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Ian Clarke of Freenet Intereview
abe1x writes "Ian Clarke of Freenet is interviewed at Feed by Christopher Locke of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Pretty interesting, can't wait for Freenet to actually function smoothly on a large scale."
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I'm sure someone will. It's a pretty obvious and useful thing to do. Another neat thing to do would be to make Freenet search systems available on Mojo Nation. The search broker would accumulate a reputation from its response time and people's ratings, and people's block clients could use that (plus anything else) as a measure of trust, and as also a measure of how much Mojo they'd pay to use it.
I don't think Mojo Nation is really set up to deal with things like that, but it might be easy to hack it into a content tracker and a quartet of a block servers. (Tracker gets request for "search?Metallica", generates a response, hands the response to the quartet of local block servers, and tells the client where to get the blocks.)
It will also have the ability to prevent a small minority from promoting censorship. A few wealthy individuals might not need to evade censorship but I appreciate how the sword cuts in the other direction
Perhaps the comparason to a library is the problem. Freenet is a tool for current free speech. It's not a perfect archive.
Consider a library system. The system contains everything ever published. (Theoretically) It has systems for archiving old periodicals and newspapers, and keeps them forever. Specific branches focus on keeping specific things. (perhaps each keeps copies of it's local newspapers and magazines)
Popular, frequently requested books are found at multiple branches of the library. If a book has to circulate the system often, more branches will get the book.
I think you can see the obvious analogy to freenet at this point. As long as you keep all copies of your publications on your node, it's never removed from freenet. It dosn't rule out the possibility of a node-loss resulting in the loss of unpopular information, in the same way a library fire may rob the world of the only copy of the 1852 NYT.
--Dan
Every MP3 of the same track is encoded slightly differently. Different rates, different filters, different noise on the ripper. Every recompressed jpeg is different.
Yet all of these store the same information in the end.
Look at gnutella. What's the single biggest problem on gnutella? "NO CARRIER". A lost download means someone is now sharing an incomplete file. Oops.
Freenet's lowest layer is (content-hashed blocks of data) is immune to that, of course. But the blocks are small, much smaller then the files.
So, how do I find out if a file really exists, really is what it claims to be on the search, and really is complete?
Borrow a trick from the warez kiddies: Trusted sources.
Digital signing of meta-directories, digital signing of votes, etc. Falls right into the web of trust you mentioned.
Biggest problem with a WoT is web pollution. A large spamhaus will generate umpteen thousand keys, and create a web of them. If you touch the web, you've polluted yourself. With a system like PGP, where the web has a small TTL, it's not a big deal. With a system like freenet, your web is likely to go fairly deep. You also run into the problem of 'front' signers. Spammers who release good data using a 'front' and sign their spammer 'nyms from it.
Also, per-reader voting dosn't stop bad data from residing in the network. Too many people will be tricked by it.
--Dan
I'm not sure about this, but I assume that if he preferred not to go on record with that statement, the question would be stricken from the transcript of the interview.
"Whatever can go wrong, will." --Finagle's Law
... is that I started reading this... and then it hit me. I could read it... without any problems. Oh my that is sad.
F /...
---
Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
This was discussed in an ,a href="http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/07/29/9649295 99.html">editorial on Freshmeat a little while ago. The editorial has a couple problems, but on the whole it's pretty good. There are still a few kinks to work out (it's not always easyt o tell if information is accurate, and no one's going to want to vote on whether it is or take the time to reload to get the official page), but it's a step toward a workable scheme.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
This was discussed in an editorial on Freshmeat a little while ago. The editorial has a couple problems, but on the whole it's pretty good. There are still a few kinks to work out (it's not always easy to tell if information is accurate, and no one's going to want to vote on whether it is or take the time to reload to get the official page), but it's a step toward a workable scheme.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Hmm. Seems to me that the trademark you listed belongs to the folks that registered it. And if they don't want to enforce it, they don't have to.
And somehow I doubt you speak for them.
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
The argument I'm making isn't really about Freenet. My point is that the problems Freenet poses to democratic law are a dim spectre of the problems nano and genetics and other New Technologies will pose.
Freenet is not self-replicating, but, like Gnutella, it is distributed. This gives is some sense of the slipperiness society will feel in managing the New Technologies.
How do you make that leap?
Just because a technology (Old or New) allows you to achieve power doesn't justify the power you've achieved with it. If I take over your house by home invasion with loaded handguns, it doesn't mean that I'm justified because I can be "safe" in doing so, in that no one can stop me.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I don't think progress was decided in the past by democratic means.
There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.
I don't particulary have any affinity for the "rules" as they stand now. I do think Humanity deserves a chance to work out for itself what the rules should be, and not have them handed to us at technological gunpoint by an elite.
You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree and call it freedom.
It, in this case, being the right of an individual to make his will universal law via technology? That doesn't resemble any kind of freedom I know.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
"It wouldn't spread if people didn't want it. That's as democratic as it gets."
No, democracy is when individual people use their individual votes to create a consensus, and then create laws based on it.
Subverting laws with technology -- like driving a truck filled with explosives into the Oklahoma City Federal Building -- isn't democracy. Just because a few people like you have the power to destroy a consensus you don't agree with doesn't justify your doing so.
Unless you believe in fascism.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
That address should read:
mr_dan_zap@yaBOYDOIHATESPAMMERShoo.com
Typos. Damn them.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Held responsible by whom? If we let technology develop uncontrolled, without constructing a much stronger political infrastructure around it, no entity will be able to enforce anything.
Think Gnutella here. They were supposedly under the watchful eye of AOL, but AOL wasn't watching carefully enough. After Gnutella was released, the concept of who was responsible didn't even matter anymore. The genie was out.
Apply this sort of scenario to a genetically modifed plant, or a malicious nanotech, and you have chilling consequences. Putting the people who created, unleashed, or utilized a particular New Technology in jail isn't going to remedy the problem.
That's the bite of the New Technology.
It's not like a toxic waste spill which you fine Exxon for and clean up. Because these new technologies are self-replicating, they can have effects which simply CAN'T be cleaned up.
Take your nuclear bomb example.
What if I create a new kind of bomb? This bomb has a 49% chance of setting the atmosphere on fire. I really don't think it'll happen. But it might.
I haven't done anything wrong, and the bomb DOES have a 51% chance of just blowing up the hundred square miles I own.
When you ask me not to do it, I tell you, "Hey, if my bomb really does set the entire atmosphere on fire, you can throw me in jail."
Even though this situation is total fiction, something very much like it WILL happen in the future. At some point, if our political infrastructure continues the way it is now, a very small group will have control of an unimaginably powerful technology; a self-replicating technology that will make the a-bomb look like someone popping a brown paper bag. And they won't be inclined to use it responsibly.
To stop, or least delay this for as long as possible, we need to create structures which only allow these kind of technologies to be developed with democratic approval, and both social and technical safeguards built into the process of development.
Because if we ever have to enforce the malicious use of these kind of technologies, it will simply be too late. There may not be any of us left to do the enforcing.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
"Things can get fucked up with a small elite, as well as with a whole country. Just because one billion people believe one thing, doesn't make it more correct. What a person with 300 IQ believes and wants, could also be just as wrong."
I totally and completely agree.
I wasn't suggesting we move towards a one-world-order run by a few eggheads. That secenario is only slightly less preferable than turning the world into chocolate cake.
