Slashdot Mirror
Freenet 0.5 Released
An anonymous reader submits "After over a year in the making, Freenet 0.5 stable has been released. This new version is far superior to previous versions of Freenet."
The announcement specifically thanks Matthew Toseland, "without whom this release would still be vaporware," noting "On the 11th of November, Matthew will no longer be able to work full-time unless more people donate, so please give whatever you can spare at our Donations page."
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds.
Freenet is:Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.
~561
I just would like to be the first to say a big "Thank you!" to the entire FreeNet team.
When I first heard of FreeNet, I thought, "I live in America, what would I need of this?" No, this isn't a troll. I was happy and complacent and slightly distrustful of the Big Bad Brother. Now the purpose of a network like FreeNet has become quite clear, as I'm neither happy nor complacent and I'm more distrustful of Big Brother with each passing day, as he takes further swipes at the freedoms my Constitution tells me I'm supposed to have.
Thanks, FreeNet, for standing up. More importantly, thanks for the foresight. Imagine if they'd waited until it was really necessary.
Freenet is free software designed to ensure true freedom of communication over the Internet. It allows anybody to publish and read information with complete anonymity. Nobody controls Freenet, not even its creators, meaning that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or shutdown.
Yeah.... but what is it? P2P? Blogger? Messenger?
I thought that Freenet just received a large 'donation' from Abiword's PayPal account a few weeks ago. :^)
obligatory OT anti-MS post above.
Maybe, TWAT, 0.5 could have had only minor improvements. But in fact, it is 'far superior'. And it has NOTHING TO DO with Microsoft. TWAT.
I'd donate, but I already canceled my Paypal account. I guess Freenet needs to speak with Abiword.
... is a little lacking. Having dl'ded and installed the program, I can't seem to connect to anything. Helpfiles are not helpful. Being a computer geek and not getting it running in 2 minutes flat annoys me to no end. Cool Idea thou.
I am the Barber of Seville.
Unlike most open-source projects, the Freenet website seems to spend more time evangelizing than talking about the technology. Check out their architecture page, and compare with their philosophy page.
Please remember NOT to set yourself as anything other than a transient node, unless you have a great big fat unfirewalled Internet pipe and never turn your PC off.
Really. There is nothing more annoying than broken links on Freenet which takes ages to resolve.
On the 11th of November, Matthew will no longer be able to work full-time unless more people donate
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, let's take this time to remember our veteran programs, without whom we wouldn't have freedom of software. Don your antiquated RAM chips on your lapel and be proud to be a programmer.
the package appears to not be gzipped (despite the suffix). Hence use tar -xf freenet-0.5.0.tgz. Also the shell scripts in the package don't have the proper executable attributes set so that also needs to be modified. After that just follow the instructions :)
FreeNet is essentially the bulletproof P2P data exchange. It's practically impossible to destroy, or track down people who are on it. It is NOT designed for swapping MP3s or porn for those who have got the wrong idea, it's purpose is (as the name implies) to guarantee freedom of speech by allowing totally anonymous yet scalable publishing.
Scalable? Yes, one of the more interesting aspects of Freenet is it's intelligent caching and retrieval system. This isn't Gnutella, when you request a file it traverses the nodes being cached at each level. Therefore, the more a file is requested, the more distributed it becomes and the easier it becomes to get to - the opposite of the web.
FreeNet takes the form of a web for new users, you can "surf" the FreeWeb, and there was at one point a google-style search engine for it, I have no idea if that's the case. Some of the problems I remember were that it was often hard or impossible to reach certain pages as they hadn't propagated enough to be found before the timeouts were hit, and even then the timeouts were pretty high (like 2 minutes). On the more popular sites the owners would have to manually request it from different parts of the FreeNet in order to make it accessible.
Another problem was that because nothing can ever be deleted from the FreeNet once published, it was hard to do news/blog style sites: at the time they used JavaScript date based redirects, I think that shows how long ago I used it. Suffice to say that I'll be trying this release with interest.
From the explorers area of the freenet pages: ..Governments seek to prevent people from advocating ideas which are deemed damaging to society....The second argument is that this "good" censorship is counter-productive even when it does not leak into other areas. For example, it is generally more effective when trying to persuade someone of something to present them with the arguments against it, and then answer those arguments....
6. Isn't censorship sometimes necessary?
But what about questions that are not answerable? For instance, some anonymous person "places" a file containing the source codes for all the windows operating systems+MATHEMATICA source code+xyz corporations major software. The software companies attitude could be bad, and mainly oriented towards profit and monopoly. But do even such companies deserve such a death blow? At one stroke, their entire product goes down the drain.
While I am not against freenet, it is not without its disadvantages. Taken to its limits, nobody can control us, yah, but nobody can control this "network" either!
