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."

Comments

Thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Thank you!

[mumblestheclown]

How ironic that you mention the Constitution, when Freenet's de facto purpose is to subvert the following:

Article I, Section 8. Powers of Congress

The Congress shall have the power ...

[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;

Re:Thank you!

[glubbs]

I have to point to this:
to authors and inventors
In other words: NOT to the people who make mony off of the authors and inventors.

Re:Thank you!

[mcubed]

How ironic that you mention the Constitution, when Freenet's de facto purpose is to subvert the following:

I might almost agree with you, had Congress not already subverted it by turning copyright from a limited monopoly into an effectively unending one. So now it becomes a question of "which subversion of the Copyright Clause is better?" My vote goes to Freenet & P2P.

Michael

Re:Thank you!

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Likewise the rest:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, (NOT the authors, inventors, or corps.s)
by securing for limited times (not effectively forever)
to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Re:Thank you!

[abe ferlman]

Well, the Congress already subverted that clause anyway, see the Eldred v. Ashcroft briefs, or visit Disney HQ. These times are no longer limited, and since legitimacy rests with the people, it is our responsibility to restore sanity to the process, even if it means breaking the copyright clause in a more freedom-preserving direction.

Besides, not everything in version 1.0 of the US Constitution was worth saving. 3/5 rule anyone?

Re:Thank you!

[Elwood P Dowd]

That's a steaming pile of bullshit.

Freenet's de facto purpose is still it's original intended purpose: To allow communication that might otherwise be controlled. There is only one constitutional general exception to our first amendment right to free speech. That is the copyright clause. Since covert channels will not be necessary for most other types of communication, of course that may be one of its original purposes.

But it's not very good for MP3 sharing. It works, but not well. Larger files are harder to keep on the network. There is no automatic indexing.

Re:Thank you!

[EllisDees]

Congress has already subverted this clause by extending copyrights for an effectively unlimited time.

Can someone educate me?

[chrisseaton]

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?

Re:Can someone educate me?

[blonde rser]

Yeah.... but what is it? P2P? Blogger? Messenger?

As I understand it, it is none of those things... but it can facilitate those things. What it is is kind of a different paradigm for the internet. At the moment with the internet I type in an address and I get data from the person who has registered that address - if he has the bandwidth. I know who is sending the info and who posted it. And if that person has spare bandwidth or is being /.'ed and needs more bandwidth, well that's just tough. With freenet I put info on freenet that is connected to some sort of name (I don't fully get how that works). Then freenet somehow determines where to actually store that data, in parts, depending on demand and who running freenet has bandwidth; ie what freenet clients to store parts of the file. Then if somebody is running freenet they can run some 3rd party freenet client (or any normal internet client I think) and enter 127.0.0.1:8888 followed by the name of the link. This queries freenet (that is running on your computer) and figures out where that data is stored and the most efficient way to retrieve it. One of the interesting things is nobody knows what data is being stored on there computer so nobody can feel guilty for that info. Of course that cuts both ways. You may feel guilty for every bit of naughty data spread by freenet because it may have come from your computer.

If I'm wrong anywhere please correct. Or if I'm right but kind of shaky please reassure me. Hope this helps

Re:Can someone educate me?

[PerryMason]

One of the interesting things is nobody knows what data is being stored on there (sic) computer

The one thing that always makes me wonder with Freenet is the potential liability for hosting 'questionable' content. If for instance, my node is used for storing some part of some kiddy pr0n and the authorities decide for whatever reason to inspect my PCs, how am I to prove that I didn't source the file myself. In fact, by hosting a node, it could be argued that I am soliciting for files of that nature.

Whilst the files are presumably encrypted in transit and on disk, its still an illegal file stored on my system.

Makes you think anyway....

Re:Can someone educate me?

[Hast]

The point is that the data on your disc in encrypted. Neither you nor the authorities are going to be able to actually find out which specific files (or parts of files) Freenet has stored on your hdd.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[PerryMason]

I'm sorry, but its not beyond the realms of possibility to decrypt an encrypted file.

What algorithms do they use? Do you know for sure that there aren't backdoors in those algorithms? I mean personally I dont think that the NSA permitted 128 bit encryption to be exported outside the states if they didnt have some backdoor to decrypt without brute-forcing.

Add to this that there are some legislatures in the world who arent keen on people having ANY form of encrypted file on their systems. The existence of anything encrypted thus points a finger of guilt regardless of the content.

