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Freenet 0.3 Released
A few folks noted that Freenet 0.3 has been released. You can read more at the project homepage. The software's description: "
Freenet is a peer-to-peer network designed to allow the distribution of information over the Internet in an efficient manner, without fear of censorship. It is completely decentralized (there is no person or computer essential to its operation), meaning that Freenet cannot be attacked like centralized peer-to-peer systems such as Napster. Freenet also employs intelligent routing and caching to learn to route requests more efficiently, automatically mirror popular data, make network flooding almost impossible, and move data to where it is in greatest demand.
Changes: This release includes dramatic architectural improvements, addition of internode and data encrpytion, subspaces, along with improved performance in a variety of other areas."
...if it wasn't written in Java.
FreeNet has two basic needs:
1) Programmers: Everyone knows C, many people know C++. Nobody I know personally knows Java. Clearly there ARE people who know Java--but how do the numbers compare? Why not write the core in C (which is, face it, just as portable as Java if done correctly) and then a UI in Java?
2) Testers: I run a home network. In order for people on the Internet to see my FreeNet node, I'd have to run it on the public side of my firewall. But there is no way in hell I'm taking the time and security risks to install Java on my server.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
Linux MAPI Server!
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(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
That's the reason for splitting the data, as is done by my Random Pads proposal or, better even, the Publius system.
See here for an implementation of a secret-sharing mechanism.
You have misunderstood what Freenet keys are. Internally they are cryptologically derived arrays of bytes - nothing that can be described via URNs, URIs or whatever.
We have sketched up a standard for describing keys of the different types as URIs. If somebody wants to make one for describing them as URNs, go ahead - it does not effect the network, only the clients that need to turn them into keys.
I have not spent much time in corporate environments, but enough that the concept for a "working group" sends chills down my spine. No beuracracy here please....
We will of course write an RFC, but we need to to know how we want the protocol to work ourselves before that - and we are still far from that.
The simple answer is that we have written Freenet for people whose ethics include the freedom of speech - even that speech which they do not like.
Since yours obviously do not, the way you can assert your ethics is simply not to run a Freenet node, and maybe by sending some money to one of the organisations who are on your side (MPAA, AFA, the Chinese communist government, etc).
It's not talking about your freedom to control the content that passes through your computer. It's talking about the freedom of everyone to publish what they want. This means that in order to ensure your own freedom, you must help to ensure the freedom of others. If you don't think that's fair, then Freenet is not for you.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You still seem to be under the impression that paedophiles go around trying to pick up children. For a few, this is the case (though they wouldn't be "paedophiles", but I don't want to get in arguments over terminology). The vast majority, though, have more or less no contact with children (beyond what one would normally find in the general public). Whether they're impressionable or not isn't relevant because there's no sexual contact involved. Paedophilia is not about actions. It's not about going out and having sex with minors.
Why don't you find some paedophiles and find out: (a) how many have had sex with a minor; (b) how many have had any sexual relations with a minor; (c) how many have had a romantic relationship with a minor (e.g. holding hands, talking); (d) how many have even approached a minor in the hopes of starting a romantic relationship. Most have a clear sense of what will do harm to the child on what won't, and will be able to draw the line. The problem is that the *only* paedophiles you hear about are the rapists, which is a very small part of the paedophile population.
And, off on a tangent here, one of the best thing about children is that they *can* have a meaningful conversation. They don't talk about the weather; they don't talk about politics; they don't talk about getting drunk; they don't talk about work; they don't talk about money. They generally only talk about things which are *shudder* interesting. If something's on their mind, they tell you what they're thinking, and then they stop. If you actually try listening to what children say, I think you'll find them quite intelligent. I fail to see why anyone would *want* to talk about something like world current events when they can talk about a nice picture instead.
Who the fsck said it was made for illegal material?
YOU said it.
That statement's wrong.
Freenet was designed with security as a goal, yes. Efficiency was another goal. Should SSL be illegal? If you're presuming anything that permits secure movement of information is also meant for movement of illegal information, sure sounds like it.
