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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
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...