Take for instance China, where Freenet's benefits would me most keenly appreciated. They arent even permitted to download the thing under export restrictions. So someone who _did_ download and use it would be easily detected; just follow the encrypted traffic flow.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[glesga_kiss]

I dont think that the NSA permitted 128 bit encryption to be exported outside the states if they didnt have some backdoor to decrypt without brute-forcing.

Believe me, the rest of the world doesn't care what the NSA does. Encryption technology doesn't always originate in the USA you know!

Besides, society has enough problems trying to regulate international trade in drugs, weapons and even people. No one is going to care about breaking these stupid, internet-ignorant anti-export laws.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Aren't you innocent until proven guilty? Don't they have to prove intent to commit a crime? Or do you suggest that freedom of speech is inherently negligent (negligence is a legal form of intent). If the file is encrypted to the point where you can't determine what it is, then isn't your node a "free carrier"?

Re:Can someone educate me?

[grainofsand]

I am currently living in Beijing, China and just tried to access the freenet webpage. Blocked of course. Google searches for "freenet" return 404.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[Greg W.]

If for instance, my node is used for storing some part of some kiddy pr0n and the authorities decide for whatever reason to inspect my PCs, how am I to prove that I didn't source the file myself.

Your question should be modded up. It's one of the most important ones.

The idea behind Freenet's anonymity is plausible deniability. But before I can go into what that means, I need to describe how Freenet works in a little more detail.

There are two different types of Freenet nodes: permanent and transient. If you run a permanent node, it means that you're a full participant in the Freenet network. Your node acts as storage and as a router for requests and inserts. Data moves through Freenet in the form of keys, which are basically the same as files (or in some cases, segments of files) but with cryptic names. Your node caches all the keys that it sees (with least recently used keys being deleted when the node's data store is full, with "full" being defined by the amount of space you choose to let it consume).

Let's say Alice inserts two files into Freenet: the text of Mein Kampf and a picture of Adolf Hitler. She does this using her Freenet node, specifying a hops to live value on the insert. This HTL value is usually around 10 to 15, and is the number of other Freenet nodes that must be talked to. Each node that processes Alice's request decreases the HTL and passes it on to another node. When the last node to get the request sees that HTL is 1, and it still hasn't found Alice's file (because she's the first person to insert it), it returns Data Not Found to the previous node, which passes it to the previous node, etc., all the way back to Alice.

Alice's node gets the "failure" message back, and then sends actual copies of the data files back down the chain. Thus, the files are inserted into Freenet.

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. So if someone were to sniff the traffic coming from Alice's machine and decrypt it and discover that her machine was inserting Mein Kampf, then she could claim that she had no knowledge of it; that her machine was simply routing an insert by someone else.

The same goes for requests. Suppose Bob stumbles upon a key which claims to be an ISO image of Windows 2000 Professional and requests a copy of it. His node generates a request with a certain HTL (generally 15 or more for requests), and it's passed along to other nodes until one of them either finds the key, or runs out of hops. The final result (either an error condition or the key he requested) is sent back to Bob's node.

But Bob could claim that he wasn't the person who originally requested that key -- he could say that his node was simply routing someone else's request, and he had no knowledge of it.

The same thing goes for files inside the local node's data store. Just because your node is storing a copy of a nude photo of Ronald Reagan doesn't necessarily mean that you either inserted or requested that file. Your node might simply have acted as a router for someone else's activity, and cached a copy of the key.

Now, all of this protection goes straight out the window if you run a transient node. Transient nodes don't ever act as routers for other nodes -- they're pure leeches. Anything on a transient node is there because you, the node operator, requested or inserted it there. You have no plausible deniability any more.

This explanation is a bit vague, and for that I apologize. The actual routing algorithms and encryption ciphers are a bit beyond my understanding at this time. If you have more detailed questions about how Freenet works, please check the Freenet mailing lists.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[TheRealFoxFire]

There are several forms of encryption used in Freenet. In the case of data key protection, the Twofish algorith is with 128 bit strength. Data keys (called Content Hash Keys) are created by running a hash function over the length of the data, and using the resulting has as input to a key generator. The data is then encrypted with that key, and the decryption key is appended to the 'URL' that is distributed'. The URL is *not* used by Freenet to route or store the data, just the Routing Key. In this way, only someone who posseses the full URL can view the data.

This doesn't prevent a blacklist of keys from being used to check an individual Freenet node, however, a couple of things protect against that:

• Large files can be split into multiple chunks using a RAID-like parity algorithm. In such a case, its unlikely that any given node would contain all parts of a file, in which case decryption would be impossible.
• The Freenet datastore can operate in a 'paranoid' mode, where the store itself is encrypted and can be rendered useless by wiping the decryption key.