Freenet, in addition to material which is in some areas legally questionable, has hosted the Federalist papers, the Communist manifesto and other political documents. It has hosted many of the papers which the "Church" of Scientology has fought to keep secret (and while these may be under enforceable copyright in the US, it ain't the same everywhere). Freenet has valid uses. It was created with them in mind.
Well, as I understand it, the files that get the most attention (i.e. downloads) will be the most widely distributed. Everything people publish will still be there, it's just that the most popular stuff gets distributed more. That means that there will probably be a lot of pr0n, since it is extremely popular, but everything else should still be accessible.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
...doesn't a system like this already exist in the form of Gnutella? What's the difference between Freenet and Gnutella, and why do we need both?
It's good to see that there are people working on systems like Gnutella and Freenet, and it would be nice to see some functional results. Unfortunately most of the Gnutella clients I have tried were pretty much in the very early stage of development. Some didn't even include basic sharing functionality (but hey, at least they were THEMABLE!!!). How complete is Freenet's functionality? Is there no motivation to get a single solution out that works well?
Call me flamebate, but it looks to me like a case of "too many chefs in the kitchen".
Also, it seems to me that any network in which a specific document can eventually be tracked to a single IP address is insecure. While it can never be shut down, per se, anyone who is doing anything that make *make* someone want to shut it down can still be found (at least until the mibs knock at their door).
Got Rhinos?
never broadcasting search queries (thank god).
Intelligently mirroring any and all data to a subset of the nodes that route the file to you
finding a file in the network is done in a chain, with the first node that knows where the data is directing the file request straight to that node
What this means is that, sure, in theory you could have to go through a hundred hops before you find your file. But next time you want that file, it'll be right next door (e.g. one hop away).
That, in my opinion, is leaps and bounds and orgasmically better than what Gnutella can do. Don't you think?
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me doesn't live for do [DEPRECATED]
Call it whatever you will, I frankly don't care. The point is that Freenet depends on this caching/pushing/pulling/whatever for its success--that is how it is presumably going to be able to outscale GNUtella. Its efficiency is inversely proportional to the distance it must go to retrieve the requested file. The more diverse the requested files are, the less able Freenet is to properly mirror them. Likewise, the larger the files are, the less capable Freenet is of mirroring them. To the extent that Freenet is incapable of providing an adequate mirror, the more it reverts to a GNUtella style network--only worse in many ways because it does not travel directly.
The mp3 naming convention comes into play with the diversity. Though Freenet may protect against identical INPUTs of files on the same node, it does nothing to protect against the same song simply being named differently, recorded at a different bit rate, input errors, etc. from different uploaders. If Freenet's users prove incapable of deciding on a standard file per song, that WILL increase the burden.
Where Freenet may work well at distributing a few suddenly popular texts (i.e., DeCSS) [maybe even better than some of these ftp mirrors], I believe it'll fail at the task of distributing mp3s in the manner that napster users expect to be able to use it [even ignoring the lack of search capablities and the like].
Some of those things are available through the civic library system, either as raw materials (SUV maintenance manuals, information on clinics) or as the actual documents that worry you (perhaps the librarian would limit access to some, but the library system as a whole archives much of what is published regardless of value).
So are you going to withhold your taxes on the grounds that an immoral user might misuse those archives, that YOU paid to maintain ?
"They say they're working on it, so when they do get that done, then I'll be more likely to go and play. "
No we aren't. We are working on updates, but the updates will be non-destructive, ie the act of uploading a new version will not make the old version go away. Self censorship will not be allowed.
Yeah, the Chinese communist government, plus, oh, I don't know, the government of every single industrialised nation on Earth!
This is incredible. Someone says that he doesn't want his computer distributing information that "could kill someone, or could exploit someone against their will". (As well as being morally very questionable, this is almost certainly illegal in most countries.) The response? Scream COMMIE !
Remember that, people. Don't want to aid and abet criminals, eh? Don't want to distribute things which go against every moral you have, huh? Well, ya know, there's a Mr. Mao out there who has a country for Red traitors like you!
Forgive me if I don't share your enthusiasm for this approach.
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Things like instructions for making drugs, race hate literature and pornography are not "speech", and should not benefit from the protections built into Freenet.