"Do something man. Right now."
Isn't this the nightmare of all anti-freedom lobbyist organisations: Any one can publish anything, while still being anonymous.
IMHO there are three optional futures:
* It is deemed illegal and shut down.
* It is stopped by Palladium and shut down.
* All developers and users are sued and it is shut down.
I still wounder why everything good has to go.
Ugh! Bad time to be asking for donations via Paypal!
Please set your node up as non-transient as long as you're online most of the time (where most is something like 75% and above). The network desperately needs non-transient nodes (high bandwidth is not that important). Also, your anonymity is a lot higher when running a non-transient node.
The idea of Freenet is really great, but there were two things in the implementation that really annoyed me:
1) I cannot control what is in my datastore. Free speech or not, I'm not going to cache your kiddieporn for you. So if I know that there's a file I don't want, give me a way to blacklist it. If it's encrypted then it's another story.
2) My files aren't shared permanently. If nobody requests the files I injected, they are thrown out after a while, even if my node is online 24/7. That's just plain stupid.
If I'm wrong or this has changed, please feel free to correct me.
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
It's not so much the artists, but the greedy record companies.
I don't believe that any *true* artist would care if you listened to an MP3 w/o paying for it.
I know I'm going to get moderated back to the stone age for saying this, but I suspect that I'm not the only one thinking it. I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.
Consider for just a minute that given a situation in which one individual distributes material to which another individual or group objects, most of the time there's a good reason for the objection. Maybe the material being distributed is copyrighted (like movies or music), maybe it's dangerous (like blueprints to a nuclear reactor), maybe it's offensive (like child pornography). Most of the time when the distribution of material is opposed, there's a good-- or at least understandable-- reason for it.
Now, it's possible to imagine a scenario in which it might be justifiable, or even imperative, to distribute certain pieces of information. "Soylent Green is people" is a silly example, but a more realistic one might be distributing news of the outside world to a society whose media is heavily controlled. But in that sort of scenario, is the Internet really going to be a useful communication pathway? Assuming the people who need the media have access to the Internet at all, what are the chances that they're going to have unrestricted access to the network of Freenet servers? If you think about it, I think you'll agree that it sounds pretty unlikely.
What I'm saying is this: it sounds to me like there's no realistic, nontrivial, legitimate use for this software. The idea sounds cool on the surface, but I have some serious doubts about its practicality.
I write in my journal
There's plenty of work to be found in the fast-food industry.
unfortunatly there is no freedom of choice in what platform you want to run on. only linux, mac and windows are supported. I'm sorry, but maybe i'll give a damn when this project supports solaris and freebsd at the very least....
Will they take a cheque, do you think? :)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
From the philosophy page:
in some European countries propagating information deemed to be racist is illegal.
I often hear how US citicens have a constitutional right of free speech. This i not so.
On the contrary the legal system in the US poses a number of restrictions on free speech. This includes libel, porn, patent and copyright laws. These laws all in some ways limit your right of free speech. So don't tell me that the US has free speech - because you don't.
Besides I personally think it makes sense for racist propaganda to be illegal. Look at it as a sort of class action libel case. Also rasism is one of the key points governed by the UN Human Rights declaration.
your sig kinda looks like a slashdot reply to eahc of your messages - is that intentional ;-)?
What is new? I don't want to download it just to find out that it is just as slow as before. _How_ is it "far superior"?
"'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"
"Daddy, where were you when they took pictures of me playing naked on the beach when I was five, and when they posted me to the pedophilia board."
The concept of free speech/press is not so simple.
The FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it. But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal ways.
On the other hand, the fact is that the more popular information is better found, and the marginal info is hard to obtain.
Moreover, the control of the net is in the hands of users. If this technology became a widely used criminal tool, people would decide to turn off their servers and the proyect would die. The purpose of the FreeNet will be decided by the majority.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Has anyone had any luck getting the proxy to bind to interfaces other than loopback? The docs refer to fcp.allowedHosts, fproxy.allowedHosts, and fproxy.bindAddress. I've tried all these, and fcp.bindAddress, in all possible combinations, binding to all interfaces and allowing all hosts. And yet still "telnet 127.0.0.1 8888" works, and telnet "192.168.2.1 8888" fails.
Without this, I have to run a server on every computer on the network ;-(
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Freenet documentation does a whole lot better job explaining how everything works.
:)
You should also visit Nubile-freesite (site in freenet) for which you can find a link from many freenet sites.
Basic information in freenet is stored in CHKs (Content Hash Keys) - they can be found when requested with their contents hash key. Content itself is encrypted and encryption key is stored in CHKs.
This means that unless you know what you're looking for, you can't see it.
There are also KSKs which are basicly named redirects to CHKs. They are not secure as they are not signed by any keys and everyone could change them by inserting a new KSK with the same name (and hope they do not collide in the network).
