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ZeroKnowledge's Freedom Server Code Available
hey writes: "The Register reports that
Zero Knowledge's Freedom Network source code is now available." This seems to be part of CodeCon, which is now underway in San Francisco. You can't use the code for commercial gain, but I could see a non-profit network springing up...
Proof once again that there can be freedom in a terrorism-obsessed world, so long as nobody has to take the blame for it.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Wasn't it available a long time ago..? Or was that just the binary?
Is someone a couple days late?
Or is the idea that people would use ZKS to send anonymous and untraceable Valentines?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Sorry, but despite the article it appears terrorism is once again eliminating freedoms internally. I used this service for a long time to dodge predatory advertisers and to avoid unsolicited contact. While Sep. 11th needs to be remembered vividly, people also need to remember that the basis of the American Constitution is that no external threat can strip one of their freedoms. This has been sadly missing of late but please don't forget that the precepts of democracy are Freedom, Tolerance, and and Equality. None can be abandoned due to an attack, in fact they are more sacred than ever...
While I'm glad to see the source is out for download now, it would have been nice to see it a long time ago. It would be really neat if online services shared their code with a "you can look, and play for yourself, but don't try to make money" sort of license. Not only would it improve the service (because of feedback) but also help others to implement a similar service as a custom solution.
I wish I had some examples.
Perfect. Now if I can just get this up and running, I can anonymously ask Kathleen to marry me. 'Taco won't have a clue who's stealing his girl! Bwaahahahah.
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
OK, it is cool that Zero Knowledge is making this available. But what are the "traditional magic words"? And how would that work, anyway, with PGP? A passphrase usually unlocks only a private key, which, erm, we don't have, as far as I know.
River Phoenix? Open Sesame Street?
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
Does this mean that trolls can prevent being "timed out"?
http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/ A free, fast, anonymous web proxy. Pretty neat.
CodeCon's being held at Jamie Zawinski's (JWZ's) club, the DNA Lounge, in case you were curious.
Because I'm certain there are lots of volunteers out there that want to donate their bandwidth to the cause of having their door kicked down and family forced face down on the floor at gunpoint because someone used their Freedom server to threaten the POTUS, exchange kiddie porn with an FBI agent, or (horror of horrors) download a non-rights-managed piece of music and that person was the lucky person to be the exit server for the traffic.
These servers simply cannot be run successfully by individuals with the potential legal problems of relatively honest use, much less malicious use. And after 9/11, I doubt very many ISPs would be able to weather the storm, either.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Time to set up a distributed code tarball cracker? :)
--joshua
Anyone have another mirror which we could slashdot? this one is chirping on at a great 1k/s :)
Both the client and server source for Freedom 2.1 have been available under GPL at http://opensource.zeroknowledge.com for about a year and a half. This is the heavy-duty IP anonymizing network that was shut down in September.
I have no clue what this story is talking about unless it's the Freedom 3 browser anonymizing. The story doesn't claim it's being open-sourced, either, and I can't imagine why it would be.
Another strange one from the Register.
--rgb
has anyone noticed that lately, all of the free browsing services have disappeared?
-anonymizer.com no longer lets you view half the pages unless you buy their premium service
-safeweb.com, which used to be the best anon browsing service, stopped providing this
-noproxy.com / silentsurf.com now only has a commercial service
-megaproxy.com has been gone for at least a week now
what's up with this? does anyone know of any good free browsing systems (read: no free reg. req., this defeats the purpose of anonymity!) that still exist?
Learning to use the traditional remailer network takes some time and effort. And this time and effort pays off handsomely by providing the user with a highly secure method to communicate privately and anonymously. But many privacy-minded folks (and their ranks are increasing daily!) are looking for an easier and less time-intensive approach. Some are even willing to pay for it. To satisfy this niche there have arrived many new products and services that provide various combinations of anonymous email, newsgroup posting and Web-surfing with varying degrees of anonymity.
I have provided URLs for some of these services below. I have categorized them into two groups: free of charge and fee-based. Noteworthy amongst these is the fee-based Freedom Software by the Montreal-based Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS). Launched in December 1999, Freedom is a 'privacy system' not unlike the traditional remailer network . It allows users to send email, post to newsgroups, chat and surf the Web in total privacy without having to trust third parties with their personal information. Freedom users create multiple digital identities - "nyms" - with which their online activities are associated. All data packets Freedom users send are encrypted and routed through a global privacy infrastructure called the Freedom Network, which is hosted by participating ISPs and other independent server operators. A 30-day free trial is available.