Oh, yes, it is. All speech is speech. Even if you don't like it. I don't like the stuff you mentioned either, but I acknowledge its fundamental right to exist. Freenet is not a tool for bookburners.
So what I want to know is - is it possible to track this kind of rubbish and remove it, along with users who upload/download it?
No. You cannot track the users; that's a very large part of the whole point of Freenet. However, remember the old "ignore it and it'll go away" bit? Because of Freenet's architecture, this is actually true. If no one downloads it, it will eventually be deleted to make room for things people do want to see.
Keeping it free of this crap will mean that Freenet will be a much cleaner place than the web, and it will also attract less attention from governments looking for their next target.
Define "clean." Free of things you don't want to see? Who gave you, or anyone else, the authority to determine what a person may see (parents excepted solely in the case of their own children), except for that person him/herself? No one did, because you have no right to do that. Freenet, it seems to me, is not about giving people the right to see what they wish; it's about taking away the ability to censor.
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The guys over at L0pht (which I didn't see at the MIT Flea yesterday...) were working on such a system. I wonder if it's mothballed due to their newfound partnership with @Stake. Hm.
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My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
With todays climate of censorship, spying, and IP based lawsuits, we should all be very happy that projects such as Freenet exist. If it wasn't for these networks, we would all be living under a corporate thumb of opresion and consumerism.
Some may say that this day has already come, and projects such as Freenet are a last ditch attempt to save the few scraps of Freedom that we still have. I say that projects such as Freenet are a pre-emptive strick against the greedy corporations. We can fight back by hitting them where it hurts: in their pockets!
Sure, some people may be using Freenet to distrobute such things as child porn, or terrorist bomb making blueprints, but personally i think that is a small price to pay for the defence of our Freedom. Provided Freenet does not get detected and closed down by the corporate Police, we can continue to fight back against them by trading their "valuable" items, such as MP3's, DVD's, and applications. If enough of the worlds users can do this, we can really show the greedy corporations who's boss!
So i say Yay! for Freedom, even if it does have a small cost.
To me, censorship is evil. End of story. Hmm, thinking about my comment about the bibles, if my kids wanted to read them, I wouldn't stop them, so maybe I'm not being such a hypocrit.
:)
Frankly, I agree about censorship being evil, by and large. But I do recognize the fact that there is some material out there that some kids, even many kids in some cases, aren't mature enough to handle. It then becomes a parent's duty to ward off things like that until the kid is mature enough to handle it reasonably.
Parents don't necessarily have a duty to control what their kids see, only a right. It only becomes a duty when the kid genuinely couldn't handle the information in question.
This does put a duty on a parent to watch the kid and try to determine what sorts of information the kid could or could not handle; you seem to have done this. You don't think your kids are mature enough to handle the Bible, so you hide it from them. Probably for the best, actually; your viewpoints on Christianity aside that's not a children's book (take a spin through the books of Judges, Leviticus, Song of Solomon... heck, most of the Old Testament... and you'll see what I mean). Even the famous stories told to children are watered-down versions. It does lead me to an honest question: have you read it yourself? Seems to me as though someone who's anti-Christian ought to at least know about the religion they don't like, and no better way than by looking into what's generally considered the definitive book on the subject
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Yes, that's true. Largely, the problem with sex with children is that the culture doesn't support it. I don't think anyone's recommending huge cultural changes just so people can have sex with children, though :)
Looks like Fascdot is offering a try-before-you-buy deal to the trolls interested in buying his nick on ebay! :?)
Since when does supporting freedom of speech mean supporting what people say with it?
You don't need to support it. You don't necessarily SUPPORT it by hosting it, you're making their speech POSSIBLE.
If I see a skinhead standing on a street corner handing out NAZI propaganda, because I support his right to speak, I will not do anything to silence him. But I am not going to stand there alongside him handing out flyers as well and support his message .
Its not comparable. What's comparable is as follows. You own a "public plaza" where people walk. Would you let the nazi stand there and hand out his propaganda? If not, would you let OTHERS stand there and hand out THEIR propaganda?
I would definitively let him hand out his propaganda on my plaza if I would let others do it. He should have the same right to distribute his information, as others should have. I would on the other hand strongly oppose his stance, and I would even go so far as print out my own brochures and stand alongside him handing out information that rebuffed his.