There also also SSKs which are protected with public/private key architecture. They are requested with public key and inserted with private key. All freesites use SSKs (with at least one exception, the anarchy-freesite wich is a KSK keyspace).
Large content can be split to multiple parts and then clued together using 'standard' format splitfiles. This basicly is that you insert all the parts and one additional file that tells
Program listening in 127.0.0.1:8888 is fproxy (internal in fred - freenet reference daemon) which does most of the nasty work with keys. It accepts request fot all previously mentioned key types and passes them to browser.
Other programs which want to access freenet should do it with another port that talks FCP (Freenet Client Protocol). FCP is an ASCII protocol - very easy to use.
Read more from fine manuals
Matthew will no longer be able to work full-time unless more people donate, so please give whatever you can spare at our Donations page.
;o)
Not free as 'leeching free'.
try this with request freesite by URI
KSK@images/humor
but is it really just another "network" on top of the Internet?
Could something like Freenet be created with say IP on IP and an seperate root-DNS for this alternate network?
Why don't you do the same if you care about free speech? Freenet is already used by the chinese opposition. Some european countries like france, greece and germany already censor the internet, so freenet is also important for western "democracies".
Some day soon something like freenet will be nessecary even in the US if you want to say something critical about bush or ashcroft without getting on some list of potential terrorists.
regards,
mrright
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
What do you think it is? Beautiful artwork? Lovely poetry? pics of the goatse guy?
-Kevin
. . no pun intended . .
: P
Just wondering, because it seems inevitable to me that Freenet and GNUnet are going to be the only place left in the world where independent idea publishing can be, a short few years from now.
How will their differences in design/engineering change their 'base', or
otherly phrased, what portions of our idea-world will live freely in each 'net'?
Messages to/for me ( in me journal )
.. that not everything in freenet is true.
Everything published there can be denied. Perhaps some false accusations will come because of that, but if they aren't true, they can be dismissed.
If it's true.. well.. someone had to say it.
It sure would have been nice for that gpl outfit to make certain their program would run with the current kaffe stable series, eh?
Does anyone 'round here know of another excellent gpl p2p system that works well with Free Software?ROTFL!
Seriously!
Beat the living hell out of them and charge them with wire fraud?
If not, I think the former would be more satisfying.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
to continuously run it and help the community by acting as a server.
That is the entire foundation of P2P and why long load times are acceptable. It needs to reach it's tentacles into other servers to let the network survive, but people like you keep dropping on and off the network. Stay on or stay off, it's your choice but pick one.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
My network, DistribNet attempts to address these issues and more. It has been a while since I have worked on it but I plan on putting some serious effort into it in the next couple of months. You an check it out at DistribNet.sf.net.
This is really interesting. In the rather unlikely situation that freedom of speech will be seriously impaired in western nations we should build a p2p alternative media and share video, audio and articles with other people. This means that internet would still be allowed. Well, at least internet _is_ very important for international business these days, which means it would not be closed? What about a war situation? In the Soviet Union they used to copy subversive zines ("Samisdats") and spread the copies around. This is why the Soviet authorities were quite concerned about allowing computers and copy machines to be used by the citizens.
I have a camble modem with fixed IP and a rate of 128kps. However it is volume limited to 10G per month. Above this I have to pay extra, and the cost is quite a bit.
Can I limit the maximum traffic per month on my node? If so I could consider running a node with say a 2-5G monthly limit.
Thanks
Metalix
What I would find interesting is how Freenet is going to be distributed in the countries it is aimed at. I'd expect the Great Firewall to block each and every site that even contains the word or, even worse, to log everybody that downloaded a copy of the program and than have him busted by some nice police officers. Does anyone know a solution?
"Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-my-own-Grandpa." - Dr Hubert Farnsworth
Article I, Section 8. Powers of Congress
[paragraph 8] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Things must have changed since I looked at the FreeNet project.
I always understood the project as a tool to disclose information that the governament didn't want people to know. For example, in some (realy bad) countries, the governament lets the police search your apparement and almost every records there are about you, without you knowing it. And it's even illegal for people to tell you that the police has ever investigated you. Even 20 years after the fact.
The same governaments have been known to assasinate foreign (elected) head of states and finance terrorism abroad.
And I who thought that FreeNet was meant as a tool to disclose information about those governaments,, tsk tsk .. How naive of me ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I tried having a node on my server, but it couldn't be. It's just too big for my Cyrix 233/64MB. It's written in Java. First, it was complicated to chroot. And then it was a pain to keep running. It can't be that complicated. I'm sure that a decent C implementation could use a reasonable about of RAM. The Java one used 32MB on average and quite often got killed by the kernel.