The package has been criticized <http://cryptome.org/zks-v-tcm.htm> for not being open-source. But that is changing. The source code of the kernel module of the Linux version of Freedom <http://opensource.zeroknowledge.com/> has been released; and the release of the Windows version source code is "coming soon."
Free of Charge
GILC Web-Based Remailer <http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer. html>
Hushmail <http://www.hushmail.com>
Safeweb <http://www.safeweb.com>
Zixmail <http://www.zixmail.com>
Anonymouse <http://anonymouse.is4u.de/>
COTSE <http://www.cotse.com/home.html>
Somebody.net <http://somebody.net/>
ANON.XG.NU's Web-Based Remailer <http://anon.xg.nu/remailer.html>
Chicago <http://xenophon.r0x.net/cgi-bin/mixnews-user.c gi>
Fee-Based
ZKS Freedom <http://www.freedom.net>
SkuzNET's The Internet Mail Network <http://www.theinternet.cc/ http://www.mailanon. com/>
IDcide <http://www.idcide.com>
--Metrollica
We need someone to host an exit server at HavenCo!
Cut and paste troll - as most of Metrollica's comments are. This one is from the remailer FAQ.
what about a SIP per misspelling or grammatical error? I wouldn't be able to stand up after one viewing of the front page.
Guido69: Perfect. Now if I can just get this up and running, I can anonymously ask Kathleen to marry me. 'Taco won't have a clue who's stealing his girl! Bwaahahahah.
Perfect? Hardly. In the unlikely event that she decides to accept she won't know who to accept.
Unless of course she saw your post...unless of course he also saw your post...
Anonymity is tricky, yes?
-- MarkusQ
In the unlikely event that she decides to accept she won't know who to accept.
What about PGP? All he has to do is generate a key pair - and sign the proposal with it.. if she accepts, he can prove his identity then!
Of course one has to ask oneself this question:
If you met a woman who accepted the proposal from an anonymous stranger, would you WANT to marry her?
Downloading the code now... at a whopping .8 k/s.
'sokay. I'll just let the download run all night and maybe I'll have a whole tarball in the morning. If not, I'll try again and grab it off one of the mirrors that will inevitably spring up.
What I'd really like to see come out of this, however, are 'userland' Win32 and MacOS implimentations ala 'Triangle Boy'.
I'm simply not much of a coder, or I would spend time on this, since I think it's such an important project.
Make this usuable for both experienced and inexperienced admins, and you have done a great deal for privacy and freedom.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
You can't use the code for commercial gain, but I could see a non-profit network springing up...
Why is this even on slashdot?! The producer of this code is releasing it under a "non free" license.
what happened to the code posting? i accessed the posting a couple of hours ago and started a download... i had been downloading for around 2.5 hours, and the transfer stalled... i decided to check the website, and -- ITS GONE!
does anyone know what happened? i keep getting a 404... its still stalling frequently, as well... perhaps getting slashdotted was more than they bargained for... in any case, id like to know the story behind it...
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
weird... now its back... did anyone else have this problem?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Either Bram or Len abused the hosting which was provided to codecon on the basis of "information about CodeCon, text-only" to host large files of non-open-source software. I have removed the files, please get them from a mirror.
Anyone who gets free service and then abuses the terms of service under which that service is provided really has little right to complain when their access is permanently deleted.
Paying customers are certainly welcome to use their full available bandwidth. CodeCon is hosted for free, as it was originally an idea a few of us on OPN were discussing and originally organizing.
This is the software for the Freedom server. To make it into a useful system, people need to coordinate to run the servers as part of an interconnected network. There needs to be some centralized place where the client software can locate lists of servers in order to choose its routes.
And speaking of the client, has its code ever been released? I know at one point they did release code for a Linux client, but what about Windows?
Freedom also used a "Nym" concept where customers paid for Nyms. When you browsed on the net or sent email through a chain of Freedom servers, the last server in the chain learned your Nym (but not your true identity). Then if you had misused the service, your Nym could be cancelled. This provided some protection against servers in the network, because users would not want to lose Nyms, as they cost real money.