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"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
* Using thermal noise, it is theoreticly possible to determine the temperature of the noise source, thus the noise is information, not noise :).
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
BTW for those that are wondering, yes, I am anti-christian (and religion in general), but only on a personal level, I will never tell anybody else not to be one, except possibly my kids, and really, if they are going to be religious, I want them to make that decision with thought, not blindly.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Yes, perhaps the biggest difference between Freenet and Gnutella is the amount of thought that went into each :). Really, though, Freenet is all
(well, mostly) about anonymity, and that's impossible to keep with a
centralised server, no matter how good its intentions (because the FBI can
get silly things like warrants).
Seriously, the poster mentioned drug-making material - if you think it should be possible to remove drug-making information, then how would you stop the Islamic nations from removing any tobacco growing or brewery related information from freenet?
Actually, for Freenet to work well, it needs a lot of *permanent* nodes. I suppose dial-up/cable nodes are better than nothing, though.
I won't get into your bit about implying that the current laws dictate morality (unless I inferred wrongly).
And if the public doesn't want it, then they have a right to not have it.
This is absolutely not true. The public does not have the right to say what is and what is not acceptable speech. The Bill of Rights was specifically established to prevent this "tyranny of the masses." There are forms of this speech that are reprehensible, and continuing to bring up the bugbear of child pornography leads me to believe your case is somewhat weak. Speech is anything that can be communicated, like it or no. - Rev.Well now.. who is exploiting who?
It would seem to me that an integral part of the freedom of speech is trusting your citizens (users) with the ability to determine for themselves what is worth participating in (listening to, reading, viewing, etc.). I'm not talking about removing content from the entire network, just my box. If you do not even give the users the right to determine what they want to traffic on their own servers, where is the freedom in that?
Speak truth to power.
Listen, no matter what you want to call it, its function is the same. Freenet's viability DEPENDS on data being sent to hosts that don't even request it. If people want to act as if it's a magic bullet for solving GNUtella's recursive query problems, then they must not ignore its critical nature--they can't have their cake and eat it too. Merely saying it is "caching" does not solve your problems. To put it in Freenet's founder's own words: "Just as systems such as distributed.net enable ordinary users to share unused CPU cycles on their machines, Freenet enables users to share unused disk space." In other words, sharing free HD space/mirroring/caching/pushing is key.
It may perform a few other minor tricks, but that system is what sets it apart from GNUtella. As for "clues", we'll see what you say when it fails to support a viable mp3 community.
Freenet is meant to be international. There isn't any international agreement on what is "rubbish". In the US the things you mention are constitutionally protected. In Holland not only is cannabis growing information legal, but so is growing the cannabis and smoking it. In England (and, I would have thought, most countries) a lot of pornography is legal, and is used by happy consenting adults to enhance beautiful relationships. In some countries pictures of women's legs are immoral.
The usual way of handling your personal values is that if you are homophobic, you avoid gay bars, if you don't like pornography, don't buy any, and if you don't want your children making drugs, teach them about why you think it is bad. You do not have to impose your values on everyone else on the entire planet, with a multitude of diverse cultures and value systems, most of which are unlikely to be anything like yours. I wouldn't suggest that the whole world bans sprouts, just because I don't like them.
you've defended someone's right to say something you morally oppose.
Until then, it's just posturing.
I think he's entirely in line. It is you who isn't.
If you don't want people to be able to say what they want to, then don't run a Freenet node. It's that simple.
(oh, and also, please don't run for public office. We've got enough of your sort already)
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Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
I think you have a false idea of what a "working group" is. It is nothing like bureaucracy. The IETF has always been very open and very efficient in its structure. It's more about radically dissociating the implementation from the protocol, which is an essential step in producing a "standard" that is not a mere description of what a program does (in the same idea, for an RFC to become a Draft Standard it must have two independently developped implementations). It's about thinking before you act, and letting some well-known Internet experts give you advice.