I've got a question too, why does Freenet have to use threads? I honestly don't understand why are they needed. Couldn't it just switch between connections like an IRC server? Maybe it'd be a bit smaller that way.
I legally cannot start to sell my own WinXP clone compiled from original source code
Lindows seems to be doing a good job of it because the Lindows source code is original and not a derivative of Microsoft Windows source code.
Will I retire or break 10K?
-> it will make slashdotting an impossibility
...)
-> it will make removing a webpage without approval of the webmaster an impossibility
-> it will prevent sniffing of your web traffic, rendering carnivore and others useless
-> it has the potential of giving these properties to a lot more protocols (think mail, instant messaging,
it is the internet as it should be
The problem with freenet is that its ideology gets in the way of any
practical use anyone might want to put it to. You can agree with the
ideology all you like, but fundamentally freenet is so concerned about
providing free anonymous speech that in practice what it's going to
provide is the ability to shout in the forest where nobody hears.
I'll explain. Because they want everything to be anonymous, they
made sure content gets spread across all nodes (flooding) and can
not be (easily) traced to the given originating node. Consequently,
there's no reliable addressing mechanism. You cannot, therefore,
create content and make it available at a certain address all the
time. All you can do is create the content and watch it get mixed
with all the other content.
Survivable? Sure, if you mean by that that as long as people run
nodes they'll be sharing _something_, but if you want a particular
piece of content to remain available, the only way to ensure that
is to keep injecting it again and again and again -- like the way
spammers use email. Otherwise, it goes through each node once,
in the midst of whatever other content is being injected, and soon
is gone. That model is _anything but_ survivable in practice.
Sure, it may work now, when everyone running a freenet node is
genuinely concerned about free speech and wants the system to work,
but if it ever catches on, it will rapidly devolve into a shouting
match, where injecting your content only a few times will ensure no
one can find it in the sea of _stuff_ that gets repeatedly injected.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
By allowing child pornography to circulate over it.
As I understand it, freesites proliferate based on usage; the more people who look at something, the more widely it gets distributed.
The main "portal" freesite contain several links to kiddie porn, and thus supports the distribution of it.
I would love to run a machine or two as a freenet node, but am afraid that supporting that filth and subjecting myself to 20+ years in prision because I cannot control the cache on my computer is not acceptable.
And before you say "it anonymous, nobody can see your encrypted cache"... I call bullshit. There are plenty of bugs out there, and I'm sure that governments have found flaws in encryption algorithms that the public doesn't know about.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
And the same is true for mnet. They too need non-transient nodes that contributes a little diskspace (1GB?) to reach critical mass.
The project is still very much beta, but those who like the idea are welcome to add such a node to the project.
Mnet does something similar to freenet and have equal anonymity.
From the FreenetProject.org page:
Efficient distribution of high-bandwidth content: Freenet's adaptive caching and mirroring is being used to distribute Debian Linux software updates and to combat the Slashdot effect.
I wonder how well they're doing on that part right now.
Sorry to say this - but the internet is much larger than national boundaries. Freenet in fact enforces the borderless nature of the internet, since it distributes content across the globe, making it really hard for anyone to retract information from it.
Think China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. Think the Scientiology. These are nations that aggressively pursue "subversive" information. Freenet attempts to make harder for goverments to stop their citizens from exhanging information freely.
This issue is indeed much, much larger than copyright infringement.
Stop the brainwash
Censorship started in Spain blocking Batasuna (a BAsque Country party) web site.... Now a web site which accused spanish royal family of an art robbery (with proofs) has been closed and their owners accused of "crown slander" (monarch in Spain can't be judged, spanish constitution says so).
Now, after LSSI law has been approved, ISP are obbligated to keep logs of all connections during 1 year... A web site can be closed by lots of reasons (a lot of them very loosely defined, lots of interpretations can be made on them)... The law would made Google and archive.com illegal if they were companies in Spain, because they keep in their cache "illegal" sites. About 200 sites have closed or moved abroad in reaction to this law.
It really seems that freenet is needed (or one of the low-latency anonymous distributed www proxies which are being developped with anonymous www browsing in mind)... Spanish inquisition is back.
Of course it'll be slow! Seriously, most 'errors' are just the webbrowser giving up. The first few days your node is still integrating. Just keep trying and it'll work.
CCP banned sf.net in China, mostly due to the freenet project. so i can not spread that download page to my friends, or on BBS, because not many proxys available for them. and i can not upload freenet to my own site, i'm afraid. if freenet team guys setup a mirror other than sf.net, it will be blocked too, in no time. the only way i can figure out is the p2p, i've put the installer into my share folder of kazaa, hope you, kazaa users, out there, can make a little help too. thank you!
What's to stop someone from releasing an easy to use Freenet client that happens to contain Adware and Spyware?
