar to WINS resolution (for you NT/samba people).
The central problem lies in TCP/IP - it's a peer, or point-to-point, protocol on the 'net at large. you can't broadcast to 255.255.255.255 and expect it to go everywhere. So an abstraction layer is required to give broadcast functionality to the network.. via TCP and UDP. Very difficult without a centralized server to host it.
Why is a centralized server bad? Simple: it has a complete record of who has what.. and more importantly, where they are. The MPAA or any other organization could seize the "browse master" and then go after each mirror site. So any network which wants to stay alive must be decentralized.
My question is real simple: how do you intend to accomplish decentralization and maintain network integrity?
P.S. I've given this idea alot of thought and was considering launching an effort. Glad to see somebody else already has. If I can find the time, you may see my e-mail appear in the dev list. =)
Operators of FreeNet nodes will spend a significant amount of resources such as bandwidth, storage and CPU. Naturally, not all node operators will be equally interested in all types of content. Is there any way for node operators to determine on what content their re$ources will be spent?
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
No you're right. You've articulated it well. Email me at natepuri@office.ompages.com if you want to know more... Later...
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Freenet! In fact I'm already on the mailing list and I'm joining the project. But... what about those tough problems?
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
blanu is one of the developers I know, and have discussed with him this post; this is one of the top developers, Brandon Wiley, as listed on the sourceforge freenet homepage. This response to Eric's attack on freenet needs to be modded up such that it appears along side it.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
FreeNet is a great idea. But it has a fundamental flaw. The information is stored on dozens of servers, and paid for by dozens of admins. But they cannot delete it.
That means that spammers will have a *Great* time. They can spam whatever they want, and nobody will be able to pull it of the net. Furthermore, they won't pay for the storage of the spam themselves.
Think about it. Making a freenet "website" - and then spamming freenet about it. Nobody would be able to pull it away. More companies would do it , and so forth. The result beeing that freenet gets overloaded with JUNK - and nobody is able to stop it.
Right? (That's my major concern about freenet..)
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"Rune Kristian Viken" - arcade@kvine-nospam.sdal.com - arcade@efnet
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
The Freenet protocol is open (although still in development). I am researching the possibility of developing an alternate implementation as a Perl module or a collection thereof - Net::Free, perhaps? - , and then developing a set of applications based on it: a command-line client for Unix, a "regular" Freenet daemon, and a Freenet-to-Web gateway. Those interested might want to email me on the above address; I'll be setting up a mailing list shortly.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I looked around your site, and am mainly interested in the technical challenges. Just last week I was trying to figure out how to do this exact same kind of thing. It seems like you have addressed a lot of the major issues that I was playing with. However something kept nagging at me while I was reading. What speech are you interested in protecting that does not already have adequate protection under the first ammendment? (sorry to be US specific)
Fundamentally I agree with the premise that all censorship should be abolised. However, I would like some examples of speech that you think are not adequately protected AND are not already illegal for other reasons.
The most important facet of free speech is preventing prior restraint. If I can get the word out and distribute the truth, I can deal with the consequenses afterward.
With or without Freenet, I can get any piece of information distributed to a national audience. I might have to answer for my actions, but that comes with the territory. For the most part the Internet has been a very healthy development for the free speech movement. However I do recognize there have been some abuses recently. The deCSS case is probably the best example. Ask yourself- how would your system have really helped the publishers? There already are anonymous channels they could have used for distribution. Did they take advantage of them? No, instead they made their case publically, stood in court to defend themselves, and have greatly increased public consciousness. Is there any shortage of deCSS mirrors now? I think that the source code is in the court records and on tee shirts. Would an anonymous posting of the source to linux newsgroups and dvd forums have had the same impact? I saw a story about deCSS on the local news. Would posting it to the Freenet have gotten the same attention? The last thing we need is to hide these issues among warez and Backstreet MP3en. Free speech abuses need to be held up to the light and exposed in the mainstream press. How does Freenet help with this process?
-BW
Demon weren't ordered to pay anything. They settled out of court, presumably because they realised they were going to lose. They settled for 15 Kpounds plus costs.
Demon have argued for common carrier status, but don't yet have it. I think the reason for this is that the Government don't understand the technical difficulties in monitoring the volume of traffic that passes though Demon's systems.
Note that common carrier is a technical term under UK law which does not mean what you think it does (I found this out because I posted to uk.net and uk.legal using this term: see this article for details). It's best not to use the term in discussions on UK law.
To link this comment in - I don't think FreeNet stand a cowboy's chance in a nuclear explosion of getting common carrier status.
Who cares? Freenet has gone as far as they can in terms of plausible deniability by encrypting the stuff on the servers, but in any case, Demon's problem was that they could not use the innocent dissemination defence because they did not remove the material when requested. If you're running a Freenet node in the UK, all you do is remove something when you're asked to. This will have a minimal effect on the rest of the Freenet, of course, but that's the problem of the person threatening to sue you.