You (and others) react as though I had attacked the idea of Freenet. I haven't. I think it's great. But I fear there's too much emphasis on the "let's implement it" rather than on the careful definition of a well-thought protocol. The implementation is nothing: the only important thing is the protocol. Of course we must fear the reverse pitfall, where the standard (like many W3 standards) never gets implemented because it was devised without any thought as to implementation. But the Internet is also too full of protocols that were engineered toward one single implementation.
And an IETF working group is the natural framework for developing a protocol. Remember: you don't need to be member of anything to do this (the IETF has no permanent members). It will bring the attention of experts who are able to address the problem of integrating the protocol defined in the mass of other existing standards. And it will bring recognition, quite simply.
My initial interest was to see what kind of content was available right now. Specifically, whether the content that could get mirrored at my machine if I ran the server was likely to be a worthwhile use of resources, or indeed likely to get me put in jail. Looking at the public key listings (indexes of content) on the project big-wigs' web pages, I was struck by the fact that the guy with the most content was mainly hosting MP3s, porn and copies of current best-selling books. I didn't see any warez on the list, but going by what is there already, how long is it likely to be before it floods with 0-day? Is this really what 'the community' should be getting behind? Maybe I misunderstood which community the parent comment was refering to? I was thinking of the Internet community, but maybe they meant the piracy community?
Speech is nothing more than what the public desires it to be...
...and I think most people would agree that child pornography has no right to be classed in the same league as the works of Mozart, Van Gogh or Shakespeare.
In other words, only popular viewpoints are valid? The very principle the US was founded on was that while the majority may rule, the minority is protected from being squashed by them.
Your argument is rather weak, unfortunately, because you can't even classify Mozart, Van Gogh, and Shakespeare in the same league. They worked in entirely different media, and it's impossible to make fair comparisons across media. And for the record, even if it were possible to make fair comparisons across media, I wouldn't class kiddie porn in the same league. But just because I happen to think something sucks doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. Just because a million people think something sucks doesn't mean it shouldn't exist either.
And if the public doesn't want it, then they have a right to not have it.
Right you are. Every person has an inherent right to not download anything they don't want to download. Implicit in the right to speak, after all, is the right of others to hear you as they wish, or to ignore you as they wish.
However, in no way does the right to free speech imply the right to silence another person, or to restrict what another may hear (again, the sole exception being parents, and even then only as concerns their own children).
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I don't like the idea of totally untrackable access. Freenet gives the perfect tool for spreading copyrighted software and music. While many think that it serves them right, it is illegal no matter how much that software or music costs.
But I'm even more concerned about child pornography and other dark sides of man. If those sickos can't be tracked, we've just created the perfect tool for child abusers. And frankly, I can't believe that this kind of freedom or anonymity is more important than human rights of the victims of these criminals.
Personal feelings aside, Freenet is also dangerous to the internet. As much as some people would love it, the society can never be free. If you want a safe society, you have to compromise a bit with your own privacy. The politicians and authorities know this and want to keep it this way. So if Internet suddenly becomes totally anonymous, there will be legislation and international agreements to bad all anonymous internet traffic. It will be severly restricted and all rogue countries will be banned. Just look at the land mines to get an idea.
At this point, it could really just use any nodes. For the long term, I agree, but until we get a few more point versions, it really needs the stress test.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
"Those who would sacrafice freedom for security deserve neither." - Ben Franklin
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The Freenet guys are ultimately hoping to have a "subversion-mode" dist of Freenet which will be completely hardened to identification as Freenet traffic, and that sounds fuckin cool :-)
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me doesn't live for do [DEPRECATED]
Freenet, if it even works, is designed in such a way that'll never be able to fulfill the current purpose of either Napster or GNutella. To boil the concept down to its essentials, Freenet works on a philosophy of PUSHING highly requested data around to its servers and can only be requested by a unique identifier; whereas GNUtella essentially works on a query and pull concept. It may work well for relatively small, yet infamous, text files and the like (i.e., DeCSS). But it'll simply never be able to rise the occassion of distributing gigabytes upon gigabytes of data. For one, even without redundancy, all the the popular music is still at least 800 gigabytes. Secondly, since there is no standard naming or provider of these files, there is a high degree of redundancy. i.e., hundreds of people will encode differently and give it a different file name. So we're really talking about terabytes of data to get it all. The problem is that, given the ad hoc strucure of mp3 suppliers/servers and listeners, all of this data must be pushed around (i.e., transfered) and stored. It simply can't work.