In much the same way as missile defense systems use technology to protect us from technology,
I believe that technology can be used to implement a new kind of government that could protect us from the government. The big difference is that, instead of being hierarchical, like Napster, this new government would be distributed, like Gnutella. It would be a collection of protocols which... well, let me put up an earlier post from Slashdot:
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You know, whenever anyone talks about the future myriad combinations of Internet and government, we always seem to get the most obvious, uninventive predictions. "File your taxes online! Vote online! Go to the DMV online!" Faster methods of doing things exactly the same way we do them right now.
Isn't anyone else out there thinking that maybe this kind of technology has the ability to change the way we think of government itself?
For instance, I wonder to myself sometimes if there isn't a new way to model the political boundaries of the world along the lines of the Internet. Here's a vision: A world where small individual node-states conduct commerce with each other by following universally agreed upon protocols, but remain largely autonomous internally. In much the same way as it doesn't matter whether or not you hook up a Mac, Wintel, or Linux box to the net as long as you send and recieve packets the way you're supposed to, couldn't we imagine a world where these little node-states allowed people the maximum amount of freedom to live the way they wanted as long as they followed agreed-upon procedures for routing goods and people through them?
I imagine a patchwork quilt of different autonomous mini-states, like websites, each where the people living there determine their own rules. True freedom requires exactly this kind of diversity.
As the world's population gets larger and more interconnected, it's crucial to note: Democracies become less virtuous as they become large, and any sufficiently large democracy is indistinguishible from tyranny. Don't believe me? All right, here's an analogy.
Let's say we all want to go out to dinner. All 100 of us. 49 of us happen to be vegetarians.
At Restaurant X, the procedure is simple. There's one big table, and one waitron. We all go, sit down, look at the menu and vote. Everyone eats what the majority decides. Unfortunately, 51% of us wanted the Filet Mignon (which we heard was quite good here). This leaves 49% of us without anything to eat. Democracy isn't always so tasty after all.
But at Restaurant Y, they have 10 tables. You still have to vote at each table, and the majority still determines what everybody eats, but now we have 99% of our party happy: 5 tables of 10 meat-eaters, 4 tables of 10 vegetarians, and one table with 9 happy vegetarians and 1 meat-eater who doesn't get to eat what he wants. Maybe he'll ask if he can pull a chair up to the table behind him?
Extrapolate this meat-and-veggie conflict to more contentious issues like abortion (or even IP laws) and it's easy to see how democracies are only virtuous when they're small.
So how big is a node-state? I live in the U.S., and as a practical test-case, I'm going to say county-sized. I think the modern county has the approximate amount of people that the Founders based our ideal of democracy on. But in all honesty, I think science and technology could help determine what the proper size for a semi-autonomous unit of governance should be. It's not impossible to model, and the idea seems exciting to me.
In any case, I find myself excited and curious: how can the technologies we have enable us to envision new ideas of government, in which we can all live freer lives? Any thoughts the ideas I've mentioned are appreciated, too.
-------------
There's more I could say here, but I think I'll just sum up for the moment by saying that this is the most virtuous form of government I can imagine.
As far as protecting us from the New Technologies goes, I really think that this idea has a number of benefits to offer, not the least of which is that I believe the smallness of the node-state fosters a greater sense of stewardship over your corner of the world. I think part of the protocols that would regulate goods transport and economic transactions between node-states might involve a re-routing of economic transactions around you if your node is found to be polluting the network by inflicting externalities on other node-states. Sort of the equivalent of refusing to send or receive packets from a known spammer. In this case, though, the "spam" could be dumping waste in a river that flows south into your neighbors backyard, or growing genetically modified plants outdoors where the pollen can spread to the rest of the ecosystem.
Yes, there's still difficulties, but like I said somewhere else, I think this is the World's Greatest Hack. Maybe the Greatest Hack In History. Geeks have done harder things than this. Why not turn their energy to preserving democracy and freedom for everyone?
I'm working on setting up a site where interested folks can debate the idea, and start working out the kinks. One of the first things this style of government needs is a name. If you've got one, or you're just interested in pursuing these ideas further, e-mail me and I'll let you know when the site's up.
-- Dan Zap!
mr_dan_zap@yahBOYDOIHATESPAMMERShoo.com
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Last time I checked, it was completely feasible to create and run a customized freenet server that had some documents that it refused to delete.
"[Founding Father] one Not Particularly Thoughtful Kid, decides copyright is Good. Or at least that he's bored. He decides to create and unleash an ideology that promotes it. And it spreads. Suddenly the whole world begins to resemble what one person, or one small group of people, decided it should resemble. "
Errrr ,,, where did copyright come from in the first place?
Now hold on for one second there, partner...
How about the scenario "Jimmy hacks a virus bomb?" saying a nanobot can turn the world into chocolate cake is just as alarmist as worrying about ebola bombs. Not the fact that they aren't frightening, but simply that something like that is hard to deliver on a world-threatening scale.
One can get into a discussion on the feasibility of pastry-manufacture nanotech (the power for the miraculous matter transmutation comes from where?), but the important part is that when you look at it, these dire warnings are just misunderstandings given form. All kinds of dire warnings have been issued regarding antrhax missiles and the like, but if you take a look at modern warfare, the pinnacle of destructive power is simple - a big, big bomb.
While it's human nature to be afraid of something new, this kind of doomsaying defies logic.
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Get back to me when my brain starts working.
I mean, what if (and this is hypothetical! don't flame me for this part!) freenet ended up being used for ONLY passing peoples' credit card numbers around, becoming a major tool of international fraud and nothing else ? Then yes, we'd be better off stopping it!
And if it did? This would perhaps be indicative of a flaw in the current credit card system, no? Perhaps leading to a new more secure system, not based off of a pirateable number?
Technology begets technology. To halt a new development because it invalidates an older one is myopic.
Instead of attacking everything new in sight, our dinosaurish corporate friends might want to invest in staying ahead of the curve. Not even ahead, neccesarily. But maybe, just maybe reevaluating a system every 30 years or so isn't a bad idea.
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Get back to me when my brain starts working.
For Freenet to be successful, it would need a wide body of users, just like Napster. If people really believed in the morality of copyright, they wouldn't use these systems to violate it.
If millions of people DO use these systems to violate copyright, then it's no longer the actions or opinions of a single person that are changing the world. Ian Clarke is just the spark. We're the blaze.
I don't particulary have any affinity for the "rules" as they stand now. I do think Humanity deserves a chance to work out for itself what the rules should be, and not have them handed to us at technological gunpoint by an elite.
What are you proposing? We have some global poll and decide what "we" want as a species and then judiciously allow only the things that further that goal?
It, in this case, being the right of an individual to make his will universal law via technology? That doesn't resemble any kind of freedom I know.
Nobody's singlehandedly making their own will universal law. If the only person who agreed with the freenet author was the freenet author, it would not be a powerful notion. The reason he is able to "impose" his will on others is that many of those others also agree with him, and are willing to work towards the same goals.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Yeah, `technological progress.' What's so
progressive about yet another application layer
protocol, poorly designed and implemented?
Privacy? Bullshit. It's anonimity, which is not
the same. Moreof, it doesn't make the resources
impossible to track. Just abit more complex.
Now relax and go, do something. Read on ISO/OSI
model, or watch Disney cartoon, whichever is more suitable
to your intellectual level.
KuroiNeko
Hemos, didya lose your clue?
How can run, save smoothly and on large scale,
something developed by a guy who knows rat's
ass about what primary key is and how to make it
work in distributed environment?