You can always take a look at the source yourself to check for backdoors, its GPL after all.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[mrogers]

I'm interested in how the Chinese filtering software works. Could you please do an experiment for me? Try URL-encoding part of the banned word, e.g.

http://www.google.com/search?q=fre%65net

Does it pass through the filter?

Even better, give me a ssh account on your machine so I can play with the filter myself. ;-)

Re:Can someone educate me?

[sql*kitten]

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.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Please mod this up, the AC is correct. Freenet is far more clever than it seems at first.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[Harik]

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.

Ok, you're wrong here on some points. First off, it's encrypted traffic so you can't just sniff. You'd have to be running a node yourself and hope they contacted you. Secondly, an inbound request can (and often does) make multiple outbound requests. If a node returns DataNotFound, and the node has another reference to try, it detracts the HTL and shoots it in a different direction. (Explanation simplified)

That foils straight-up traffic analysis. Also, it takes time to route requests in freenet, and the average node is getting 1-2 requests/second, so it's pretty tough to correlate.

Want to know what the content is? Just replay the same request yourself, see what you get, and see which nodes talk to you.

Nice try. Freenet keys are composed of two parts: the address (content hash, name hash or key-signed name hash) and the decryption key. If you sniff, you have nothing. If you're a cancer node, you have a routing key and no way to decrypt it.

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.

Governments generally have found it's cheaper and easier to boot a door down then spend months trying to crack encrypted traffic. Even to the point of putting keyloggers on a machine to get passwords rather then trying to crack it themselves.

Re:Can someone educate me?

[Alsee]

According to Harvard (see this post) http://www.google.com/search is not accessible, so it doesn't matter how you encode freenet. It says filtering is by IP address so encoding "Google" wouldn't help either.

-

Re:Just some info

[mumblestheclown]

Ah. You mean the usual:

• In theory it's about truth, justice, and the american way.
• In practice it's an Eminem / Photoshop Plug-Ins / pr0n delivery mechanism.

Donation's Page??

[charon_on_acheron]

I thought that Freenet just received a large 'donation' from Abiword's PayPal account a few weeks ago. :^)

Re:Just some info

[packeteer]

From the website:

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.

Freenet is also efficient in how it deals with information, adaptively replicating content in response to demand. We have and continue to pioneer innovative new ideas such as the application of emergent behavior to computer communication, and public-key cryptography to creating secure namespaces. For more information please read this paper on the Freenet architecture.

BTW its also a Good Thing TM.

Usability Engineering ...

[fleppir]

... 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.

Re:Usability Engineering ...

[yatest5]

"not getting it running in 2 minutes flat annoys me to no end"

hope you don't run Linux then ;-)

Re:Usability Engineering ...

[Greg W.]

Either say what the problem is, or keep reading. C'mon, you didn't even say what operating system you're running! (Must be a Windows user.)

In general, the procedure is as follows:

0) Download Java.
1) Download Freenet software.
2) Configure it (generate freenet.ini or freenet.conf).
3) Start the node.
4) Wait for it to initialize (usually takes less than a minute).
5) Go to http://127.0.0.1:8888/.

Now, you can go yell at the Freenet developers if you wish, but all of the documentation linked to from freenetproject.org is badly out of date and incomplete. There is a much better Freenet user FAQ at The Freenet Wiki. It's not perfect, either, but it's much closer.

Now that many people have FreeNet...

[Big Mark]

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.

Re:Now that many people have FreeNet...

[perlyking]

I tried freenet a while ago and that was the problem with it, waiting ages for a page to resolve and most of the time it didnt appear at all. I'll check out this version when I get a chance, it cant be worse than the one I tried.
I love the idea though, the power for anyone to publish everywhere without restriction.

Re:Now that many people have FreeNet...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Like others, I love the idea. Yet experience suggests that actually reaching content seems unlikely. This would be the third time I tried, so I think I'll wait until I see slashdot posts after a release where people claim to actually be seeing a "net" in freenet. Perhaps I just don't know the right people to get started...

On remembrance day...

[silvaran]

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.

Re:On remembrance day...

[silvaran]

s/programs/programmers/

A few tips for those trying to get this up

[blonde rser]

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 :)

Re:A few tips for those trying to get this up

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds more like you're using a braindead browser (some older versions of netscape, for instance) that decompress gzipped files transparently without changing the extension.

A quick description

[IamTheRealMike]

For those who have never heard of FreeNet, here's a quick rundown.