Java comes along. Java is C++ with all of the powerful innards stripped out, so now you can't do things as quickly or efficiently. To compensate for this loss of speed, Java is interpreted.
:)
powerful innards? - oh you mean Multiple Inheritance , Operator Overloading, and Dangling Pointers
That garbage was taken out because of the unmaintable code that it helped to create.
If you need the speed of c for writing something like a 3D shooter then use it!
The issues that freenet has are not related to application speed but bandwith, and that is definetly a language independant problem.
But if you still need some of those "power innards" write JNI code for your java to use.
BTW, have you taken a look at IBM's JDK1.3 for linux? It might not be the language to write something like OpenGL in yet, but it's JIT compilier breaks the bytecode down fast as hell.
Who mentioned closed doors? IETF working groups are as open as you can get. Internet working drafts and RFCs are public documents. They get ample public scrutiny. Much more than Yet Another open source project on sourceforge in which the protocol and the implementation are hopelessly tangled.
What I am saying is that the implementation is far less important than the definition of the protocol. It should serve as a Proof of Concept, but it should not lead the way. The two should be kept separate enough.
You can't, whether you run a Freenet node or not.
If your machine is connected to the internet, it's probably forwarding packets full of kiddie porn, white supremacist bullshit and a thousand other flavours of poison all the time. If your machine uses a dialup connection, you're just paying someone else to forward those packets. The only change when you start running a Freenet node is how long you sit on the data.
It's important that Freenet node operators can't (easily) filter the contents of the datastore, because if they could, a node operator could be held responsible for the contents of the datastore if he didn't filter it. Would you want to be held accountable for the contents of every packet passing through your machine (or your ISP's machine)?
Warez happens, freenet won't change that either by it's existence or lack of existence. What freenet *does* provide is a way to make it impossible to censor. Frankly, I could give a damn about the warez angle, so long as I can guarantee that important information won't be suppressed.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Freenet is good, it came up with some pretty neat ideas, but it would be better if it had been developped and thought out in advance in the context of an IETF working group, if the specifications had been released as a Request For Comments, and, in other words, if it had paid a little more attention to existing Internet standards instead of being Yet Another anti-censorship system.
For example, why did Freenet have to come up with their own key scheme instead of using the official standard of Uniform Resource Names (URNs) defined by RFC2141 (the previous link was an example of a URN)?
I have this dream of a true world-wide distributed database founded on recognized Internet standards. It would use URNs as keys. (In particular, it would allow arbitrary Unicode character data.) It would use the ubiquitous RDF format as "semantic sugar" (pardon the expression) of its communications. It would borrow ideas from HTTP (the best Internet communications protocol we have so far) for the protocol, and Usenet and Freenet for the distribution mechanisms, as well as the public key distribution system and trust web, and the everything system. It would use public-key cryptography as the basis for its trust graph, so as to make data authentification possible and tampering impossible. Certificates and signatures would be distributed along the network itself. It would employ secret sharing mechanisms to split the risks of carrying certain data. It would be impossible to tamper with, impossible to censor, and extremely difficult to break. It would replace the lousy and obsolete DNS system (and also alleviate somewhat the power of "root registrars" in the DNS), and possibly The Web itself. And, to make my dream even more of a dream, it would be simple to implement.
Hmmm.... Nice project, for the year 2100 or so. Anyone care to start an IETF working group?
These days I can run DSL connections hither and yon and it looks like they act like frame relay (At least from what I could tell from when I had my first DSL line installed.) We could very conceivably wire up an entire private network outside the Internet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While I mirror the sentiments of the other posters to this thread, I would like to point out that freenet is not a *storage* system, it's a *distribution* system. Documents are stored in a cache and flushed when they are no longer requested.
If there truly is "rubbish" on freenet, it will never be requested, and thus it will fall off the cache relatively quickly, leaving freenet nicely uncluttered.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
meaning that Freenet cannot be attacked like centralized peer-to-peer systems such as Napster
This is all very good in theory - but I've found that Gnutella (another non-centralized peer-to-peer system, albeit without the encryption layers) suffers as a result of this - with no central servers your packets may be routed through potentially hundreds of systems.