Well, prolly the problem is that Slashdot is
running MySQL, and stupid things like PKs and DRI
are not required? Even, are bad to karma?
KuroiNeko
I'm not so sure. Take the invention of the television, for example. From what I understand, it was essentially developed simultaneously in several places at once. After inventing the TV, If the guy here in the U.S. had said "Ooh. I better just forget about this TV thing. It's going to be the next opiate of the masses," we still would have had the television that was invented in Europe.
I think invention tends indeed to happen in this sort of distributed way. Stone tools appeared on several continents at more or less the same time in societal development, even when the rates of development were quite different - see Guns, Germs, and Steel.
I really do have to agree that "technology can't be stopped." To stop it would be to have a society, a world really, where every member has a common will or a common set of goals. Due to chaos or evolution or whatever, this has never been the case and never will be. Given that as a basis for action, we have little choice but to attempt to adapt as technology races on.
If we were to "monitor" technology as it is invented, who is going to do the monitoring? The government? I think not. We wouldn't have a government for long. Industry? Which biotech company makes the final decision on whether to release the drug that cures AIDS?
Even if some government/multinational wants to stop freenet, if the will of the people is for it to continue, it simply cannot be stopped. Technology is like a river. You can struggle and fight to swim upstream in order to stay in place or you can use your energy to navigate the rapids and the falls and stay afloat much longer. The Zen of technology navigation.
As you may or may not know, it's a Java app. It not only runs on various flavors of Windows and Linux, I believe some folks have it running on Macs, BeOS, etc.
IMO it shouldn't be out for public use yet. It's pre-Alpha-quality software. It's not that it's poorly designed, it's that right now it's very, very incomplete. No search feature (yet), no GUI (yet), protocol needs work....but I expect that once it hits its stride it will blow right by Gnutella. Alls we got to do is encrypt transmissions and it will be unstoppable :)
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
How should the Gnutella protocol be modified, i.e. what is wrong with it now?
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
They've already thought of this problem from what I've read on the site. There won't be a problem with people voting down information, because the only thing you can do is vote yes by downloading a file. Afterwards, if the file isn't what it says it is, you can take back your yes vote.
Warning! Wandering and sometimes slightly offtopic, stay with me to the end!
:-) is trying to get to is that technological change _can_ facillitate societal change. How society changes is up to us as individuals, which is the big caveat. I only hope that we (in the US) have not grown so lazy and fat that we refuse to make improvements when opportunity presents itself.
Firstly,
>There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.
>You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree nd call it freedom.
Well said!
> set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
Our society (USA) is not really democratic, and I am not talking about the representative aspect of it. I really am worried about the lack of concern for the rights of individuals by those in positions of power. I don't want to sound like Jon Katz here (although I know I will anyway) but the present arangement of electoral votes being all but decided by special interest groups (especially corporations) will inevitably destroy the rights of the average citizen.
Governance by humanity is failing.
Even, or more to the point especially, my father, sees his rights eroding. This is a man who is 78, and has seen a lot. He grew up in the great depression, fought in WWII, and raised children throuth the 50's, 60's, and 70's (yeah, there are 10 of us;_) ) and has seen the change. His position is that our elected representatives no longer look at the rights of citizens first and foremost.
Governance by humanity is failing.
The technologies developed developed in the middle part of the century served to enslave us by giving us controlled, censured, moderated information. TV and radio are controlled by those who want to control us. The internet could be the spark that will burn the whole rotten mess down. _Provided that it stays free_. The only way (until recently) to guarantee freedom on the internet was to mirror "unpopular" information on foreign hosts, but that approach is suspect. The US weilds too much influence to depend upon it.
Freenet, by making information truly anonomous, distributed, and secure could prove a much superior approach. Of course it has its own technical hurdles to overcome, but it is a start.
What this rant
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" *or something like that*
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
LOCKE: So let's start with the basics: When did Freenet get started? And how did you originally
envision it?
CLARKE: I started the Freenet project when I was at university as my fourth year project. I
completed the design in, I think, July of 1999. Freenet is a system designed to allow the distribution of
information on the Internet, in an efficient and anonymous manner. Much like a library -- a library
where anyone can place books in the library, and anyone can borrow books from the library with
complete anonymity.
LOCKE: I was just looking at your FAQ on the site, and it's very complete as to background, and
answering some of the dicier questions about criminals and pirates, and terrorism, and pornography, and
copyright infringement. Maybe a good way to get into that is to ask you what your take is on the current
Napster flap.
CLARKE: Well, I mean, I think that it's unfortunate. I think that the RIAA is making a mistake trying to
fight technology... There's a whole succession of technologies that the RIAA has tried to stifle -- and
failed. And, in the longer run, it's been demonstrated that those technologies have actually benefited the
recording industry. I think that will also be the case with digital distribution of media on the Internet.
Although the Internet will probably start to challenge conventional ideas of copyright.
LOCKE: On your FAQ you say threats to traditional publishing and recording industries have come
from radio, the mimeograph, television, photocopier, magnetic tape, compact disc, video cassette
recorder, et cetera. So what you're saying is that there's a long history of technologies of plagiarism, you
might call them.
CLARKE: Well, I think I would make a more general point than that. I think that you cannot try to
prevent technological progress. What you must do is take a step back, and say, "How can we adapt to
this new technology?" Because, you know, even if the RIAA succeeded in stifling a particular
technology in America, they're going to have a very hard time stifling it in the rest of the world. And
eventually it's going to creep back in. I think, generally speaking, any effort to try to prevent
technological progress to preserve your existing business models is just short sighted, and doomed to
failure.
LOCKE: I recall a case when the U.S. federal government was fighting the export of 128-bit
encryption. Some site called hushmail.com set up, I think it was in Barbados, and offered free 128-bit
encrypted mail to anybody who wanted to sign up on the site. So they went offshore a few miles and just
said, "Well, stop this." It's the old story of the Internet routing around obstacles. Let's talk about, for a
second, the difference between Freenet and Napster. I mean, obviously, the courts are stepping in, and
there's the potential of Napster being stopped by judicial decree, although I suppose that's questionable
along many lines. But, how does Freenet differ from that exposure to a particular government saying,
"You're not allowed to do this."
CLARKE: Okay, let me start with the motivations of Freenet. Freenet was designed to permit free
distribution of information, even under a government, which is intent on preventing that. Now because of
that, Freenet has been specifically designed to withstand attack by a government, even to withstand
attack by its own developers. So, really, Freenet has been specifically designed to be immune to any
kind of judicial attack. Sure, they might try to sue me, for example -- I'm an individual, and I can be
sued. But it would get them nowhere, because it would have no impact whatsoever upon Freenet.
LOCKE: There's enough code out there now, that if all your equipment was confiscated, others would
carry on the project. There's no one head to cut off, in other words.
CLARKE: Even if they put me in jail, confiscated my hardware, Freenet would not miss a step. In fact,
it would probably benefit Freenet, because
LOCKE: Free PR.
CLARKE: Freenet has been designed with this kind of situation in mind, from day one.
LOCKE: You know, it strikes me that the real story is not the particular fate of Napster, but the overall
dynamics that the Internet brings to bear on such issues: Here is a mechanism for distributing MP3s
peer to peer, which is Napster today. And the business concerns try to stop that through whatever
means available. Then what comes behind it is a much more robust response. In which case I'm talking
about Freenet, which is potentially a hundred times scarier because you really can't do anything about it.