Judging by the look of the GUI tools on the Freenet website and some of the comments posted above by people trying to get Freenet working on their PC, it probably won't be long.
Amazing magic tricks
but it's better than no government at all!
Sorry, couldn't resist quoting fortune.
It is NOT designed for swapping MP3s or porn for those who have got the wrong idea,
Before anyone gets misled, let me state for the record that Freenet does have porn and MP3s in it. In fact, it's quite a good platform for publishing collections of pornographic images. (It's not quite as good for MP3s and Oggs because they're much larger files. But it has been successfully used for that purpose. It may even have been used successfully for the next order of magnitude (ISO images, movies), but I can't confirm or deny that.)
So if you're reading this wondering if Freenet is going to have any pr0n -- yes, it does. But you may be somewhat disappointed if you're looking for huge MP3 collections.
I installed everything and it works OK.
.. i guess its not really unbreakable?
BUT
mamma mia, each page takes some 5 minutes to download! that is not a viable solution!
AND this is with a direct connection to the internet backbone in the netherlands (Surfnet). so
so far, so good. but.. what is its use when there is no search engine? or did I overlook something? it is really necessary to be an "alternative" for me!
looks like a nice task for the google teams..
The freenet fund paid for a month of full-time development. This was enough to take it from a relatively unstable 0.4 to a nearly rock-solid 0.5. I think this is a great example of putting together some donations and giving them to someone who can spend eight hours a day looking at the code.
I think this is similar in some ways to the street performer protocol.
æeee!
The FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.
.
"Wrong" as defined by whom?
The Bush family thinks it is wrong to leak information emberrassing to the family out to the press, and they punish people severely (within their power) when they do so, yet what they do is clearly constitutional.
Supporters of Clinton felt it was severely wrong to have private, political groups fund and possibly incite lawsuits by private citizens for poltical ends, but clearly that was within the bounds of the constitution.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it.
Ah. So are you the person who gets to tell us what is "right" and what is "wrong?"
But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal way.
Pedophilia is an illness, and people who act on those feelings are criminals. It was never necessary, nor smart, to subvert the first amendment by making information (child pornography) illegal to possess. Illegal to sell, yes (that falls under the commerce clause), but making the possession of child pornography illegal was a serious mistake.
Why? Two reasons I can think of off hand
1) Possession doesn't imply any intent or even desire. Ever get child porno SPAM in your mailbox? How about child porno popups when surfing completely unrelated adult pornography, or perusing newsgroups some looser has spammed with their vile crap? Most people have, and have immediately become guilty under the law for possessing child pornography (it is copied to your machine's memory). Worse still, that crap is cached on people's hard drives, often without their knowledge, for extended periods of time.
2) Any photographs are by definition evidence of a crime. Instead of banning information, such evidence could be routinely siezed, to be returned to its owner only after the crime (child molestation) has been solved. That would have had the twin benefit of not eroding the 1st amendment and building a strong incentive to squeel on the seller into the entire process.
The "dark side" of freedom is a red herring. If we are free, we are free to do things others disagree with. The only limits should be when those freedoms reduce the freedoms of others (that was what the founding fathers intended, after all). IN other words, in the case of pedophelia, the crime is the molestation and harm to the child (and the selling of a regulated, in this case banned, product), not the mere possession of the photographs. However, the police can and should seize any such photographic or video evidence, and keep it on hand in a file, until the case is solved and the child raping perpetrators convicted and put in prison. Of course, such evidence couldn't be returned until said perps had exhausted all appeal opportunities
A little clear thinking would go a long way toward solving many of the 'problems' that come out of people's misuse of their liberties, without eliminating those liberties altogether. And those downsides which can't be eliminated through intelligent application of the law, within the bounds of the constitution, should be viewed as the price we are obligated to pay for liberty.
A price, by the way, which is laughably small compared to that which our forfathers paid in establishing and protecting those freedoms in times past.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If nobody requests it, then it will eventually drop off the network. However nobody can force it off the network -- if people are requesting it then there is no way to get rid of it short of destroying the entire network.
I think it would be cool if this was an apt-get source. Yes, the crypto stuff is overkill for that, but who cares?
That is not a long shot when ultraconservatives run the whole show.
Something like freenet would be a useful way to keep an abortion "network" alive -- methods of contacting willing MDs, or just finding information -on- abortion.....
Can anyone out there give a good user story about freenet? You use it often, have gotten something of value off of it, etc?
I spent another half hour installing freenet and a GUI called frost. I have done this now 4 times over the past several years. Thats 15 minutes longer than any common user would spend.
Guess what? Nothing. I have yet to get this thing to "work" for me. I know it is running, but it's not doing anything for me.
Call me at 1.0.
- I like pudding.
