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Freenet, Broken Down By Content
cardhore links to this O'Reilly piece about Freenet, detailing what's actually on the anonymous data cloud these days. It reads, in part, "But if we were to indulge ourselves and construct a
demographic of the average Freenet user from Freenet content, he'd be
a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature,
political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn." I wonder what will be there (or in equivalently untraceable data pools) in five years.
The thing that I don't like about porn is that I feel like I'm being lied to -- that I'm subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) being educated in falseness about what relationships between men and women are supposed to be.
But then again, I'm one of those people who feels that sex only has a proper role in a monogamous committed relationship, so, you know, why beleive me?
Tweet, tweet.
For the benefit of others who haven't actually read the O'Reilly story yet, Mr. Orwant makes reference to finding "pictures of naked people playing lawn darts", hence Timothy's "that's-me-with-the-darts dept." comment.
Why do I get the feeling swarms of people are going to be trying to find "lawn darts" on freenet now?
/*Insert boring sig here*/
Wow.. you take porn pretty serious, huh? Maybe that's the problem. Porn is entertainment. It's not art. It's not meant to educate you about relationships between men and women. It's designed to arouse and stimulate your imagination.
:) Might drive everything underground and cause worse ills. Might have a problem defining porn. It's hard to say. I thought the idea was intruiging, though.
I can buy this in part -- you're probably right in that most people can distinguish between the fantasies portrayed in porn and real life.
Still, it seems to me that arousing and stimulating your imagination in that way has got to color -- note I say color and not determine -- how you look at your relationships. Heck, biology and general culture are already pushing me to favor the woman who looks like Pamela Anderson over the average looking girl who I feel peaceful around, and recreational affection over conversation. Seems to me porn pushes you further that way. Not that I think anyone should plan lifelong celibacy. Just think you're more likely to make good relationship decisions w/o its influence. For some imbalanced people, it doesn't seem impossible the effects might be harsher.
You're free to either look at porn or not. You're free to determine when and with whom you have sex. So are the rest of us. Now if we can just get the damn politicians and religious groups to understand that it's not their place to decide for us how we should live our lives, things should be just fine.
Relax. I wasn't advocating that we send everybody with porn to jail. I'm not even advocating that we should burn all the stuff; though I'm of the opinion it might be a good thing if everybody got rid of it themselves, the implementation of trying to do it for everyone would be nightmarish and in the end futile and impossible. I agree that people have got to take responsibility for their own lives, so I state what I think some of the problems are with porn, and you still get to chose. Good system, huh?
I think many religious leaders have a handle on that idea, too. They'd rather not see even borderline porn showing up on TV and billboards and anywhere people are likely to just trip over it ( Which is at least as valid a request as not being subject to public prayer and creationism in schools), but they also understand that the only way to really affect change in society is for individuals to chose to do so in their own life, rather than trying to solve problems by policy. Some go beyond this. It's too bad.
I'd be curious to know, however, what you'd think of the following idea: making it illegal not to posses or produce porn, but to profit from it. Might end concerns about exploitation, and people who were into it would have to be into it for love of the hobby.
Tweet, tweet.
Ok, since I just realized how long this thing got, I'm going to say this up front. I may come off as being rather pissed about this. That's true, but I'm not pissed at you or what you wrote, just at a lot of things surrounding this issue. Please don't take offense.
making it illegal not to posses or produce porn, but to profit from it.
Seems to me that there's no real evidence that porn actually causes any harm to people who look at it, even if they look at it often. As for exploitation, I don't think I understand the reasoning. People get exploited all the time in many industries. Take professional athletes for instance. They often get lured away from getting a real education by representatives of the big leagues. They play sports that are often quite physically damaging to their bodies. Some of them are paid very well, until they can't play any more. Some of them are not paid very well at all, and still suffer many of the same consequences as the well-paid players.
Now, why is it ok for professional athletes to be exploited, but not for professional performers in the porn industry? Seems to me it's the product that many people don't like, mainly due to their religious beliefs, so they look for reasons to justify their persecution of the industry. Yet the same people ignore the exploitation in many other industries and areas of our lives.