In an open source Freedom network, what would replace the Nym concept? Would server operators no longer have this protection, so that spam or hacking could go through their systems and there is no way to stop the people involved, who are hidden at the other end of a chain of Freedom servers? Or would they coordinate to set up a centralized Nym server and perhaps even require a monetary donation to purchase a Nym, in order to discourage abuse?
Many questions remain to be resolved before even this generous release of source code can replace the service formerly offered by ZKS.
This software, as a peer-to-peer network, could be everything we dream of. Since individuals would use each-others' IP addresses, the network would be even more anonymous than the old network. It would have to chop the packets into very small pieces, though, and send them on twisted routes to avoid individuals from collecting credit card, and other sensitive data.
Those things are generally the scummiest things out there. Some fuck gets a government grant to "help people" with some thing, say $500,000 for a three year project, the main scurve pays himself $100,000 a year out of that money leaving $200,000 left. Enough for office rent, pseudo-advertising (aka CYA money), a couple computers, and probably a bunch of coke in the meantime.
:)
If I ever license anything like that, it's going to exclude both corporate and little scum-sucking "legally" not for profit "organizations" as well. Only truly for "no gain usage"
Maybe if they share the coke...
The obvious magic word to me is:
XYZZY
(The world spins around, and you find ourself in front of small house, there are pgp keys and a lantern on the ground by your feet)
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
did anyone get the file and have it mirrored?
oh where oh where will the mirrors be!
Wrong, wrong wrong. What killed Freedom was that it was a horribly designed client application. I sent them money to register it and bought a tee shirt besides because I liked what they were trying to do, but their implementation was simply horrible. Rather than allow you to anonymize HTTP, SMTP, and POP and those alone, they attempted to intercept and proxy with encryption EVERY SINGLE CONNECTION on your machine. Jesus H. Obviously, Freedom broke a number of protocols that it had no clue about, and utterly demolished performance for things that one wouldn't want anonymized, such as SSH connections from your own machines to your own machines.
ZeroKnowledge also made their product unusable by emitting far too many forced updates without even bothering with authentication. You'd think that people who had better be experts in privacy and security would know better, but I guess not. It's bad enough to have your client stop working every four weeks and force you to reinstall, but to force you to go download an unsigned, unauthenticated binary and install it to update the Freedom client was ridiculous. Six weeks after I bought the thing, I knew the company wasn't going to make it because their demo client wouldn't be able to gain a foothold with the proxy design and constant update requirements.
It sucks too, because they came really close. They had smart network coders there and they knew enough about Microsoft network stacks to do some cool things. If they'd have just stuck to what 90% wants and done that well, they'd have gotten the customer base they needed *and* not stepped into the infinite-number-of-protocols developer resource tarpit.
This is great - we don't need any demi-paranoid analysis to acknowledge that there are countries where the internet is censored in some way and where triangle + freedom create a relitavely safe way to exchange music. I mean ideas. either.
.gov site where it's published.
So A) howabout someone link to an explanation of how to set up a server and point triangle clients to you and
B) let's hear a little enthusiasm for freedom on the web - I recently searched, for example on "constitution united states" and found 2 sites willing to sell me 'chapters' of the constitution before I found the
What's whrong with us, it seems like in some ways the internet has lost content since 1995 (when the gutenberg project was in full swing, muds and bulliten boards were all around and the microsoft EULA was, well, something no one read and it didn't matter.
*sight*
closed minded is as closed minded does
Fact is, the exit server is the one where the rubber hits the road--the one where from which the threating emails are being sent, the one trying the stack smashing on web pages, the one trying to telnet to dockmaster.nsa.mil.
Fact is, I'd admire anyone taking the risks associated with that--but only someone either wealthy enough to afford a bevy of lawyers to assert his rights or with a serious wish to see the prison system from the inside would run one of these and make it available to all comers.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
You know Taco has access to the server logs, right? Probably knows where you live by now. Whew, I'd hate to be in your shoes.
She is a cutie, though; you're right about that.
--rgb
CodeCon is being broadcast live from the DNA Lounge over streaming video.
They just announced Ryan at HavenCo has changed the password to the codecon.org server and conference organizers can no longer log in. They have setup a New Server for CodeCon which has updated info on the conference.
The source to the Freedom Network servers linked from this new server is now at Linux Fund. Yeah!
Clicking on the "encrypted source tarball" link gets me a "file not found." Has it been removed? Any mirrors?
Those interested should sign on to the announcement mailing list, at:
http://tweakdom.sourceforge.net
--Will