A more interesting question is what happens when you remove something when you're asked to and then you end up caching it again. I suppose server owners might want the option not to cache data (or data and links, if you're Demon) for particular keys. That said, all that happens then is someone resubmits under another key.
FAQ says it isn't searchable, no one knows what's on their own site, no idea where documents are stored.
How does one retrieve a document? You have to know it's title and/or keywords, plug them into a client, and here it comes? If not searchable, how does IT find stuff in itself? (To anthropomorphize a bit.)
They're also charging alot more than, IMO, the music is worth.
You know, according to economic theory, if you pay for something you by definition, think it is worth at least what you payed for it, otherwise you wouldn't have paid for it.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I liken Freenet to Usenet in some ways. A system of interdependant servers who all agree to publish one anothers data.
As we all know, Usenet is subject to gross abuses. How do you propose to prevent such abuse on Freenet. Is there a Freenet 'death penalty?' Whats to prevent me from creating a porn site, or spam site on Freenet that could easily consume most of the available bandwidth and resources of the entire network?
John
If I read your FAQ correctly, FreeNet is based on a multi-layered cashing system (like cashing proxies on the internet today). For static content (i.e. graphic images, white papers, stories, mp3s, iso images...) this type of system would work great. On the other hand you have dynamic data (i.e. stock quotes, e-commerse, search engines, "today's top 10 list", ...) How do you plan on handling dynamic content such as slashdot.org?
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Ach... forgot to mention that Java on the Mac has notorious compatibility problems with otherwise compliant java. Yeah this is Apple's bad, but a lot of it can be worked around if I'm not mistaken.
Sorry for appearing like an idiot who didn't read the FAQ.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Being a Mac user and a non-programmer, I feel fairly well left out of the entire OpenSource movement. Of course I could always dump the MacOS in favor of LinuxPPC but, being a graphic designer who works both web and print, I cannot abandon programs such as Quark nor can I live without reasonable WYSIWYG rendering of fonts, something which Linux doesn't do terribly well with at the moment. (And not to mention reliable color calibration, but we won't go there.)
Often I feel as though the MacOS is neglected as a viable platform for OpenSource development because it's viewed as being a weaker platform because it lacks a CLI and has been, in the past, extremely unstalbe. Additionally the OS itself is decidedly closed (with the notable exception of Darwin), which tends to lead people away from OSS development.
What are your thoughts on this issue, the lack of OSS development for platforms other than Linux? Nothing would make me happier than to see a FreeNet client for the legacy MacOS and, of course, MacOS X.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Well the Java source is free as in beer. Just go download it when you download the JDK. I've used it several times to figure out what was actually going on behind the scenes. Actually you /cannot/ redistribute the JDK AFAIK...you must only redistribute the JRE.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I realize that the main idea is to make a network that's kind of anonymous in location... but where are you actually physically locating the servers?
I'm just curious about what laws you are actually under. I mean, we DID have the comments the other day about using Mir for a location out of international laws... but unless you have some major contributions in hand, that's not an option. So how can you legally get around having lawyers knock down your door?
Don't get me wrong, I think freenet is a great idea. It's just hard to see how it could possibly get off the ground with all of the laws it's going against.
In creating a decentralized information network, FreeNet is obviously drawing ideas from Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. Of course, the www itself also drew from the same, pool of ideas. Unfortunately, it grew so fast that the implementation was not perfected before the standards such, as html, became de facto. Several issues, such as two-way linking, version management, and information maintenance were never addressed. Now we are left with several semi-fixes and upgrades (e.g. XML), which try to make a more perfect internet. I saw in the FAQ that unused information would automatically be deleted, which takes care of some information maintenance.
Now for my questions: How do you address these other ideas (two-way linking, version control, etc.) that Project Xanadu attempts? Do you, indeed, draw any of your ideas from Xanadu, or is the inspiration simply to make a better www? How, in general, does the FreeNet project compare to Project Xanadu?
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
What is dynamic content? Well, in MOST useful cases, it's simply a dynamic query into a larger set of static content (slashdot and pricewatch are good examples of this) This is necessary because the web browser architecture does not allow you to make these specific queries on your own without serverside help.
I don't know if FreeNet is going to be such that it will be practical to have forums like slashdot emerge (it sounds like it's going to be funcionally more similar to usenet than to the www, but I can't really tell).. but what we think of as dynamic content really isn't all that dynamic at all.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Is the architecture of Freenet such that it could someday be extended to gateway to or otherwise include/subsume other parallel systems?
If so, what would it take?
A little harsh, but I'm still unsure, even after reading the FAQ.