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.

Re:A quick description

[yatest5]

"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"

Yes, I cannot see how anonymous posting would be useful for porn or MP3's.

Re:A quick description

[IamTheRealMike]

Yes, I cannot see how anonymous posting would be useful for porn or MP3's.

Although of course you could use it for trading porn/mp3s, in reality the upload/propagate nature of it means that it's not simply a case of "publishing" a folder, you have to explicitly upload files to it. Due to the lack of a built in search protocol (hence the existance of search engines for it) you'd be much better off using Kazaa.

Re:A quick description

[yatest5]

Not if you wanted to distribute / collect illegal pornogaphy, you wouldn't.

Incidentally, I don't run freenet - before the police come knocking down my door.

Re:A quick description

[wossName]

"nothing can ever be deleted from the FreeNet"

That's not how I understood it. AFAIK, everything disappears automatically if nobody requests it. Even your own files, because instead of sharing a folder, you upload stuff to your datastore, which is part of the distributed cache that is Freenet. Am I wrong ?

Re:A quick description

[Hast]

That's correct. There are OTOH projects which do aim to preserve data. E.g. Eternity Service use distributed servers to do it.

Re:A quick description

[civilizedINTENSITY]

So access to freenet is requires access to keys. Yet the keys published on websites don't resolve (least, they never did for me). Instead, keys will now be posted on freenet, where if I had a key I could access said keys. Hmmm...I keep pulling at my boot but I can't seem to fly.

Re:A quick description

[leuk_he]

The downside is that you cannot control the lifetime of data. Data will "randomly" fall out of freenet. This is in practive a weak point of freenet.

Re:A quick description

[Uruk]

You are right - but what's meant by the statement "nothing can be deleted" is that others can't take things out of the network. Your own node may take something out of the network by choice at some point.

The algorithm removes the least recently used file in the datastore when the store fills up, and has a bias towards larger files.

If you insert content that is popular and gets requested though, it's not possible to delete it even if you (the author) wants to

Re:A quick description

[Greg W.]

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.

Wow, you're right -- that does show how long ago you last tried it! ;-)

Suffice to say, the Javascript method is no longer used. In fact, fproxy (err, I think they still call it fproxy even though it's called "mainport" in the config file now) will object vehemently if it encounters any Javascript in a Freenet document.

There are several popular sites (and some less popular ones, like mine) that do a quasi-daily blog style. It's been working quite well for a couple weeks now (ever since Matthew's really excellent debugging job got into high gear). If you saw what Freenet 0.3 and earlier were like, you're going to be stunned when you try 0.5. Seriously.

(Those who missed the early Freenet days may not be stunned. You don't have the point of reference that IamTheRealMike has, and you may be spoiled by services that are much faster than Freenet -- of course, none of those services has Freenet's anonymity.)

Re:A quick description

[sql*kitten]

Yes, I cannot see how anonymous posting would be useful for porn or MP3's.

Indeed. And since you don't have to "pay" for what you use, a la Mojo Nation, the Tragedy of the Commons applies and the FreeNet system will rapidly go the way of every other P2P system, in which the balance between contributors and consumers is destroyed.

Re:A quick description

[Harik]

Indeed. And since you don't have to "pay" for what you use, a la Mojo Nation, the Tragedy of the Commons applies and the FreeNet system will rapidly go the way of every other P2P system, in which the balance between contributors and consumers is destroyed.

Actually, you lose on this point. The TotC problem with P2P networks is that the single holder of Starwars Episode 3 pre-pre release gets A) swamped by requests (that people are asses and don't reshare) and B) sued and/or jailed. On freenet, the simple fact that you requested something means you're contributing.

The nice thing is a contributors efforts are multiplied by how much his contribution is requested. Also, now that redundant encoding is becoming popular, you can take a file with missing parts, reconstruct it, THEN re-publish the missing parts! If a few common clients do this the data-loss of larger files would be drastically reduced. Even now you can get MP3s (AND .ISOs) off freenet if you wait long enough.

uncontrollable network?

[krazyninja]

From the explorers area of the freenet pages:
6. Isn't censorship sometimes necessary? ..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....

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!

Re:uncontrollable network?

[AlCoHoLiC]

Getting source code doesn't mean that entire product goes down the drain. I legally cannot start to sell my own WinXP clone compiled from original source code. There're laws and other measures that prevents such practices.

Information (knowledge) itself isn't good or bad. It's just that: human knowledge. It's entirely upon human being what he does with the knowledge. Man should be held accountable for his deeds not for what he knows.