CLARKE: Although I think it is important to stress that Freenet was not designed with the issue of
copyright in mind. It was not designed to be the next Napster. It was actually a journalist who first said
to me, "Hey, well couldn't you do the same thing as Napster, but better?" But in terms of the actual
genesis of Freenet, I wasn't thinking about MP3s, I wasn't thinking about music, I was thinking about
freedom of speech.
LOCKE: Let me put your feet to the fire here, slightly. The first time we spoke you said very explicitly
our mission here is to destroy copyright. Maybe you don't want to go on record with that, but that was
pretty explicit, and I thought it was interesting.
CLARKE: Okay. Let me clarify. I do think that copyright is a bad thing, but my initial motivation was
not copyright. First, people started saying to me, "Hey, this could be used to distribute stuff without
enforcing copyright." Then people started to say, "This can be used to distribute material without
enforcing copyright, therefore, it shouldn't be allowed." And that put me in the situation where I had to
justify what Freenet did. So yes, I did come to the conclusion that copyright was a bad thing, but that
was not the initial motivation behind Freenet.
LOCKE: It seems like the initial motivation was free speech: unbounded ability to publish.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: When we first talked, I said that I thought that this mechanism would largely appeal to
contraband information.
CLARKE: Sure.
LOCKE: Whether it was whistle blowing by employees on companies dumping, you know, strontium
90 into rivers, or the Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak kind of stuff coming out of the Soviet Union.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: Or terrorist information or child pornography. Maybe you could address that suite of concerns
a little bit.
CLARKE: Well, if there's one thing that I got from a computer science background it's that if you find
yourself having to draw an arbitrary line between two things, you generally made a mistake earlier on.
And you need to rethink things on a more fundamental level. And so applying that philosophy, I thought,
well, why not permit everything, and then allow people to draw lines, for themselves.
LOCKE: You had a much more pragmatic argument, too: You made the point about child pornography,
that this is stuff people sell. They don't put it out there out of the goodness of their hearts. They can't sell
it on Freenet, so it's not an attractive proposition. I have a question about version control, which is if you
have an official document on a Web site -- a position statement or whatever it might be -- and it's a
kind of living document that gets updated according to the latest thinking. Now there's two possibilities
here. One is the revisionism that says, "Oh, we never said those things before, and the current version
doesn't reflect that stuff." It's something as simple as the definitive FAQ. Alternatively, you can have all
the versions, and you can go back and do the historical development of where did these ideas come
from, which dropped out, which were added. With Freenet you can keep all those versions -- but it
might be very hard to find the definitive current version of something.
CLARKE: We're actually addressing that issue at this very moment. We're working on a mechanism
that we call sub spaces, whereby you can actually reserve a subset of Freenet space of keys. So, you
can basically kind of reserve an area of key space in which, for example, if you're publishing a daily
magazine, you can publish each daily version. Yes, you're right, Freenet does kind of retain information.
It is a kind of version control -- at any point you can go back to see what was written before. Provided
it hasn't been dropped from the system due to unpopularity. But, in terms of finding the first, or the latest
version, that's not actually that big a problem -- you can use an algorithm and find the latest one
reasonably efficiently.
LOCKE: We talked about the magnetism of contraband information. What do you see as the advantage
Freenet has over the Web as it exists today for information that's not at the perceived risk of censorship,
or of being somehow abridged by whatever kind of authorities. You know, if I were just publishing a
humor zine, why would I want to put it on Freenet, as opposed to the Web? Or do you see them living
parallel lives?
CLARKE: At the beginning of the conversation you asked me what Freenet was designed to be, and I
said it was designed to be an efficient means to distribute information. Freenet is actually much more
efficient than the Web in the way it distributes information. With the Web, if a hundred people in Europe
request the same document in America, that will travel under the Atlantic a hundred times. With
Freenet it will only travel under once or twice. And then a copy will be stored locally in Europe, where it
can be distributed to the other ninety-nine or ninety-eight people requesting it.
LOCKE: So that's a caching capability.
CLARKE: It is caching, but it's not. Because generally, with the cache, you've got the cache, and
you've got the main repository. Whereas Freenet is
LOCKE: So it's a distributed caching...
CLARKE: That's correct, yes.
LOCKE: Right. Well, that speaks to sort of mechanical efficiency. But are there ramifications outside of
that? I would guess, because you're counting frequency of requests, that you also get, almost as a side
effect, a ranking of popularity. And that tells you something about what people are interested in.
CLARKE: Well, in a way, yes: Unpopular information is dropped from the system. But there isn't really
any way to conduct a census on the Freenet, like, there are fifteen copies of this and twenty copies of
that.
LOCKE: I'm very interested in mechanisms whereby people can hook up with communities of interest.
And I see the potential here for a way to gauge the current levels of interest that would be fed back into
a community of users, and would begin to constitute, let's say, communities in potentia.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: I mean, we see these waves across the Internet, these sort of memic waves that break out.
Cluetrain was my Web site and book, and they both had some of that quality, certainly. But, to be able to
see those early on, and find places that you can hook up with like minded people, that seems to be a
dimension of Freenet that's very interesting. Are you pursuing anything along those lines?
CLARKE: Well, yes, I mean, Freenet does actually self-organize and aggregate similar information
together. And that similar information is not only in terms of it being physically similar information, but in
terms of similar people being interested in the information. So it's a little bit like systems like Firefly, or
Amazon, where Amazon will say that other people who like this book, also like these books.
LOCKE: So, are you actually bringing some kind of collaborative filtering to bear here?
CLARKE: Well, right now, we actually deliberately prevent Freenet from doing that. Or we kind of
scrambled that mechanism. And the reason for that is so that you don't get, you know, all books about
philosophy on a small number of machines, which could then be wiped out, due to a kind of localized
failure. So we deliberately scramble that mechanism. However, we are working on a searching
mechanism, which will actually exploit that.
LOCKE: So you would aggregate the index to reflect categories and taxonomies.
CLARKE: That's correct, although there wouldn't be any centralized index, as such. The search
mechanism would be completely decentralized.
LOCKE: But, virtually, you have a way to aggregate topical information by subject.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: So it's something more like Yahoo! than Altavista.
CLARKE: Yes. That's exactly what it'll do. It'll be like a Yahoo! directory. But it'll actually figure out
the categories for itself, rather than rely on anyone to tell it what the categories are.
Share your thoughts on Freenet, copyright, and free speech, in the Loop.
© FEED Inc. 2000
Actually, news capabilities already exist in Freenet do to a Freenet client for Unix/Linux named fnclient (which is written in Python). fnclient (which is admittedly somewhat slow) uses guessable enumerated keys to implement in-Freenet key indices and newsgroups. It is available from http://freenet.sourceforg e.net/contrib/fnclient-0.0.8.tgz. fnclient also can request normal files on Freenet. Note that there is a top-level index at index and a top-level newsgroup index at news/index. These indices are meant to provide master lists of various stuff (news/index is meant to be the primary newsgroup index). Be patient when using indices and newsgroups with fnclient - it is quite slow due to inherent architectural limitations imposed by Freenet 0.2. Note that these will be much faster in the future when searchin appears (which will *not* be Freenet 0.3, or Freenet 0.4).
>>If you were trying to build a library, would you only stock periodicals?