We thought this was a bug too - until we discovered that Mozilla 1.2 (and probably older versions) were transparently ungzipping the tgz file.
Got it installed and running under Win98SE, but it appears that every other geek on slashdot has done the same... Very slow, and I'm on cable.
When you first jump on, your nodes routing table is fresh and its initial guess for where things are is very poor. As you run a permenent node for a while, the routing table gets more refined and responses get faster. By no means are they quite as fast as you'd get from a unloaded web server. But I get the The Freedom Engine showing up in about 15 seconds. It takes quite some time to completely load (since some of the links present on the page just don't exist so the node has to time out its search).
It is worth noting that transient nodes will always be slow since they don't integrate fully into the Freenet. That is the price you pay for being a leech; that and the total lack of plausible deniability.
does anyone know if any of the source Zero Knowledge released was used directly or indirectly in this project? just wondering if anything ever came out of all the work put into the "Freedom Network".
... and got it working in 2 minutes flat (discount the transfer time from CD to HD) ;-]
I am the Barber of Seville.
The Freenet team are very receptive to feedback and suggestions. If you want to help resolve the issues that you have encountered, email support@freenetproject.org and we will try to ensure that 0.5.1 is better.
(Offtopic: Children playing naked on the beach is not pedophilia -- it's just pictures of children playing naked on the beach. It's not even illegal in the US. If you get turned on by it, see a psychiatrist.)
It's ironic that Freenet, a tool for free speech and unfettered communication, is released under the GPL, a license which is designed to put restrictions on what you can do and say.
Under the GPL, if you distribute GPL'd software you are obligated to make the source available. Whether this is good or bad is not the point here. The point is that it is a limitation, a rule, that you must follow.
But Freenet is designed to free us from such limitations and rules. It allows us to publish information without regard to any restrictions that some third party wants to impose - even restrictions imposed by the GPL.
In short, using Freenet one could take GPL software, modify it and redistribute it without making the source code available. And you could get away with it. No one would be able to track you down and make you stop. Freenet makes it easy to bypass the GPL.
Granted, it would be hard to get paid for such software. Some people claim that the real point of the GPL is just that, to prevent people from getting paid for software (not that GPL advocates would ever admit it!). But it seems inconsistent at best for software designed to provide complete freedom of speech to be released under a restrictive license.
The first thing someone should do is to make a copy of the Freenet code with all the GPL licensing terms stripped out of the source, change it to a license that has no restrictions, and publish it on Freenet. That will truly demonstrate the nature of the beast.
Let the dissemination of warez and beast porn begin...
It's pretty bothersome to read comments that play out like the following:
-- BEGIN SUMMARY --
FreeNet can give anyone great anonymity.
FreeNet can give anyone a safe public forum.
FreeNet can help groups dodge oppressive governments/corporations.
Wow! FreeNet is great!
Oh wait. Did you say it might have child pornography? BAN/REGULATE/CENSOR IT.
-- END SUMMARY --
I can't believe people will use child pornography as a measuring stick for free speech. Does the magnitude of the problem even register here?
Pros: allows individuals, groups, and (god help us & china) even nations to retain their pursuit of knowledge without allowing iron-fisted governments to control their opinions and votes through censorship, misinformation, and isolation.
Cons: Allows a few deviants to propagate photo documentation of child abuse that hardly any normal person is interested in anyway.
Do these even compare? Does anyone here really want to overthrow this network because a small minority of established pedophiles have a new, very slow, and somewhat complicated way to get their jollies?
Speculation that it will be used to distribute nuclear bomb blueprints, etc, is just speculation. There's no evidence that this has been done on freenet, nor is there any good reason to believe these things couldn't be printed, put in a briefcase and walked over to the interested party.
As long as information flow becomes more automated and regulated through computers, and as long as this software does what it claims to do, the need for freenet will rise. Don't even think this should be thrown away to pretend we're sticking it to child pornographers.
Freenet is not a new project so it definitely was not spawned due to the code release.It does have significantly different goals and architecture then Zero-Knowledge. As far as I know there is not cross over coding going on.
The GPL is there to prevent OTHERS from restricting my freedoms to access my own code.
If I publish my code under the BSDL, companies can use my code in their own products, then PREVENT ME from giving a copy of their product to other people.
Copyrights are a deliberate restriction on freedom; the GPL is simply a license that defangs that restriction.
But For me, Child Porn is not free speech.
... it is only illegal if it involves an actual, real world, physical child.
... indeed, it only becomes complex when one wishes to disregard that right, and justify doing so.
... you get the material off the street, and you do not even need to diminish anyone's liberty to do so. Plus, you get the added benefit of encouraging real pedophiles who want their material back to cooperate in bringing the seller and original, vile perpetrators to justice.