If someone wants to let someone take pictures of them nude, then that should be their right. What's wrong with being nude? Many people are not at all offended by nudity and consider it to be quite natural. If someone wants to let someone film them having sex, again, what's wrong with that? Even if they want to do it for a living? People are willing to pay for it. Sure, they embellish and enhance the performance, but so does hollywood with everything they do. What it all comes down to is that some people feel that nudity and sex are inherently immoral except within the limits of what their religion prescribes. Then they procede to try to stamp out anything that offends them, wherever it may occur.
A good example of this is a church near where I live. They are lobbying the city to close down a nearby "gentleman's club" because they feel it is too close to their church. They've show this place on the news several times. It's hardly offensive in appearance. It looks just like any other nightclub from the outside. There's no lewd language or pictures to be seen. Nothing to offend anyone. But since they know that there are topless dancers inside, they are offended. Since they are offended, they feel they have the right to force the owners of the club out of business.
Perhaps it is this sort of action that colors my views on these issues. Because I see many of the people who are against nudity and pornography as being intolerant bullies that try to force everyone to conform to their own views of how people should act. It disgusts me and I do what I can to support those people who are willing to stand up to the bullies, even when they are doing it mainly to defend their ability to make a profit. I don't think there is anything wrong with profiting from porn, as long as it's done within the constraints of the laws that protect employees in other industries.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Sure, and then we could cut out the "classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software" part and make it just "Lots of porn"
and mp3s...
and warez...
etc... IMO, advertising freenet as just another free storage service will destroy the actual project.
How amusing, the last time Freenet came up on /. I checked it out, and commented that it wasn't really promoting free speech but free pR0n, and got modded down as flamebait. Today the same comment by a different author is front-page stuff ;-)
On the contrary. The third paragraph is pretty clear on the fact that the names don't neccessarily reflect the content, saying that a file called "constitution.txt" could contain ANYTHING be it an MPEG or copy of software. The author then suggests that he is indulging himself by constructing the demographics based on keyname, even though he knows it is not neccessarily accurate...
Sounds to me like he's taken into account the probable inaccuracies and made that clear to the reader.
Ender
Nothing to see here
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I'll tell ya what's gonna be there in five years: porn.
Ah, porn: it's nice to find a constant these days.
^_^
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What about the stolen M$ source code ?? ;)
...
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& Genuine Britney Spears pr0n
& Bill Gatez credit card serialz
I mean, who doesn't like porn?
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If my understanding of freenet is correct, as well as being anonymous it is also smart enough to choose the best source of a file if multiple copies exist. As well as allowing anonymity, it would also allow people to use things like apt-get without needing to maintain lists of ftp servers or let you download the linux kernel from your closest mirror without needing to know what that mirror is.
But for this to work, we need to get the major FTP servers out there to start running freenet servers too.
What will be on Freenet in 5 years? Hopefully anything you would want to download.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
I mean, ONE adverticement was enough to count for 2% of the total video content.
Freenet is not done yet and the number of people who use it seems to be much too small to infer anything.
Also, if a similar study was made about the real net, I suspect certainly that atleast as much porn would be found.
Bjarke Roune
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Requesting your own files doesn't work. You would have to do the requests from nodes all over the network. If you just request from one single node it will get the data, cache it then just give you the data every time. So only that one node would have a copy of your data.
Telling your node to not delete specific files doesn't work. Just because a specific node has some data on it doesn't mean any other node can find it. Each node has a set of references that point to other nodes. If a key x is "close" to reference y then the node pointed to by reference y will be contacted. But the references don't last forever and are only renewed by someone requesting data. If no-one requests the data the references to your data will eventually decay. When that happens even if someone did want to request the data they would be able to find it.
See this page for a more indepth discussion of this.
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Wow.. you take porn pretty serious, huh? Maybe that's the problem. Porn is entertainment. It's not art. It's not meant to educate you about relationships between men and women. It's designed to arouse and stimulate your imagination. You're free to either look at porn or not. You're free to determine when and with whom you have sex. So are the rest of us. Now if we can just get the damn politicians and religious groups to understand that it's not their place to decide for us how we should live our lives, things should be just fine.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
...unless someone else requests them. Otherwise, they just stick around on your node -- and if they aren't requested there often, they get deleted (unless, of course, you modify the code appropriately).