This is only a valid criticism for the current code. With data only purged when it falls off the stack, then implement more stacks. This IS free software. Unpopular information would then be dropped from more popular stacks to less popular stacks, say stored across tiers of servers or on tapes or WORM media instead of disks. True, the server would have to be able to say "I can get you what you asked for from the archive, but it will take a few hours" for which you could charge a few if you could work out the privacy details of anonymous payment. In college we called this mysterious service "Inter-Library Loan".
From what I can see, the server should be allowed to customize what it does with its own stack, so long as it accurately advertises its collection of keys to clients and other servers and deliver up what they request.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
yesssssss
If it's only one person, or one small group of people, then how does it spread? Obviously if the whole world begins to resemble Ian Clarke's vision, then he has succeeded in persuading people to adopt his vision. That's freedom, not fascism.
I look forward to more about freenet in the future. distributed applications are the future of computing, until alternate tech methods are developed. I enjoyed hearing from someone who may actually understand the mini-revolution that is occuring.
Pax Digitalia
Freenet was not started to end copyright. Freenet was started to stop censorship. Ian Clarke is not Freenet. Ian Clarke thinks copyright is bad. Many people are attracted to the Freenet development lists because they think that's what Freenet is about and they think copyright is bad.
But Freenet originally had nothing to do with copyright and for me, it still doesn't.
Freenet makes censorship more difficult and it ends the need to know *where* something is and it helps fix the problem of overloading websites.
This whole copyright thing is a product of the press attention that Napster has been getting. Music piracy has been around for a long time. We're attempting to do something much more interesting.
That unpopular information is dropped is one of the most common and most bizarre criticism of Freenet. You have to have a way to manage an endless supply of information and a finite amount of space. First recognize that popularity is local, not global. So the network won't be filled with Britney Spears MP3s like everyone seems to think. The area of the network which I form by connecting to my friends will more commonly have cool stuff that we as a group like than stuff which "the people" think is popular. But, if you don't like the throw out unpopular stuff strategy of resource usage regulation, you can check out freehaven.net (I give you a meg, you give me a meg, permanent storage based on trading) or mojonation.net (trading via virtual currency) or the ever popular Gnutella (I keep what I want, you keep what you want). You can choose amongst the available options whatever suits your tastes in resource management.
The actual problem here is with downloading untrusted information. That's what causes the problem with spam, the "Pat Boone" attack, and trojans. The solution to this is a trust system. We're working on a trust system based on digital signatures. It's all worked out, it's just a matter of implementing it along with all of the other hundreds of things we need to implement.
This isn't true at all. The time it takes to start downloading the file is the time it takes to contact the 5 or 10 servers and then get a response. So it's the cumulative latency between the servers, just like with TCP/IP, except that in our case it might take longer to find the file (you have to search the network for it). But the file start downloading immediately once it's found. And if anyone in your area has already requested it, then it will only be a few hops away. The clustering is not arbitrary. It is somewhat arbitrary. You tell your node what nodes to talk to. So if you only want to talk to nodes in Europe, you can configure it as such and the geographical clustering which Ian talks about will happen. If you want to only talk to nodes run by former Scientologists, you can do that too and then scientological clustering will occur. Or you can only talk to people you meet on alt.fan.jwz and then there will be clustering of pictures of jwz.
There is a hypertext distributed message board by Joe Soelbrig. There are also Freenet newsgroups that you can access via the fnclient Freenet client. I am also working on an NNTP gateway to the Freenet newsgroups so that you can read them in your favorite news reader.
What you are looking for is an Eternity service. The only implementation of this that I think has a chance is FreeHaven at freehaven.net.
What would be particularly useful is a
FreeHaven Freenet gateway. Permanent information storage and fast, unslashdottable access at once.
Your definition is most certainly not the definition being used in architectural whitepapers.
The definition of popularity in Freenet is simply what's being requested and it's local, not global. When a file is requested, it gets bumped up in the list. When there is not enough room, something on the bottom is kicked off. It's more complicated than this to avoid abuses like flooding the system with a bunch of junk so as to knock every useful off. But that's the basic idea.
But you are right that the obscure, unheard-of, and unknown gems will not last long.
HOWEVER, cult phenomenons which only a small community like will proliferate in that small community, just not on the rest of the network. And so it should be! If there is ever a boom in the desire for such an obscure text, it will still live in the archives of this small community and instantly proliferate out onto the network.
This doesn't solve all problems. (like I said, freehaven.net). But it's better than the web. It protects hot spots of interest. *Something* needs to protect hot spots of interest, after all. They are the most under attack. That which no one cares about or even knows about is an entirely different problem solved in an entirely different way. Join the two and you're doing pretty good.
It is a tool for the propagation of free speech! FREE SPEECH! It has nothing to do with violating copyright! AaRGH!
Why do you need strong encryption to pirate MP3s? You don't even need anonymity! People have been doing it on IRC for years. Napster hasn't even been shut down yet.
Freenet wasn't designed to be a permenant datastore. Also, as more disk space is allocated to Freenet, it becomes less likely that things will drop out.
The way Freenet works, there is a stack that represents all the information in a particular node. When a peice of info is requested, its put higher in the stack. If it gets to a certain point, its deleted. A big hard drive == bigger stack == less likely to drop out.
In this way, only really unpopular stuff will drop out, like a twenty-year-old doc about Intel's new 8086 processor.
------
Not a typewriter
The freenet developers just can't decide what they want this tool to be. Is this a tool for violating copyright, or is it a tool for the real propagation of free speech?
As someone who follows the development of Freenet closely, I can tell you that the core developers agree that it is for free speech. Copyright gets draged along for the ride, but since they don't particularly like copyright anyway, they continue. However, they don't apreaciate people calling it "a better Napster", and neither do I.
I also find it interesting, that the developers believe in deleting documents that are unpopular
It wasn't intended to be an infinate storage space, like the Eternity Service was, but big hard drives make it so that only the most unpopular documents aren't there. Also, if there is a specific group of people who are allways asking for a specific set of docs, it will propagate around that group, whereas the rest of the network dropped it long ago.
Additionaly, as hard drive space becomes cheeper, it will be less likly that stuff will drop out. I personaly have a 30 GB drive, with one partition of 20 GB just sitting there, unused. I have no issues with devoting this to Freenet. Even Microsoft bloatware would have a hard time filling that space :). If I had a big pipe on that computer, lots of stuff could be stored and requested, but it would take a very long time for a very unpopular file to ever drop out of my storage space. Unpopular in the sense that absolutely no one was asking for it.
Even in addition to that, the drop out provides a protection against those who would spam the network by requesting a useless file. As they request the Freenet key, it will propagate to machines closer to them. The next time the user requests that file, it will call a node it knows its on and no others. That means the rest of the network would drop the file and only a few nodes close to the would-be spammer would have it.
but won't let people who enter keys delete their own documents.
For one good a simple reason: If the FBI came a raided you, demanding at gun point that you delete that doc describing, in detail, say, the Carnivore, you couldn't do it, even though you inserted it into the network. Why exactly is it so important to delete files you inserted, anyways?
------
Not a typewriter
you're right in that the idea of reserved keyspaces makes announcements easier to implement. I hadn't heard of that before the interview.
Together with a searchable keyspace, it should be possible to implement a usenet-like announcement network in such a framework, which would, however, still lack a mechanism to attach ratings to certain keys and persons. Only in combination with these becomes the announcement network (or rather, in this case, the network of announcement keyspaces), a powerful tool: Person X (who has a nickname on FreeNet) has subscribed to announcement channel Y and rated this channel as "excellent". Because I trust person X, I can now subscribe to channel Y too, instead of channel Z, which has been rated by person X as "SPAM-Channel, run by PR company".