The supreme court disagrees. In a recent ruling they ruled that child pornography, in the form of cartoons or fiction, were perfectly legal. It is only illegal in the United States when it involves photography or filming of minors. You can sketch or write about whatever vile behavior you like
It is something disgusting... If pedophils says this is free speech, then murder is free speech too...
Um, no. Child Porn is something disgusting. However, pedophiles (or, much more commonly, non-pedophile people who speak out because they are concerned about losing their rights in society's zeal to go after the despicable habits of pedophiles) who say this is free speech are akin to Hollywood movie moghuls who claim that films depicting, or witnessing, murder is "free speech."
Films like, say, "Faces of Death."
Freedom of speech and the press is generally simpler than most people make it, because most people have their own personal agendas and concerns they want to filter freedom of speech through. Whether those agendas are laudable or banal is irrelevant to the underlying fact that they impose complexity on a pretty simple and straightforward right as enshrined in the constitution
Possession of information, however vile that information is, should never be illegal. Marketing and selling it, sure, just as marketing and selling anything, like cars without seatbelts, can be regulated by states, or by the federal government if said trade crosses state lines.
But not possession, for the simple reason that someone could slip a vile picture of a child being molested into your luggage, then have you brought up on charges.
Think this doesn't happen? Anytime you ever receive SPAM containing a pornographic photograph of a child in your mailbox, or read a USENET newsgroup to which some dipshit has posted their OFFTOPIC, vile kiddyporn crap (because the feds are watching the alt.whatever.porn groups), or get hit with a kiddie-porn popup add when browsing the web, including but not limited to completely unrelated, legal adult pornography, you are guilty of breaking the law.
You remain guilty for as long as that material is cached by your web browser, news reader, or mailbox on your hard drive, or, arguably, as long as it sits in your mailbox unread. You are, in all those cases, in possession of banned information.
What is interesting is that the FBI has used this exact kind of thing against people they've gone after for unrelated crimes, even though it is pretty clear (e.g. a guy has 10,000 porn pics on his hard drive, including 3 in his browser cache of underage people) that they were not looking for or collecting child pornography. Because mere possession is illegal, and ignorance (i.e. not knowing) is no excuse, these people are criminalized despite the fact that they have no pedophiliac tendencies or desires whatsoever.
Worse, many people who have no interest in pornography at all, of any kind, end up with this crap on their hard drives simply for having been foolish enough to type whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov, or to have posted something in public with the real email address attached, thus ending up on someone's SPAM list.
Now, if said information were treated as the evidence of a heinous crime that it is, rather than a contriband, it could still be taken away as evidence of a crime, and held until the crime (trafficking in a regulated item: child porn, and/or the physical act of harming a child itself) is solved, prosecuted, and all appeals are exhausted.
Wala
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Freenet is experiencing (and slowly adapting to) the large influx of users generated from this slashdot story. While Freenet is not vulnerable to a flood of request coming from well established nodes, it definitely is turning out that it is vulnerable to an influx of new, untrained nodes.
Just keep your node running (in permanent mode if you have a static IP/DNS... not transient) so that the rest of Freenet learns about it. Then you will get a far better idea of request times. As it stands now, Freenet is very very bogged down but it should adapt without people leaving.
With all this talk about 'plausible deniability,' sounds like an issue to keep in mind...
Thanks for intentionally making the web site impossible to read! The size of the text is specified in pixels. That means on my normal display, the text is too small to read. On my portable terminal, the text is too large (two characters per screen) to easily read. Text should be specified in points. For a client, you have no way of knowing what a reasonable size in pixels could be.
I'd guess there will be some much improved builds comming out within the next couple of weeks as they learn more about today's stress test.
In other news, supposedly the great firewall of China started filtering out http packets with "freenet" in them today. (Source is questionable.)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/ 02/Oct/0462.html
:)
A very nice and polite woman named Heather from PayPal called my home
number this morning in order to resolve this dispute between AbiWord
and PayPal.
She emailed me 2 affidavits that I must sign, notarize, and then mail
via post back to the PayPal headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. The $581
will be credited to my account immediately thereafter. This means that
within one working week the AbiWord Fund will have its $581 back, less
the cost of postage and a notary's fee. All in all, that isn't so bad.
To the folks at PayPal, I applaud you for doing the right thing, even
if it took a while to do it. In my eyes, I feel that your company has
redeemed itself. I only pray that your company handles all future
complaints with the due-diligence that they deserve.
To all of those who have written letters of support to both me and
PayPal on my behalf, I thank you. I think that if nothing else, we've
helped raise some awareness in the general community. At the very
least, we've gotten our money back
Thanks,
Dom
---
*) The PayPal documents were multi-page MS Word documents. AbiWord
opened and printed both copies (paper output in my hands) before
OpenOffice even loaded. Abi's versions look better, to boot.
