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.

Comments

Re:Misconceptions

[wizard992]

"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."

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.

FREENETS BROKEN!!! (down by content)

[Sanity]

What an unfortunate title!

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"Lots of porn" redundant

[Temporal]

I mean, who doesn't like porn?

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We need everyone on freenet.

[enterfornone]

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.

Permanent files aren't possible

[retep]

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.

Misconceptions

[GMontag451]

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.

Nope, sorry

[Galvatron]

Doesn't work for Freenet. Freenet storage is not permanent. Since nodes must set aside dedicated HD space for storing Freenet files, whenever there's a space crunch, the least popular files go. So, if people don't want to download your English essay, it's probably going to get removed.

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.