Only with such a distributed, pseudonymous announcement & rating system, possibly (and preferably) implemented within the existing FreeNet framework, will it be possible to make FreeNet truly independent of outside sources (which the WWW is, in fact, not).
--
Oh, you mean evil people like Samuel Morse who decided that the Pony Express is bad, and invented the telegraph to subvert it and suddenly the whole world begins to resemble what one person decided it should resemble?
Suddenly the whole world begins to resemble what one person, or one small group of people, decided it should resemble. Scary sure ... but you've got the wrong moment.
That happens when, if you believe in copyright, you download copyrighted music and use it, not when the tool to make it possible is created.
And it sure is changed if you click on over to fairmusic.com and pay what you think its worth - directly to the artist.
Are you asking for a vote on every invention or something?
File sharing antagonises the control element of copyright - it needn't antagonise copyrights other function - getting the artist rewarded.
Cheers
James
I meant fairtunes.com
1. a right, which can only belong to the author, over the first release of their work (not over subsequent copying &c) and to stop others using their creation for profit.
Can't make money? Bollucks. See the Street Performer Protocol and Stephen King making it happen
2. A short time-limited non-transferable patent where the application is made public for a real search for prior art (not half an hour in the patent office). A development period of, say, 12 months and then a limited revenue period to re-coup costs and, say, 20% profit.
After that it's public domain.
Cheers
James
The 'popularity' system of distributed caching should take care of that.
The real goods should be more popular than the spam (if not then the advertisement must be entertaining...)
Thus it will be cached more and eventually the spam will drop off the network.
Course some bastard will figure out a way - it just won't be easy and it will prompt a whole enw round of innovation and development.
And that is the exact reason we setup something called Fairtunes that allows you to voluntarily pay for copyrighted music that you may (or may not have) 'stolen'/downloaded.
Matt
co-founder
www.fairtunes.com
Lets face it, most of the world still uses Windows, and if freenet is ever to gain mass acceptance, it will have to run on Windows. Currently it does not, as I have tried on several machines. Just telling everyone...
Kalrand
-the voice of reason
Actually, that has come up before, and while I'm not an official spokesperson for /. by far, the problem would be keeping the /. version consistant with the original if they update theirs. ,br>
Also, if people visited the cached site, it would mess up their tracking statistics that the advertising guys use for the banner ads. (Oh no....)
-Space for rent
Interesting interview. (At least it broke the monotony here at work) I've never used Freenet myself before, and only dabbled a bit in things like napster and windows file sharing, but it does make sense as the further extension of the internet.
Definaetly a lot less biased than most interview you read (though they are by nature biased to some extent), it's at least worth a read
-Space for rent
Amen to that. Give that man a 5.
And his answer is just as bad..
Okay. Let me clarify. I do think that copyright is a bad thing, but my initial motivation was not copyright. First, people started saying to me, "Hey, this could be used to distribute stuff without enforcing copyright." Then people started to say, "This can be used to distribute material without enforcing copyright, therefore, it shouldn't be allowed." And that put me in the situation where I had to justify what Freenet did. So yes, I did come to the conclusion that copyright was a bad thing, but that was not the initial motivation behind Freenet.
goosh.. you mean what I wrote can be used to break the law.. I didn't think of it like that.. Well, I guess that law sucks and shouldn't be a law then..
What kind of logic is that???
"Intellectual property" is the term for a creator's rights to a valuable idea, right? Show me a single company that is capable of thought, and therefore entitled to protection of its "intellectual property", and I will show you an employee who actually did the work, and no longer has the right to use their own ideas.
And this gets a plus 5 ?? please ??
The employee is getting paid for their work, no ?? If they feel they can do it on their own.. good for them.. guess what they'll do.. Start their own company and hire a few others.. There are people behind these companies... Thats how things work....
...which would be fine, except in this case the "one small group" is not an industry association representing large multinational corporations.
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Sounds like you should get your intestinal gas problem treated.
And then, the RIAA/MPAA/anti-piracy-goons will be able to flood the system with anti-votes for copyrighted material. You just can't win.
Check my other reply about this.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
The answer is, Democracy. Civil disobediance is a right provided you accept the consequences of your acts.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
I think the reason that things are progressing so slowly is because what we're doing is REALLY HARD.
Well, that *sounds* convincing, but a quick check of the mailing list shows that there is roughly zero discussion going on at the moment about the crucial issues I mentioned (updating and searching). And roughly the same amount of development. Why do think that is? Sure my post was controversial, but I stand by what I said. I think the real problem is that a lot of developers who have the right stuff to attack and solve these problems are not being well-received by some developers already entrenched in the project. Try it yourself and you'll see what I mean.
Open source developers tend to exhibit well-known cat-like behavior: they do what comes naturally and move on to some other project that can make better use of their talents. If you go back, *way back* through the list archives you'll see exactly what I'm talking about happening over and over again. Don't be distracted by the volume of posts - you have to look closely at the quality to see what I mean. Whatever, I wish you the best of luck.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If you need help to get Freenet to work on windows 98 (like I did!) go to this page http://freenet.netunify.com/13. It does in fact work, but there is hardly anything on it yet; still it is fun to be able to use it at this early stage.
Too bad you did'nt get sucked into the television.
The big challenge here is to respond to Freenet's antagonism of copyright in a way that lays the groundwork for responding to similar technological threats. To set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
Um... let me get this straight... the following inventions all have something in common:
Audio Tape Recorders
Video Tape Recorders
Photocopiers
The copy or cp command
Freenet, Napster & Gnutella
Each one allows the user the freedom of choice to use unethically.
Take away that freedom of choice and you have tyranny.
Every advance in information technology which expands duplication and distribution will be no different than me taping a CD and giving the tape to a friend.
It wasn't always such. Copyright is a modern practice that not all nations yet believe in. There are some good arguments either way, but these arguments inevitably drag technology into the debate and try to water it down or restrict it, which is infringing upon the ability of the ethical and unethical, alike to have their freedom of choice. Ergo...
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You guys should like calm down with all this stuff
Nobody wants to read your emails..
I dont know why you guys think that your emails are sooo important
Do you have something to hide?
chaos, mayhem, riots
Have you registered the trademark in Ireland or at the EU trademark office? If not, I suspect you are SOL.
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Freenet rocks.
I wish someone would write a client that speaks both Freenet and Mojo Nation protocols...
There should be "bridge nodes" that speak at least two protocols and that link the various distributed networks together.
And I hate to point this part out, too, but not only are we not nearly as controversial; we got there first. I'm pretty certain there's actually even a trademark on the name.
[ looks ]
Yep. 1986.
And for the anal-retentives in the audience, yeah, I think a court would accept a dilution argument, given the close association of the problem spaces.
Cheers,
-- jra
-----
Of course I have a choice about whether to install a freenet node. Thats not the question. The question is: Freenet, and other technologies, if used widely, have consequences even for those who do not use it, in that, for instance, copyright will become untenable. Is it therefore OK that those who introduce such things do so unhindered by social constraints ?
Spouting naive egoism doesn't answer every (or possibly any) question. People don't live in hermetically sealed boxes, and therefore don't always get a choice when the "rules" start changing.
The problem with deleting via a key is that it's vulnerable to attack from a single source. Deleting old data is a distributed action and thus not vulnerable to an attack from a single source.
