Slashdot Mirror
IEEE Computing Covers Freenet
Rayban writes: "From the Freenet Project homepage: IEEE Internet Computing has an article (pdf) entitled 'Protecting Free Expression Online with Freenet.' It provides an excellent technical introduction to the core ideas behind Freenet."
I worry that things like freenet are going to make it so that people will have to engage in continual warfare with people like John Ashcroft.
Ashcroft is the guy who pulled lots of federal enviro data on pipeline locations and stuff from the Net. He will have to attack Google caches and stuff to completely hide this information.
Total lack of anonymity is next. How can Freenet survive if the service is branded as terrorist and the individual humans are pulled away from their terminals while servers are confiscated? No robustness of code can prevent this.
I love Freenet, but to protect anonymity we must acknowledge that not all solutions to civil liberties restrictions are code-based. We must back them up with aggressive defence of civil liberties in political and protest arenas.
Goat sex free since 2001
Or you could just browse with Lynx.
Like it or not, not everyone wants to use an ancient text browser with fixed-width fonts and no images or colours whatsoever. There is plenty of multimedia content on the Internet that is useful, not just banner ads.
Or use an ad-busting proxy.
This takes time to download and install the proxy software, set up your browser, and spend hours upon frustrating hours tuning Junkbuster to fit your needs. Not everyone is inclined to run a whole other piece of software just so they can browse without ads.
Or just ask daddy for a little extra money this week and pay the damn $5.
Cute, but don't you think it's just the slightest bit slimy and underhanded of VA to abuse their most popular asset (and that's all Slashdot is to VA, a cash cow) in order to annoy people into giving them money? Pissing off your users is NOT a valid business plan.
I used to love Slashdot too, but their newest money-making scheme quite frankly pisses me off. I'd much rather see Taco and Hemos throw in the towel than betray the ideals of freedom from corporate oppression that Slashdot once embodied. I hope that you will open your eyes and join me in showing them that we're not going to take it.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
have you ever been to cryptome.org, or any sites like it? Those sites create lots of enemies because of their content. If their content was copied to freenet, then it can't all be lost in one fell swoop. Freenet would be the mirror that couldn't be taken down. As for what it currently is being used for? Well, 1) its still beta, but just like all new techs it has lots of porn on it. But i havn't used it in months so i'm not the best source.
Basicly, once its big enough, i'll use it just like i currently use gnutella.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
Simply ask yourself if you can talk freely without fear about "politically incorrect", "unpatriotic", "racially biased" subjects.
You'd rather go masked for a wide array of topics, even in All-mighty America.
And freenet is not your toilet. Far from it.
Just quit bitching about what you obviously can't grasp. Freenet is living without you anyway.
If I wanted to put up pictures from my vacation, I'd use the web and HTTP protocol - everyone has it and there is no content problem with my pictures. I wouldn't ask my friends to download (and compile!) a tool and pass around PGP keys.
Freenet et al come into their own only when you want to put up content that you expect that people will try to force you to take down.
Sometimes that content does have some redeeming features even if illegal; the Xenu texts help show how ridiculous Scientology is at the higher levels, yet they're illegal (copyright violation.) The documents spirited out of the tobacco companies that proved everything they'd ever said about "no harmful effects" were lies and led to the huge settlements to the government: All private, controlled documents that were effectivly stolen and illegally published by the whistle-blowers.
These are the things people "think" when they think of how freenet, &c. will save free speech. Yes, they're illegal, but they're important.
Of course, the report compares their system to Napster, not whistle-blowing. Argue as you may, Napster was just another system for distributing material of questionable legality (i.e., if you had the CD, you could have burnt that MP3 yourself!) The whole report has a feel of "here's how we're not gonna be shut down like Napster was." I don't know the exact history, but didn't freenet really only take off when Napster started having problems?
Dose of reality: If anything actually useful does make it into the FreeNet (and ugh, couldn't they have picked a name that doesn't mean "Free Network BBS access" to anyone who'se been online > 10 years?), it'll never be found, expired away to make room for all the goat and child movies.
C is easier than Java only in the sense that Windows is easier than UNIX; there's less of it to learn. Once you've learned either well, however, one can build complex projects much more quickly with Java than C.
C is certainly faster. C is without question better in most cases for low-level code -- whoever thought of writing an OS in Java should be shot.
On the other hand, Java makes it much easier to assemble (fairly) large, complex projects -- which, in case you haven't noticed, Freenet is. Network and stream handling is genuinely easier in Java than in C; the same goes for many other tasks. SQL is another that jumps to mind, though it's not particularly relevant here; proper exception handling is Yet Another Java Advantage (don't you hate checking every function's return value in C? Or worse yet, do you just not do it?), and not having to worry about buffer overflows or accumulating unfree()'d memory over days of operation is damn nice.
Understand -- almost all the code I write is in C, Java or Python, and I respect all three for the things they're good at. Freenet is certainly not a Python project, and (due to the need to structure its design effectively and do correct error handling easily) it strikes me as more of a Java project than a C one.
Yes, more people know C -- but if it takes them twice as long to get to release (tracking and removing all the memory leaks and potential buffer overruns, recreating the network code Java does for them, &c) or just takes newcomers twice as long to understand the program's structure (something OO, when done right, makes easy), that's no killer advantage.