I know how to make explosives and yet I don't make them. Almost every high school student knows how to make nuke and (surprise, surprise) almost nobody is trying to make one. Just because I possess the information (in your case the source code) it doesn't mean I'm criminal. Nobody has the right to tell me what I'm allowed to know. And that's exactly what Big Brother is trying to do - prevent people from having the information he doesn't want them to know, and to criminalize people who possess such kind of information. Freenet is designed to fight this information slavery.

Re:uncontrollable network?

[deblau]

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.

This observation is inevitable. Let's do some basic business logic:

1. [Assume] Businesses need recurring revenue (i.e. you can only burn VC $ for so long)
2. [Assume] As long as your hardware doesn't crap out, software lifetime is infinite
3. [Assume] You have a finite customer base
4. [Assume] If you keep improving your software, eventually it will do everything your customers want
5. [Therefore] You can only sell so many copies of software to your customers before they don't need you any more
6. [Therefore] Software as a product is only good for a limited amount of money, and that isn't recurring
7. [Conclusion] Software as a product is not a viable business model in the long-run

Microsoft is having this problem right now with their operating systems. See, Windows 95 is good enough for most people. It runs AOL/MSN, Word, Outlook Express, Solitaire, and their printer. What more do they need? The MS solution has been to release a new OS every 2 years and hype the hell out of it, as well as purposely not provide patches for their older versions to support newer hardware, thus forcing software upgrades when old boxes die (since the older hardware isn't sold any more). The problem is, people are catching on, and new OS sales are fewer and fewer these days. The same could probably be said for purchases of Office. Who needs more Excel or Powerpoint templates? Anyone?

The product business is fine if the product has a finite lifetime. Take housing, for instance. People will always need to repair and build houses, because they weather. Software doesn't, which means the only money to be made long-term on software is in support. The same argument applies to patents and other 'intellectual property'. Dolby has the right idea: come up with an idea, and license it until the end of time.

Companies that sell a product that doesn't break have already signed up for their death blow. Distributing the software online only speeds it up.

Re:uncontrollable network?

[fferreres]

Everything that can be sold can be though as a service. You think of software as long term investment (infinite stream of service actually). But in reality, it's just like any other good, some have an infinite lifetime (say "Calculator App"), while some others do not (games for example).

Simple example:
You sell chess boards. Most people that like chess probably have one or two boards. So after catch up, you sales will only be (at most), newcommers to chess that need a board. That means your sells grow like your population does plus GPD growth (because some poors can now buy the wooden board, let's say). Once everyone is rich enough, you are only left with population growth (everyone else ALREADY has some nice boards).

Also, you have icecreams, you can sell as people feel like tasting. The "installed base" at t+1 is zero.

With software happens the same. You have very volitile "consumer" software and non-volatile "investment" software. So everything depends on what market you are in.

Examples: a computer game (obsoletes)
Office: obsoletes slowly
Calculator App: does no obsolete

Last thing, software has zero marginal cost, so it is very apealing for non-big-companies to enter this market. If you get it right, you can sell millions of them at no additional cost. Who cares if you can sell the product 10 years from now?

Re:uncontrollable network?

[Alsee]

7. [Conclusion] Software as a product is not a viable business model in the long-run

Invalid conclusion based on false assumptions. The false assumptions start right at number one.

1. [Assume] Businesses need recurring revenue (i.e. you can only burn VC $ for so long)

A bussiness merely needs more revenue than expenses. Even ignoring the flaws in 2 through 6, it still leaves you two options.

(1) Create a new product to generate new revenue.
(2) Take the profits you've earned and close the bussiness. If a produce is no longer profitable then closing the bussiness reduces expenses to zero.

Just because a bussiness has made a profit on some product in the past does not mean that that same product must contine to be profitable forever.

-

DMCA RIAA Bush...

[e8johan]

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.

Re:DMCA RIAA Bush...

[e8johan]

"But maybe you're just a pessimist?"

Yes, probably. The FreeNet site says "Uncensorable dissemination of controversial information". At least we living in the free world (not the USA, China, etc.) will be able to enjoy it! 8^P

Paypal .

[shri]

Ugh! Bad time to be asking for donations via Paypal!

Re:Paypal .

[tanveer1979]

Ugh! Bad time to be asking for donations via Paypal!

Give them a break. They didnt deliberately do it. Crackers have brought down the internet a couple of years back. Do yo u stop using it? OpenSSL had a security flaw.. Did people stop using it. The mantra "if it is cracked stop using it" is not in the spirit of the net. If it is broken, get it fixed, find out why it got broken.