I suppose it could be made pseudonymous, like slashdot. If you want the +2 bonus you need to establish a reputation.
Pseudonymous communication is possible in an otherwise anonymous network through digital signatures. For example, if all slashdot posts were Anonymous Coward, someone could come along and create a client-side thing to automatically GPG sign posts and verify GPG signatures, hilighting posts from known-good GPG keys.
This sort of thing has been discussed on the cypherpunks sewer^H^H^H^H^Hmailing list for years.
Now imagine if you were to think of a band you used to like, musically similar to Foo Fighters. You could browse Freenet looking in Media/Music/Alternative/Rock then finding a few songs by Nirvana and realizing that was the band you were looking for.
OK, perhaps that isn't the best analogy to draw, but I think with Freenet you will be able to find a lot of information on a general category, as opposed to finding a specific piece of information.
So, Jimmy hacks a nanobot that turns everything into the world into chocolate cake. Jimmy likes chocolate cake!
Jimmy's gonna let it go, too, because he says that "anyone who hasn't climbed up onto the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder" and built an anti-chocolate cake nanobot deserves to get "stepped on".
Whee! Now the Mona Lisa, The Hoover Dam, and your house have all been turned into chocolate cake!
This can't be what you want.
The Bill Joy Point is that we have to stop thinking about technology as simply a liberating mechanism, and start reckoning with the unprecidented menace to freedom the New Technology offers. Freenet isn't even one of the New Technologies. But I think it's a premonition of them, and a good chance for us to ask ourselves the hard questions. What if there was a Jimmy with a chocolate cake nanobot? What should we be doing now to limit the kind of control of damage any one person can have through technology?
This is the biggest hack out there, and it's one all true geeks should be interested in.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I'm not sure you really can, in a totally anonymous system you must allow everything or nothing because you can't filter it reliably.
-- iCEBaLM
But you don't know who voted, this is a completely anonymous system, thats the point.
-- iCEBaLM
But then that leaves open the opprotunity for an organized effort to vote out legitimate content, I say don't impliment the voting system, make people work harder to kill the system, I mean, which is harder? Simply wasting little bandwidth to vote down legitimate information, or wasting a lot uploading bogus stuff? Not to mention if you allow people to vote off legitimate information then you have the possibility of no legitimate information remaining, with the organized effort to insert bogus information you still have both legitimate and bogus, so that raises the chances of finding actual legitimate info, when you know this kind of abuse will go on.
-- iCEBaLM
- the number of requests there will be for porn vids and Britney Spears MP3s, and the number of directions those requests originate from, especially relative to requests for other material
- the amount of relative space required per item for porn vids and Britney Spears MP3s, vs. that for fascinating treatises on the human condition.
As a past (and somewhat present) Usenet administrator, I've seen this effect in action before, where I've had to mark down expiry times on binaries groups again and again, and where newer caching news servers still spend nearly all of their time keeping track of binaries groups because that's where the reader demand is. Freenet will take over this task itself and automate it completely, but that will make the effect even more pronounced because just as the designer notes, it can't tell the difference. It only judges on one dimension - demand.The system can be tweaked, certainly - large objects can be penalised for instance - but in the end I suspect we'll find that 90% of the demand and 99.9% of the storage requirement is for recordings of Ms. Spears music and pictures of her navel. Whether this is really a failing depends on your goals going in.
That said, the only way to find out if it works is to try it, and (as has been noted) there are other models being developed that you can inject your great novel into as well. So bring it on. :)
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
I get so sick and tired of hearing this line again and again! Let's think about it. Technology is a human-driven enterprise. All biological metaphors are just that: metaphors. Except in the case of, oh, bacterial research, new and interesting inventions do not just pop into existence. Inventors think about what exists, and make new things to improve their lives. Or at least their pocketbooks.
We all have a responsibility to examine those inventions -- all technology, really -- to monitor its effects and decide whether it's really a Good Thing. I mean, what if (and this is hypothetical! don't flame me for this part!) freenet ended up being used for ONLY passing peoples' credit card numbers around, becoming a major tool of international fraud and nothing else ? Then yes, we'd be better off stopping it!
The attitude that "technology can't be stopped" is just irresponsible. If you start with that attitude, you back yourself into situations where a technology gets to the point that it can't be stopped. Self-fulfilling prophecy, that's all it is.
I was on the mailing list and worked a little bit on Freenet early on. I didn't witness as much ego as you describe. Maybe that's happened since I left.
I think that what the Freenet developers are trying to accomplish is considerably more difficult that what Napster and/or Gnutella have done. We're talking distributed caching, anonymous uploading, encryption of stores (at least there was talk of such). They're certainly not insoluble, but they're not trivial, either.
These documents will probably be unpopular, and will be eventually dropped off Freenet. Also, with a rise in Freenet's popularity I expect to see a corresponding rise in the use of cryptography. I know I plan to GnuPG sign most documents I put onto Freenet.
This "Web of Trust" is common among many cryptographic solutions.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That said, I think the primary effect of FREENET, if it is successful, will not be the ability of minority ideas to evade censorship, but the de facto eradication of copyrights on digital media. (And that fact makes its success all that less probable, of course.)
Couldn't any motivated user could poll the FreeNet and build his/her own archive?
Deja News would seem to be a useful analogy: USENET stuff hangs around for a while and then expires, but nothing stops motivated users, like Deja News, from archiving for later use.
Whoever does the archiving becomes vulnerable to physical/legal attact, but that is the nature of any physical archive
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
(Note that I didn't know about MojoNation when I wrote this, which also sounds very interesting, and does want to implement a rating system.)
--
Freenet is actually much more efficient than the Web in the way it distributes information. With the Web, if a hundred people in Europe request the same document in America, that will travel under the Atlantic a hundred times. With Freenet it will only travel under once or twice. And then a copy will be stored locally in Europe, where it can be distributed to the other ninety-nine or ninety-eight people requesting it.
this would solve the slashdot effect for content access overload, because it could be cached all over.. So slightly offtopic, Has SlashDot ever considered caching, or mirroring sites they point to? At least the first page, until freenet takes over?
air and light and time and space
Assuming you meant dealing with a very large supply of information, there are any number of possible solutions. However, I think that most people aren't going to be willing to give up any more than a tiny fraction of their hard drive and communications in exchange for a guarantee of their rights. Most likely, you'll see a lot of folks giving Freenet a few hundred megs and using it primarily to find MP3's and porn which they'll then move to more permanent, local storage.
The more "dangerous" or "subversive" content that finds its way out there will only stick around so long as its subject matter is popular. While this could be an interesting phenomenon to watch in and of itself, (like publishing a monthly count of the number of times various 'keyowrds' appear in a Freenet search each month) the end effect will still be far from perfect.
I'm not saying that Freenet won't serve a valuable purpose until a better solution comes along. I just want to debunk the statements that I keep seeing that it will be a perfect and complete means of protecting the right to free expression.
Humanity is fickle and emotional, and as a group, we have very short attention spans and poor memories. The same tragedies occur time after time, and no one ever knows about it, because it's just one voice lost in the noise. Free speech won't do you a damn bit of good if no one can hear you over all the people shouting, and it will do you even less good if you only have a relatively short time to make your message heard, after which it might as well have never existed.
So, can you have a completely anonymous system in which there is still at least a semblence of accountability? Or, will any channel of communication which completely seperates data from the identity of its creator be overwhelmed with raw noise?