*) Omaha is also the US city where Nyorp, our "little BSD server that could" resides.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
Berman-Coble legislation passes, mercenaries from the ??AA clog the network up with corrupt files and cancer nodes, making it nearly unusable.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
I strongly support Freenet's goals/methods. Thanks to the informative posts above, I realize that its unlikely anyone can be faulted for the encrypted data they have on their computer.
However I must ask: Isn't it likely that once Freenet becomes popular, a law will be passed saying:
1.) You are responsible for what you are sharing on your computer.
2.) If you join with other people to collectively share data, then each of you is responsible for ALL content shared.
Under 2.) anyone running a freenet server could be busted as long as some illegal content is found on the system.
While law 2.) does not currently exist, I doubt those in control will have trouble pushing such a law, esp. if they raise the "terrorist documents" red herring. Wouldn't law 2.), if enacted, be the end of freenet?
Try out a static key rather then one of the ones that are on the gateway page. Due to the crazy network activity, daily updated keys (aka Date Based Redirects aka DBRs) are not being updated today. Here are a few keys for you to try for people still sticking with it:
... it will not give you yesterday's version of any link on the page including images):
2 00 21028
A good site with an overview of freenet principles (may be slightly outdated):
SSK@qe3ZRJg1Nv1XErADrz7ZYjhDidUPAgM/nubile/11//
Yesterday's edition of The Freedom Engine (note the ?date= parameter will only work for the mainpage
SSK@rBjVda8pC-Kq04jUurIAb8IzAGcPAgM/TFE//?date=
Some good satirical propaganda poster images:
SSK@efagrRWmaC0Ne4ztzKRv5R2yW4cPAgM/propaganda
Hope these work for you.
Alrighty, so I downloaded the software for freenet 0.5, and I got everything installed and running in about 5 - 10 minutes; no big deal. So then, like any true geek, I had to start tinkering with the settings. Now, it still seems to work ok, but it's using a ton of CPU (about 30 - 40% on average of an AXP 1700), and I'm having a bit of trouble getting into some basic sites like The Freedom Engine, which I was able to pop right into last night. Of course, I didn't look to see what the defaults were, and I guess my main concern is that I might be making life difficult for others with a possible misconfiguration. So if someone who's a bit more knowledgable about this software could give me an idea of what the Performance settings under the Advanced Settings should look like, I'd greatly appreciate it. I turned up zip on google and saw nothing in the helps/docs/online helps about a default configuration. Personally, I'd rather have well-tweaked settings (for optimal performance for both me and people using my node) than the defaults. Anyway, here's some info to maybe narrow things down a bit.
System Config:
AthlonXP 1700+
1GB DDR
more drive space than you can shake a tree at
business cable (3.5mbps/384k)
Win2k
Freenet is configured as follows:
non-transient (duh)
10GB disk space allocated (willing to add more if needed)
announce to other nodes is on
Init Req HTL: 15
Max HTL: 50
Max connections: 40
Max Threads: 160
CPU priority: (lessthan)NORMAL (interferes with games and such is it's on normal, I suppose it's something to do with the thread scheduler, perhaps talking to the folks at distributed.net might help with that.)
If anyone can help shed some light on this for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. It's entirely possible that this is all normal; it's just that being new to freenet, I don't know what "normal" is in terms of software/network behavior. From what I've seen, freenet is a more secure/private version of the pre-WWW internet. I like the concept and I'd like to help out if I can get the software nailed down.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I know I'm going to get moderated back to the stone age for saying this, but I suspect that I'm not the only one thinking it. I'm having a very hard time imagining any nonsexual legitimate use for your parents.
Consider for just a minute the given stimulation in which one individual distributes pornographic material involving individuals, groups, or objects, most of the time there's a good reason for the erection. Maybe the material being distributed is copyrighted (like Hustler or Scatology Today), maybe it's amateur (like blueprints for a bondage machine), maybe it's homosexual (like your father's home movies). Most of the time when the distributed material is splooged upon, there's a good-- or at least understandable-- reason for it.
Now, it's possible to imagine a scenario in which it might be justifiable, or even imperative, to distribute your parents phone number. "I need group sex right now" is a silly example, but a more realistic one might be distributing news to the outside world of a venerial infection. But in that sort of scenario, is the Internet really going to be a useful communication pathway? Assuming the blacks and latinos who need access to your parents have access to the Internet at all, what are the chances that Google is going to cache a story about your parents herpes infection in time? If you think about it, I think you'll agree that it sounds pretty unlikely.
What I'm saying is this: it sounds to me like there's no realistic, nonsexual, legitimate use for your parents. Elevating them beyond the status of perverts sounds cool on the surface, but I have some serious doubts about its practicality.