FreeNet must overcome this (although I am glad to see that intelligent routing is being worked on and improved!) if it is going to be viable.
-Tom
Looks like the moderators have their work cut out for them... And, in an attempt to stay on-topic... is there going any attempt to benchmark the different kinds of peer-to-peer networks (Gnutella, Freenet, etc..) to see which one is "best" as far as how bandwidth it uses (for a particular sub-network), how long it takes to search and retrieve a file, etc... as time goes by, it might interesting to rebenchmark the services again, to see if there's any change in the way it uses bandwidth. One good reason for this is that there's been a lot of complaints about how these "decentralized" networks sucks up a lot of bandwidth.
People keep on touting the anonymous aspect of freenet and gnutella. The problem is, is that it doesn't really matter where the data originates or where it ends up. Now, encryption makes it very difficult to peek at data being transmitted between nodes, but the last node on the chain gets decrypted data, and can finger the machine that it was received from. No, I'm not talking about the originator of the data, rather, the last system that packets physically came from.
You see, it's against the law to transmit some types of data, be it child porn, warez, or whatever. If that type of data is coming from your system, too bad, you are breaking the law. This was almost the case with ISPs until laws were passed protecting them from their customer's use of their networks, but guess what? There are no laws protecting you from yourself! If an official connects to your node and downloads the DeCSS code, they can come take your system(s) and charges can be filed. Why? Because the decrypted, "illegal" data, was received from your system, and that's all that matters. If you feel that running freenet relieves you from your responsiblity for data transmissions from your systems, according to the law, you would be wrong, unless, of course, you are an ISP.
Basically, if you run freenet, you assume the risk, just like if you setup an anonymous ftp server allowing uploads, you assume the risk.
Somebody please correct me if I am mistaken, but with the laws that we have in place, that's how I see things.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
The sheer amount of effort going into this project just leaves me thinking "wow"...
After all, this goes back to the original ethic of the Internet, the ability to share things freely, post things around, and generally be pretty laid back about things.
The sad thing about it is that it's become as necessary as it has.. What with the legal vultures leaping onto everything in an attempt to make it theirs, and stopping people doing anything they either don't understand, or don't agree with.
Malk.
For freenet to really take off, it's going to need the support of the community. We need to all install freenet nodes where we can to ensure the growth and acceptance. The more people that get on the freenet, the more the network itself can be tested and stressed.
:)
If we all talk about it, it will never happen. But we have the power to make it as important and standard as anyone. Look at our plans of world domination with Linux!
If we can kindle the same passion for a secure and safe internet, I am sure that the freenet idea can be driven to a high standard of acceptance. I am sure the last thing any control-seeking organization wants to have happen is the mass acceptance of a decentralized encrypted network.
it's very easy to download and install.
It doesn't chew up much bandwidth to run a node.
I doubt it will be long before someone hacks in a Freenet client into Mozilla, or another open source browser such as Conqu or Galeon.
I really believe that it's quite important for the community to rally behind this effort... if we don't accept it, nobody will.
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Freenet does not push data around. Data moves around the network in response to requests, ie it is pulled, and in a much more efficient manner than Gnutella (no broadcasting).
You will not find dozens of identical versions of a file on Freenet, because when a document is inserted into Freenet its key is generated by hashing the data. That means that two identical copies of a document will have identical keys, and thus they will never be stored redundantly on the same node.
The amount of data stored is, as far as I can see, irrelevant. I don't understand where your hundreds of gigabytes/terabytes argument is coming from at all. Unlike Gnutella, Freenet should be able to scale to thousands or millions of nodes without breaking up into isolated islands. Maybe your concern about the size of "all the popular music" is based on the idea that Freenet is meant to be a Napster replacement? It's not. But if people want to use Freenet to trade MP3s, and they're willing to provide the disk space, it's certainly up to the task.
