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IEEE Computing Covers Freenet

Posted by michael on from the free-and-clear dept.

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."

8 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. anonymization arms race by perdida · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Freenet... Why? by Uberminky · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I don't mean this to be a troll or anything. I do realize that there are ideals behind it -- free speech for everyone, censorship is the devil, etc. That's dandy. But seriously. Why Freenet? It's such a tremendous effort, for something that so few will use. In fact, does anyone actually use it for getting work done? Heck, does anyone use it for anything? (I honestly want to know!)

    A year or two ago there was a presentation at my college about Freenet. One of the CS guys here was "on the development team" (whatever that means). I never did hear a real reason, other than ideals, for doing it. (In fact the kid that was talking about it was mentioning an effort to try moving it onto packet radio, thus freeing it from even the censorship of ISPs. This threw a huge red flag for me that he didn't know what he was talking about: this is blatantly illegal by FCC regulations, and anyone who tries it will lose their ham license! No encryption is allowed, in any form whatsoever. You can't even legally come up with a substitution cypher, like "beans" means "meet me in the parking lot" and "chicken" means "9:30pm". NOTHING. And the encryption issue is just the tip of it. Read up on it, get your ham radio license, it'll be immediately clear that doing anything even remotely resembling this is just not feasible on the ham bands in the US.)

    So yeah, I'm veering off-topic. Anyway. Let me reiterate: I'm not telling anyone NOT to do work on something they're devoted to. I do appreciate the ideals that Freenet stands for. But seriously, what's going to make it succeed? What makes it worth the horrible inefficiencies designed into the protocol? Is it actually useful to anyone? Alright, enough from me. I hope someone can answer these, I'm very curious. Somebody give me a reason to help the development effort!

    --

    The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.

    1. Re:Freenet... Why? by Gaccm · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...
    2. Re:Freenet... Why? by km790816 · · Score: 3, Informative

      The founder guy gave a talk that I had the pleasure of attending this summer.

      The coolest thing freenet is used for now: helping free speech in China. There is a version that fits on a floppy and it's used to spread information about things the Communist party doesn't like: basically anything that isn't pro-Communist party.

      The funny thing: when pressed on what freenet is used most for, the answer came back: porn. Laughs all around at the talk, but the positive impact in China seems like a good example to me.

      "To hold a grudge is to maintain an intense connection with someone you might not want to have a relationship with in the first place."
      -Francine Prose

      --
      A speech...
    3. Re:Freenet... Why? by dghcasp · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Why? Simple. It's a system for distributing information of questionable legal status.

      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.

  3. Main problem now- Freenet is slow and in flux by LM741N · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've been running a node or two for several years now. There were once a large number of Freenet web sites, but when the protocol changed, most of them dissappeared. Now a lot of them are coming back. But who's to say the protocal won't change again in a few months, and we're back to square one. It seems to be a project with no plan and thus no endpoint. Imagine if Microsoft changed the format for Word files every 6 months, and you get the idea.

  4. The best is yet to come... by heretic108 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I put 8 months of hard work into Freenet - in particular, developing the W--dows FreeWeb client program and the multi-platform FCPtools library. It's very possible that I will return to the project at some time in the near future.

    In my mind, Freenet is still very much in its infancy. At present, it's mostly a prototype, suffering severely from being written in J---, but if gcj gets into a fit state (or some hard-assed hackers re-code it in C), the major problems will be overcome.

    But to me, one of Freenet's greatest strengths is almost totally unknown - the bottom layer is designed so that almost anything can be easily slotted in and used as a transport - not just plain TCP/stream sessions, but UDP, or tunnels, or anything.

    Because of this design foresight, it's very straightforward to write and plug in a few steganographic transport drivers which traffic keys in devious ways, eg usenet groups with graphics file carriers, or whitespace/grammatical stego in plaintext mailing lists or IRC, hidden packets within webcam feeds, even pirate radio (note that Freenet is high on redundancy and very fault-tolerant).

    The way I see it, any determined effort at stamping Freenet out will bring the project alive like never before, and cause it to attract legions of talented and inspired developers to keep n steps ahead in the arms race.

    "Repress a religion, and it will flourish"
    -- James Herbert

    --
    -- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
    1. Re:The best is yet to come... by Tom7 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How does having it written in Java make it suffer? I ran a node for a while, and the performance was just fine. It's also nice to know it won't have any buffer overflows.

      I can understand the desire for native-compiled code, but... C??