This is the first incident of its kind, so dont write of paypal, unless of course they are not at all willing to take any corrective or remedial action.

Re:Paypal .

[cebarro]

This is the first incident of its kind, so dont write of paypal, unless of course they are not at all willing to take any corrective or remedial action.

This is most certainly NOT the first incident of its kind.
I refer you to
http://www.paypalsucks.com
http://www.paypalsui t.com/
Look at the forums. This was just the first time a group slashdotters care about got ripped off.

wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:wrong

[lhdentra]

Ah, so only 25% of links will fail.

No - Freenet stores data redundantly. The only instance when turning off your node would cause a piece of data to be unfetchable is if yours was the only node with the data within the search radius. This is very, very unlikely except if you inserted data at HTL 0 and nobody requested it, or it just happens that you have the last remaining copy of a piece of unpopular data (also unlikely).

Re:wrong

[greenrd]

Um, in the UK dialup users are typically disconnected automatically every 2 hours (I know, it's really stupid), which I presume means different IP addresses every 2 hours, and therefore the nodes must be set as transient.

Why I don't use it

[wossName]

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.

Re:Why I don't use it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The whole point of freenet is that all speech is free. Your first point goes against those ideals by judging what should and should not be on freenet. By allowing people to filter their content, you would break the system. Doing so would limit material from ever even getting the chance to spread, which according to you would be good in this case, but how could you limit it to just kiddie porn? Can't happen.

Re:Why I don't use it

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

That's the whole point. If people could figure out what was in your data store, then the concept of free speech would be meaningless as you could be forced to hand over lists of content and then have it removed. Having the owner not able to see is the only way of guaranteeing that content cannot be deleted.

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 you run a non-transient node this isn't the case, but this is like running a web server, so you need a 24/7 machine with lots of bandwidth. If you publish data that is popular, and then go offline however, that data is still available - it's more like the web than Gnutella.

Re:Why I don't use it

[aqua]

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.

It is. The store is cryptographically opaque; you don't know what you're hosting. Whether it's possible to identify whether a particular item is in the store when you know its key, I'm not sure.

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.

It's necessary for a distributed-storage system where the injection point needs to be distanced from the storage points. Data flows to where it's being requested, so you could keep an item in your own store by requesting it automatically every so often. It won't go anywhere else, but it will stay in the keyspace should it ever be requested later on. You could do much the same thing to prolong the longevity of someone else's data that you valued -- but again, it would tend to live only on your own node if no other nodes were requesting it.

Re:Why I don't use it

[McFiegolx]

The idea of Freenet is really great, but there were two things in the implementation that really annoyed me:

Yes but these aren't bugs they are a fundemental parts of the design.

1) I cannot control what is in my datastore...

Then neither can anyone else, if a blacklist was implemented (keys a node should not cache) then Evil Organisation of your choice (RIAA,FBI,MI5), could publish a blacklist that you MUST use.

2) My files aren't shared permanently..

Because its not just about storage but about routing. The requesting of files should cause data to "migrate" across the network allowing for specialisation. The caching and expiring of data is a fundemental part of this process. It is this that gives the scalability thats I feel is lacking in other P2P networks.

Re:Why I don't use it

[tunah]

Whether it's possible to identify whether a particular item is in the store when you know its key, I'm not sure.

Well it must be, otherwise how would a server know whether to answer a request?

Re:Why I don't use it

[Hast]

True. But it should be noted that the keys are hashes, so there is no way for you to know what other people are searching for. Descriptions of the protocol can be found in the paper on Freenet. (That is not the original paper, but a revised version.)

They also adress the "I don't want to have kiddyporn on my computer" in the FAQ:

The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting. If this is not acceptable to you, you should not run a Freenet node.

There is another thing you can do. Since content in Freenet is available as long as its popular, you can help limit the popularity of whatever information you do not like. For example, if you do not want a file to spread you should not request it and tell everyone you know not to request that specific key.

There has been attacks suggested though. E.g. using the "time to live" variable in order to probe a specific node for what data it stores. The same technique could be done to probe your local store. I'm not sure if these issues have been adressed yet.

Re:Why I don't use it

[BurritoWarrior]

The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting. If this is not acceptable to you, you should not run a Freenet node.

Hosting kiddie porn is not a freedom of speech issue, it is a legal one. (and etchical one, and moral one). Criminal activity is not protected speech under the 1st Amendment.

