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."
... 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.
I am currently living in Beijing, China and just tried to access the freenet webpage. Blocked of course. Google searches for "freenet" return 404.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
That's a very naive view of the legal system. If a friend is sitting in your car with a pound of cocaine in his jacket, you will be arrested on a narcotics distribution charge if a policeman pulls you over and searches the vehicle.
Could you control what the guy had in his jacket? No.
Read about the law. The existance of child pornography in any form on a computer makes you a criminal. Whether you put it there or not, it is your responsibility.
The end result of Freenet will be regulation of encryption.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Now, this is where the plausible deniability comes in: the data coming from Alice's node looks just like the data coming from all the other nodes she talked to during the request/insert process. There's no way to distinguish between the node that originated the request and a node that's simply passing the request along on someone else's behalf.
Uhh, yes there is. Just correlate requests going into and out from the node, if you're snooping all the traffic anyway. You can probably even do this by looking at the timings, if it's encrypted. If you see an outbound request with no inbound request in the n preceding milliseconds (established empirically) then it's pretty obvious that it was a request originating at that node. Want to know what the content is? Just replay the same request yourself, see what you get, and see which nodes talk to you.
Freenet might work if you only look at one-way traffic from one node at a time, but the people that it was built to circumvent - governments - have the resources to take a wider view.