Not really. If you add 8,000 nodes with just warez and mp3s to the 200 with warez, mp3s and political screeds, you still have 200 nodes with political screeds. If some of the 8,000 people request any political screeds (or some of the 200 peoples' requests go through them), then copies get propogated out onto their nodes too.
Scare people away from accessing the stuff (you can't *really* do a Freenet Wall of Shame, as it would hit false alarms on your neighbors and miss nodes further away, but you can threaten it) and if you're sufficiently succesful, the material gets eliminated. Straight clever.
I'mm getting really tired of all the people saying that Freenet (or things analogous to it) won't work because you can't trust people, and therefore you can't trust the things that people share. These people are ignoring the other major use that Freenet has (and things like Napster, Scour, and Gnutella don't), and that is extra space for YOUR stuff. If you can promote Freenet by advertising it as free extra storage, then you can build a much larger user base to then focus on the sharing aspect.
This is an analysis of the keys listed on key index servers, analyzed by name. The key index servers are publically accessible web sites where people can enter keys for things which they have placed in Freenet.
Therefore, this analysis doesn't take into account certain facts, such as that names do not always accurately reflect content, some listed keys were never inserted into Freenet, some listed keys have since fallen out of Freenet, and some information in Freenet is not listed.
This is not so much an analysis of what is on Freenet as in what people think they should tell the world is in Freenet.
the author is only profiling 1070 items that he found... assuming freenet isn't really *that* small (and if it *is*, then why are we bothering to talk about it?), then this sample is way too small to generate any accurate stats.
You could automate it, I guess, so that you kept requesting your files, thereby increasing their popularity. Unfortunately, I believe that if you have space for it, the file will be moved to your node if you've left room (Freenet tries to move files to the areas where they're most popular), and if there is no room, I guess you've got a little extra space, but you've probably got no bandwidth left because you're constantly requesting your own files.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The same way you know you can trust Debian in the first place. I mean, the entire distribution _could_ just be a trojan horse. Unless you've read and understood every single bit of the source (which I haven't) you don't know whether it's real. But it's fairly easy to make a guess.
Besides, freenet isn't trying to replace the entire internet, is it?
aside from some of the technical content, doesn't seem much here that I would be all that interested in
most of it is available elsewhere in better quality.
and to be honest, the bandwidth and reliability needed to make it work well is still a few years out.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I mean, the entire distribution _could_ just be a trojan horse.
No shit. But if it were, I'd know who to blame. We know exactly who works on it, the ftp servers log uploads very well, etc.
However, my brilliant young scientist, Freenet is specifically designed to be untraceable, to destroy logs, and to generally remove any consequences from uploading anything.
Surely you see the difference.
You can of course download your apt modules, then make sure the official Debian boys have signed them. But this is a needlessly complex and risky way to work around the very nature of freenet.
The internet is not anonymous. Never has been, never will be. You can be tracked online more thoroughly than you ever could before. But you generally aren't, because no one gives a shit what you do online. Freenet is a toy cooked up by paranoid freaks who have not come to realize these simple facts.
Well, at least it keeps the kooks busy.
It runs fine on my 486... I installed freenet and Java without going root. I was rather surprised. It was like the good old days... I think I had to specify some path before I ran it. It blew my mind that it ran at all.
Something like:
export PATH=$PATH:/home/user/jre1.2.2/bin/:/home/user/jre 1.2.2/lib/
The downside was that I could finish my coffee before my 486 could deal with all that encryption code written in Java.
I do have a K6-2, but it looks like Freenet doesn't do NAT yet, so either I figure out the ports, or I run it on my "firewall."
How about java -jar freenet.jar.
./ (like in current directory) could help. View the content of a JAR file with unzip -l freenet.jar (it's basically a ZIP file).
Cannot say anything about the parameters, though, I don't know the freenet app. With a decent manifest file you shouldn't have to specify the application class as a user. And any config file should be in the home directory, so I don't understand why you have to specify that. Maybe a couple of
And please guys, no more Java bashing. It has been said many times that JRE's have improved in terms of speed, functionality etc.
You can't trace people back to their REAL identities, but you can trace them back to their public keys if they choose to let you. You can request only a copy of a file signed by an individual (ie. the debian) pubkey.
If I choose to use a particular public key for all my freenet postings, people can trust me by what I post -- which is how they trust me anyhow.