It sounds like they should replace Freedom of Speech with Anarchy in the FAQ.

Re:Why I don't use it

[civilizedINTENSITY]

The first amendment isn't authorative everywhere. Part of why freenet exists is to provide a means of communication which is purely free and protected, so as to be unstoppable by authority, in part because authority can become corrupted. It is a safeguard on the political system. Could freenet be abused? Well yes it could. Do we need something like this? God willing we never will, but then whoever hopes they need a fire extinguisher. Freenet is just an experiment until someone manages to dissolve the constitution. Then it becomes a necessary tool. At which point it becomes illegal. It would seem that the only societies that would allow freenet are those free enough not to need it yet. So perhaps its most useful time frame would be immediately after a coup, but before the regime has consolidated power.

Re:Why I don't use it

[Salamander]

you could keep an item in your own store by requesting it automatically every so often.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really work. See my Freenet FIQ (Frequently Ignored Questions) for an explanation.

Re:Why I don't use it

[Salamander]

Because its not just about storage but about routing.

More accurately, it's not about storage at all but about routing. Most of the Freenetistas I've discussed this with have eventually admitted as much; Ian himself has said on more than one occasion that he never claimed otherwise.

The caching and expiring of data is a fundemental part of this process. It is this that gives the scalability thats I feel is lacking in other P2P networks.

The caching and expiring is not necessary for scalability. I know this as well as anyone because I worked for a year and a half on a global-scale data distribution project that provided permanence and full consistency with all the scalability anyone could ask for. What really forces the non-permanence of data in Freenet is its focus on anonymity. To assure permanence one needs at the very least to maintain an accurate count of how many copies exist elsewhere (so you don't delete the last one to make room for the new N'Street Aguilera "song"). That turns out to be terrifically difficult - and perhaps impossible - to reconcile with all of the "hiding" that necessarily goes on in Freenet. If someone could ever figure out how to reconcile permanence and anonymity that would be awesome, but so far nobody has and Freenet has chosen anonymity.

Re:Why I don't use it

[karlm]

Hosting kiddie porn is not a freedom of speech issue, it is a legal one. (and etchical one, and moral one). Criminal activity is not protected speech under the 1st Amendment.

Umm... you would be referring to the extent to which the U.S. Constitution guarantees free speech. Don't confuse that with free speech itself. How would you classify a communist pamphlet?

Your viewpoint is also very U.S.-centric. Mathew Toesland is in Britain, btw.

If your definition of free speach is legal speech, what will you do if your government outlawed criticism of its policies, or makes it illegal to greet anyone with anthing besides "Heil Hitler"? Do you think the U.S. will never go through another period of McCarthyism?

Don't get me wrong... I can see where you're comming from. Personally, I think think there's no lower form of human being than one who takes pleasure at the expense of a child. I would not be at all opposed to life sentances for producers of child pornography. However, when you step back and look at all of the things they would like to make it illegal to say, (talk to Emanuel Goldstein, Eeeeeed Felton, Dmitry Sklyarov, et. al.) you begin to wonder what fundamentally makes us different from the Taliban.

Look at all the crap Phil Zimmerman went through to bring you PGP. That was legal speech, yet the U.S. Government harassed the hell out of him. Let's not forget what happened to Communist and even suspectedCommunists durrin the Red Scare. Don't forget that Communist propeganda was outlawed then too.

Re:Why I don't use it

[BurritoWarrior]

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I don't disagree with Freenet on its principles at all. I think it has wonderful potential and is a terrific tool for many uses. Unfortunately, there is a great potential for illegal activity as well. I just wanted to make a distinction between what is legal and what is not. It goes beyond just what I (or you) find "objectionable".

I don't think their FAQ is forthright enough.

Re:Why I don't use it

[karlm]

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.

Yes, it is another story, particularly for split files. It's designed this way on purpose so that, for instance, the U.S. government can't require you to delete all of the communist litterature off of your machine, or else be dragged in to the Star Chamb^h^h^h^h^h^h^hHouse Unamerican Activities Comittee hearings.

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.

Re-insert your webites daily. I think Fishtools can be set up to do this automagcally.

Sit down and think things through. For the most part, they did things the only way that makes sense for maximizing anonymity. If th files you inserted were by default always available from your machine, it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who was publishing what.

Personally, I would have made everything FEC split CHKs except for SSKs, which could only provide metadata, but I guess hindisght is always 20/20.

Re:Why I don't use it

[Jucius Maximus]

"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."

It is less stupid to have the network collapse under its own weight?