Many people have already made some (good) posts about the chance that people will just put up warez other illegal items. But what about the good? What sorts of documents would Freenet be better at handling than the WWW?
In essence, what content will be on Freenet that I can't get on the web? More precice information? Art sites? Less banner ads?
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"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
I must ask if you read up on freenet?
Basically...when data is requested, it propagates
ie is copied out to more servers, then those
servers also serve that data when it is requestd.
ie data has no "fixed home" it stays where it is
popular, and is eventually deleted from servers
that never see requests for it.
How would you do dynamic content when there is no
central area to hold a database or run code
on? I supose it could be done with javascript or
some such...but it would have to be all
client-side code.
kind of an interesting idea though.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
For the past couple of weeks I have considered contributing to an open source project and have hesitated due to the fact that even though I am competent in C and C++ my area of core competence is Java. Imagine my surprise when today while hunting around I found NOT one but TWO sizeable open source projects that primarily use Java; Apache's Tomcat server and now FreeNet.
Now on to my questions.
a.) Besides source code is there an object model or UML diagrams available for potential contributors to Freenet to view?
b.) Do you know of any other sizeable open source projects that use java primarily?
c.) Are you worried about Freenet becoming a haven for pirates and W4R3Z d00ds and if so are any steps being taken to combat this?
OK there are two things mentioned on the Web site about how this is supposed to work. And I have been forced to ponder about two of them:
/hardware/reviews/celeron/overclocking etc, right? Well first of all I want to know, like everyone else, who controlls this directory architecture? What if tons of garbage get pumped in, like hundreds of empty files and stuff? Also, you say it's not searchable? Well, I pictured that with a directory structure like the one outlined, one would be able to load /hardware and see directories like reviews, previews, articles, etc, in the directory, and that's how all directories would work, and thus be searchable? After all, woulnd't someone have to go around giving out the document location anyway? How anonymous is that? I think we'd be able to remain pretty annonymous by having at LEAST a username and password that each person can use. For example: /hardware/articles/athlon_rules.html->fleckster or something like that, tagging the file name with the user name, in a virtual manner, wouldn't really bother anyone, they could use a bunch of phony logins if they really need to remain anonymous, right?
1) Directory architecture.
People should be able to access documents in a manner like
2) Centralization
You say that there will be no centralization. So how are all of the new servers gonna know where all the other servers are? My point: doesn't it seem like there will HAVE to be at least one mothership of all servers to give out lists of all other servers? It's like saying I could get a list of all Quake III servers without a master server containing a list of public servers. Basically, this doesn't seem like it can happen without one master server, unless you reimplement TCP/IP communcations to work like DNS does, and "just find stuff" by hierarchy, but that doesn't seem quite possible for something that RELIES on TCP/IP, does it?
Well that's it. Thanks a ton for listening.
............ no.
Unfortunately or not, chances are your friends will remain poor musicians. If they are interested in making money, they should get into a game that is less rigged (say, bricklaying). Why is it that so many musicians expect to get paid for what they do? Because the music industry itself has created an image of the rock star, the big bucks, etc. It's a hopelessly flawed dream.
Quit blaming Napster. This technology -- peer to peer file exchange -- is only going to grow. It's here to stay. If the music industry wants to save its fat ass, it will adapt to it and figure out how to make even more money than they do now (by all reports, they make more money than ever, even with so called MP3 piracy).
I'm sorry, but you sound like an apologist for retro technology (compact disc and the old distribution model). Things are changing -- if you don't get out of the way, you'll get run over...
I know that http://www.slashdot.org/ gives me the latest version of Slashdot (modulo net delay).
But in Freenet, any dynamically generated document would have to have a different and cumbersome name for each generation. This makes impractical to publish dynamically on Freenet, isn't it?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
From what I read, in Freenet storage is unlimited but the scarce resource is URLs, names, URIs or whatever you call them.
How do you organize so that interesting documents have a name like "GNU license" instead of "/software/free/GNU/GPL/COPYING" because some decided that it would be funny to post a blank pixel with the name "GNU license"?
How do you avoid that "the good name are all taken"?
__
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I believe it used to be a practice a thousand years ago for petition signers to sign names ina circle, so that the "instigator" could not be determined from the order of signing.
The US supreme court ruled that political posters can be distributed anonymously, being a fundamental right.
Voting is anonymous.
Anyone afraid of anonymity is being awfully silly. Only Big Brother need fear it.
--
Infuriate left and right
* A static IP address
* No Firewall or Proxy between your machine and the Internet
It goes on to say that a static address is not *strictly* necessary, but if your address changes, you will need to rejoin the network.