I wish that were possible. I hate it when my own tax money is used against me.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You shouldn't be putting a freenet server -behind- a firewall anyway, it's a public server. The recommended architecture looks like (pretend the periods are spaces, slashdot breaks my nbsps.),
...|
...|..............|.........|
...|
...|.................|
i ces
|
+- My Linux Box
|
+- My Housemate's Win95 Box
|
+- My Friend's Laptop
This will probably make security experts cringe, but hey, how many different PCs am I supposed to have running 24/7 to have a home 'net anyway?
Gateway
----------------------------- Exposed net
Firewall ExposedServer1 ExposedServer2
----------------------------- Isolated net
PrivateServer PrivateWorkstation
Of course, for my home network my architecture is actually more like,
FireWall-Is-The-Gateway-And-Runs-the-Exposed-Serv
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
But really, what is this technology going to be used for primarily? Probably something illegal.
Since when is it wrong to do things that are illegal?
people are going to view this as is a system that will be able to thwart Big Brother, aka the government and big business.
Well, that is one of the things that it can do. "It's a feature, not a bug!"
Ofcourse we need to protect the freedom of speech, especially in a medium like the Internet. I just hope it's done legally.
This is an oxymoron. When laws are created that constrain individual freedom, and when court decisions prohibit people even from talking about these issues, it's not possible for individuals to "protect freedom of speech... legally". We must break the law, or live as sheep.
"If a man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately, he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case are superfluous."
-- UnknownPrevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Nope, I'm talking about my home systems.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
The idea of a more "free" network built on top of the current one is something I thing we're going to need more and more in the current climate of censorship and oppressive legislation, but I'd like to know if it is possible for Freenet users to be indentified, either through the content they upload or their behaviour whilst online.
Whilst there is a lot of information which certain national governments would rather have suppressed that deserves to kept alive, there is also a lot of stuff on the internet which shouldn't be kept alive, but which will quite likely attempt to preserve itself through services like Freenet. Things like instructions for making drugs, race hate literature and pornography are not "speech", and should not benefit from the protections built into Freenet.
So what I want to know is - is it possible to track this kind of rubbish and remove it, along with users who upload/download it? Keeping it free of this crap will mean that Freenet will be a much cleaner place than the web, and it will also attract less attention from governments looking for their next target.
http://www.mojonation.com for users and
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-
http://www.mojohackers.org for developers
Decentralization, file encyption and micro payments. True, the whole Mojo economy is still in a beta state (right now there is an abundance of available space and not a whole lot of content...this tends to cheapen the value of free space and mess with the economy) but in only two months it's gone from something that wouldn't even run on my WinNT system to something that I have been able to publish many files and have my friends those files by just sending them a nice little URL.
Check it out. Right now we need some good open content to fill up all the available blocks and start putting the system through its paces.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
The question that pops into my head when I consider the ramifications of FreeNet:
How can I ensure that my machine is not involved in the trafficking of content that I don't support?
I think a lot of people who find FreeNet interesting immediately imagine all the victimless pilfering that can go on. "RIAA can't shut us down!" I'm not talking about free movies. I'm not talking about cracked Win2K warez. I'm not talking about the source code and inflammatory emails that were leaked from MegaCorp's development department the day before the stock price plunged.
Once you are a node, it seems you give up your right to have any control of what's hosted on your own computer. You become a member of the collective. You are a cog in a machine, without any ability to have any context.
John Doe may like kiddie porn, GHB date rape drug recipes, tips on how to spot vulnerable SUVs for car-jacking, Aryan Nation websites, and abortion clinic hit-lists. I don't. Look for it elsewhere.
If you want that sort of information, I don't want to be a party to it. I'm not talking about legalities. I'm not talking about censoring all of FreeNet from that information. I'm talking about my own ethic.
I don't want to have the feeling, that information resides somewhere on the server I've installed with my own time, money and energy, that could kill someone, or exploit someone against their will.
This isn't "cover my ass", this is "sleep well at night."
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Freenet, it seems to me, is not about giving people the right to see what they wish; it's about taking away the ability to censor.
And there lies the rub. If you're a FreeNet host, you have lost the right to control your own computer. You will be forced to traffic information you do not agree with. You will be complicitous against your will.
Doesn't sound so free to me.
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Got Rhinos?