If you don't want to accept the new "rules", then don't. If you don't ever log on to Freenet, then you've cast your vote against it. At least give others the freedom to cast their vote as they see fit.
Okay, I guess I don't make it up a rung -- the second-to-last sentence should have read: "...potential for constructive or dangerous applications..."
Although it's not quite as simple as that, I guess there must be hundreds of cases like this all around the world. Just because something is made into a law, doesn't mean its perfect or even fair.
I understand that, but his answer makes it seem like he is against copyright only because people are taking offense to Freenet because it allows unauthorized copying. (Its this which has made Freenet so popular in the first place)
Let's face it: laws are made by governments, not by the common people. Laws should be made in order to help / protect / take care of the people, but they usually are not.
I believe in a lot of cases the government has overstepped it bounds... but you have to admit, 99.5% of laws are in place to "help / protect / take care of the people"
Take the copyright laws, for instance. They were made in order to protect the creators of works of music, art, etc. but in reality they're used to protect the big corporations who make money out of them.
Big Corporations who spend millions (mostly on peoples pay) shouldn't have the right to protect their creations?? Come on now....
And then, the RIAA/MPAA/anti-piracy-goons will be able to flood the system with anti-votes for copyrighted material.
...". I think the RIAA would have its hands full fielding a large enough force to overcome the millions of people and millions of files involved. If I recall how Freenet works (anyone who wants to chime in here with better info, feel free), it boils down to a 'one-IP-one-vote' sort of system, so any attempt at an automated attack would require a Class A address segment for the RIAA to use (which I wouldn't put past them). And if they really tried this sort of attack, perhaps something like the MAPS 'blackhole list' could be used to thwart them. (Anyone else notice how this measure/countermeasure scenario starts to resemble actual warfare? Hmmm. Wonder what a surplus Nike missile sells for these days. :-)
Surely a danger. But, as the old 60's song says, "they have the guns, but we've got the numbers
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
One of the areas of vulnerability Freenet has (one which it shares with Gnutella) is that it's possible to post bogus stuff (like fake MP3s containing anti-piracy messages, for example) in an effort to pollute the stream, so to speak. Clarke has said that he wants to eventually implement an 'anti-vote' (my terminology - I've forgotten his term for it) so that users who discover one of these files can demote it and cause it to eventually disappear. I hope that he can get that mechanism working before Freenet gets too widely used. Otherwise, I'm afraid that an organized effort to gum it up will result in a lot of bogus files with high 'popularity', causing them to persist for quite a while.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Napster
Gnutella
But Freenet has several unique features that distinguish it from Napster and Gnutella. I especially like the fact that content can be uploaded anonymously which is great for banned intellectual assets like DeCSS.
Ultimatly, Freenet will probably be good for the internet if it takes off with success - the idea of unrestricted, free and anonymous content publishing will encourage Web diversity without the fear of lawsuits or just plan technical limitations.
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Kiro
The freenet developers just can't decide what they want this tool to be. Is this a tool for violating copyright, or is it a tool for the real propagation of free speech?
People have said many unpopular ideas, and written unpopular essays, that over time American citizens grew to accept. No, it didn't happen overnight, and it may have taken several decades for us to accept something as true. "Citizen Kane" was plagued with bad reviews when it first came out, and is now considered one of the best films of last century.
I also find it interesting, that the developers believe in deleting documents that are unpopular, but won't let people who enter keys delete their own documents.
I appreciated the value of unrestricted resource and information sharing about 5 years ago, when arranging a simple trade of a couple sweatshirts across international boundaries.
Some may think nothing of this, but since I have conducted far more commerce around the world via the internet. Upon examination I, and my trading partners, are probably violating any number of trade, tarriff, informational or customs restrictions for either end of the transaction. Multiply this by a few thousand people and governments will sit up and take notice. Iran is already struggling with the internet. No doubt if a student is reading this post the government knows about it, and has evaluated this post for Evil Western Influence(TM)
A Free internet is vital, not just for my selfish purposes, but to bring down barriers, not erect them. I'm actually pretty thrilled, in a Berlin-Wall-Coming-Down way, when I think of how easy it has been to communicate and exchange around the world.
Worry when the only way you can communicate is through commercial enterprises (AOL, YAHOO, MSN, etc.) which may fall under goverment regulation.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Windows client
Linux client
Source code
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Kiro
You are using a subtly different definition of "popular" than Ian Clarke is.
Your definition of popular seems to be "stuff that people like and agree with".
Ian Clarke's is "stuff that people download".
Take an example: "Mein Kampf". That's an "unpopular" work, in the sense that few people agree with it. But it might be "popular" in that many people will download it.
In fact, many of the people who download it probably disagree with it. Me, for instance. I know I disagree with Hitler's view on Jews, but I'm still interested in finding out exactly what he wrote, so I can decide why, exactly, I think he was wrong.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
The big challenge here is to respond to Freenet's antagonism of copyright in a way that lays the groundwork for responding to similar technological threats. To set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
Highfalutin' words, but these is highfalutin' times. I reckon.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Dropping "unpopular information" from the system is not intended to be a form of censorship, merely a way to save disk space by eliminating seldom-requested or never-requested data. As the author indicates, as disk space gets cheaper and as more freenet servers come on line, the need to drop data will diminish.
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www.scorbett.ca
goosh.. you mean what I wrote can be used to break the law.. I didn't think of it like that.. Well, I guess that law sucks and shouldn't be a law then..
Although it's not quite as simple as that, I guess there must be hundreds of cases like this all around the world. Just because something is made into a law, doesn't mean its perfect or even fair.
Let's face it: laws are made by governments, not by the common people. Laws should be made in order to help / protect / take care of the people, but they usually are not.
Take the copyright laws, for instance. They were made in order to protect the creators of works of music, art, etc. but in reality they're used to protect the big corporations who make money out of them.
Just my 2 pesos worth...
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Does Freenet have similar capabilities for spamming as Gnutella does? I know Gnotella has spam filters for things like FlatPlanet, but there (seems to be nothing) from stopping someone from posting a useful looking file only to really be an advertisement. If Freenet is completely anonymous, then there won't be any real way to block spammers, is there?
Unpopular information is dropped from the system.
The real flaw of Freenet, IMHO, isn't the potential for revisionism, it's the idea that only popular information is valuable. That might make sense in a market context, but it doesn't really have any place in an intellectual context if by "intellectual" you mean to imply a search for truth instead just popularity. Moreover, it is often the most revolutionary, cutting-edge, ahead-of-their-time ideas that are the most unpopular.
At one time, the ideas of democracy and freedom of speech were extremely unpopular ideas. In some places, they still are. Freenet-like systems would not have helped the rise of democracy very much. Mind you, it's great to see that popular ideas will be more resistant to government/corporate suppression, but they already were. It is ideas held by small minorities that are the most vulnerable.
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Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
"Intellectual property" is the term for a creator's rights to a valuable idea, right? Show me a single company that is capable of thought, and therefore entitled to protection of its "intellectual property", and I will show you an employee who actually did the work, and no longer has the right to use their own ideas.
Think of it this way: If you were trying to build a library, would you only stock periodicals? True, they are updated regularly, and are often a dense source of current information, but they are, by design, transient. Also, assuming you have finite space in which to store them, you will have to start throwing out the ones no one has checked out when the shelves are all full. Some of the old editions might cover popular events or figures, and would therefore stay popular and in cirulation, but the obscure or unknown stories of the past issues would be wiped away without a trace.