I am on Roadrunner, like I'm sure a great number of other people out there who would like to participate in Freenet. However, I also filter traffic between my machine(s) and Roadrunner with a box running NATD/IPFW. Simply telling NATD to forward traffic for the port(s) on which I have configured Freenet to listen does not seem to work. I have been told that this is a fairly well-known issue and that Freenet actually communicates over many ports, which really *does* require that you have a completely open and "unencumbered" network connection to be a Freenet node.
So the question is, doesn't this seem to be counter-intuitive to the sorts of people who would like to run Freenet nodes? Doesn't it seem that the type of person who would like to make available an anonymous, distributed repository for information would also like to keep that machine fairly well locked-down? Are there any plans to change the protocol or node implementation, or whichever part of the Freenet system that seems to require that you run it on a machine sitting out for the whole world to see? (Or have I been completely mis-informed and am just doing something wrong?)
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
First, let me give you some background. My step-father - whom I've spent a good deal of my life with - is a musician, he owns a high-end studio store where I also work, and my mother has been a caterer/lighting/rigging crew member for concerts since I was 10.
The only bands that make any money off of concerts are the insanely popular ones - read Smashing Pumpkins, the Stones, etc. The only reason any band would EVER tour is to promote their CD. Although they only make $1.50 or so from each sale, having thousands of people buy their CD is much better for them than spending their entire lives on the road, maybe making close to that for each concert goer. Keep in mind though, that even famous bands like Blink-182 don't fill stadiums - they fill clubs of 5000 people, usually playing with other bands who also take a cut. And here's other people (& items) that take a cut:
Promoter
Tour Bus Drivers
Caterers
Rigging Crew
Lighting Crew
Mixing Crew
The Venue itself
TicketMaster
Advertisment for the Show
Now add in traveling expenses - bus rental, gas, expensive hotel rooms, meals out, road gear, for EVERYONE on the crew, and you can see how quickly the $20 joe schmoe gave them for the concert has disappeared. Or they could sit at home, write more and better music, and collect money from CD sales. Even though record labels profiteer like crazy, it's only because bands usually wouldn't have happened without initial investment from said record label. Putting together a good tour and producing records are VERY expensive, as stated above.
The only way "free music" could ever work is by the honor system - you listen to one of their songs, you give them $0.50 for each song. The problem is the honor system will never work - kids will always want something for free, take advantage of it if possible, and leave the artist twisting in the wind. So please buy the CD - pay the people who deserve to make a living.
IF YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR THE MUSIC, DON'T LISTEN TO IT. It's that simple.
Ghetto
A witty saying proves nothing. -Voltaire
How do you forsee freenet being used? Reading over the FAQ, it does seem like an ideal method of trading warez, porn & mp3s (similar to Napster or Hotline), although your ideal seems reminiscent of Project Gutenberg or the FSF -- sharing information without fear of censorship. The anonymous information sharing for legitimate purposes could be very important in places where sharing of information is suppressed (China, for example). 10 years ago, no one could have predicted that the Internet would be used as it is today. In 10 years, how do you forsee freenet being used?
In your FAQ you admit that FreeNet does not offer even a modicum of anonymity (ala Mixmaster), does not encrypt communication between nodes, and (I infer) is vulnerable to trafic analysis. So why is it useful? How can you possibly claim that "individual documents cannot be traced to their source or even to where they are physically stored"?
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 dependancy 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?
Maybe I'm just showing my ago, 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:
Seems like the existing Freenet is already a very good and useful thing, and it really doesn't need the confusion.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
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 (eg, music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts (eg, 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.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Most Open Source folks aren't the offenders here. They created their Open Source software so that they'd not have to bother with restrictive copyrights. But most of them are ethical enough not to engage in passing around music when they don't have the right to redistribute it.
My impression is that it's people who are entirely naive about copyright and intellectual property who are responsible for most of the passing around of music via Napster, and they are going to screw up the net for the rest of us.
So, if you are worried about net freedom, be a responsible net citizen. Don't pass around music when you don't have the right to redistribute it. Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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
It's pretty scary when Wired slams you with the headline, "Alternative Net Protects Pirates", which contained in the story gems such as:
d y/0,1096,500188504-500253045-501284316-0 ,00.html) , that's actually been the best article so far. The New Scientist m l , and ABCNews.com e ws/freenet000322.html
"
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(http://www.nandotimes.com/opinions/story/bo
is running "Out of control: The Internet is about to get even harder to police" in their current issue at
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_223135.ht
did a one-paragraph style summary of this article at
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/dailyn
, 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?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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?
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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.imag
e
- ...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?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
My thoughts when I first heard about this project were extremely positive for the first 5 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 it's 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 website, I'd be in some way traceable. And if I wasn't identifiable, there at least would be a mechanism in place (an email 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?
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 reprocussions to your group for creating this forum based on this fact?
tcd004
LostBrain