Re:Why I don't use it

[Alsee]

1) I cannot control what is in my datastore... give me a way to blacklist it. If it's encrypted then it's another story.

If you want to be able to control what you are caching then the courts will hold you responsible to do so. Do you really want someone hitting you with the DMCA demanding that you remove Steamboat Willy because its 1939 copyright has been extened yet again?

So yes, all files are encrypted for your benefit.

2) My files aren't shared permanently. If nobody requests the files I injected

People are donating space to store these files. The storage space for files is limited, yet an unlimited number of files can be injected. No one wants to waste space on files no one wants. If you really want to keep files available it only takes minimal effort, just write a script to keep them in your own cache. Re-inject them with a TTL of zero to place them locally.

-

no legitimate use

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:no legitimate use

[R.Caley]

I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.

The first which comes to mind is whistle blowing.

OTOH, I think the most likely impact on freedom of speech is

1. A resonable number of people start using it
   
2. It becomes flooded with stolen goods and kiddie porn
   
3. The powers that be make a fuss.
   
4. They use it as an excuse to pass sweeping anti-encrypton (etc) laws.
   
5. We have all taken a big step backwards.
   

On the whole, I think in resonably open societies, suc a the US and Uk still are, the only sane option is `publish and be damned'. That way they at least have to be somewhat public in acting against you. If you hide, they can attack you in hiding, perhaps by attacking everyone who looks a little like you.

Re:no legitimate use

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

On the contrary, FreeNet is used by a lot of Chinese people as it's a good way of distributing information without being traced. Right now freedom of speech may not be a problem for us, but we're lucky.

Re:no legitimate use

[aqua]

Anonymous publication and retrieval are tools for the politically oppressed. Freenet could, in theory, make any information of value unsuppressible. F'rinstance, an outlawed political group publishing a manifesto, someone reporting the actions of a corrupt government, that sort of thing. Suppose that during the demonstrations in Tiennamen Square, there had been only one camera in private hands; getting that video out would be a perfect job for Freenet.

For which reason, tools like Freenet are banned in China and a number of other nations.

There does exist a tricky bit of how to deliver such technologies to the people in need of them; possession of crypto is still a crime in much of the world, much less crypto intended to do that which oppressive regimes cannot allow.

Re:no legitimate use

[blkwolf]

How about Fulan Gong practitioners being able to post or read information about their religion in a country that bans and outlaws it?

How about women in the middle east being able to safely find information about women's rights in other countries, and possibly even using such a network as medium for creating political change in their own countries?

How about cuban, south african, (name your favorite country here) being able to safely speak out against atrocities performed by their own governments or provide proof of such acts without fear of retaliation?

How about americans being able to express their disagreement with current "anti-terrorist" laws or actions of the Bush administration without fear of ending up on some FBI list as a potential terrorist or disadent?

Re:no legitimate use

[Maniakes]

Anonymous publication and retrieval are tools for the politically oppressed. Freenet could, in theory, make any information of value unsuppressible. F'rinstance, an outlawed political group publishing a manifesto, someone reporting the actions of a corrupt government, that sort of thing. Suppose that during the demonstrations in Tiennamen Square, there had been only one camera in private hands; getting that video out would be a perfect job for Freenet.

What's wrong with usenet for anonymous publication? Posting is over SMTP, so you can put whatever you want in the from block, and you can post through any public SMTP server you want. Once you post, the document is rapidly spread throughout the world's news servers and is permenantly cached by several servers.

The only problem I see with usenet is that your local ISP has a carnivore-like packet scanner, the MIB can catch you in the act of posting. You'd need to encrypt your message and send it to a confederate who decrypts it and posts it to usenet.

BTW, usenet is great for piracy as well. They'll never shut down alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*, alt.binaries.multimedia, alt.binaries.warez.*, and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*. They're hosted by the ISPs, and the ISPs can use the phone company defence (ie, "We provide a medium for legitimate communication. Not our fault if people abuse it").

Re:no legitimate use

[gazbo]

Oh yeah, because searching freenet for "deep throat" is sure to give you secret information right at the top of the list.

Re:no legitimate use

[StrawberryFrog]

How about cuban, south african, (name your favorite country here)

Since 1994, the South African government has been fairly enlightened about both the safety of it's own citizens and press freedom. I would insert 'Zimbabwe' there.

Re:no legitimate use

[furballphat]

The first which comes to mind is whistle blowing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way to find something on freenet is to search for it. The whole point in whistle blowing is that nobody knows about whatever you're uncovering. If they don't know about it, how can they search for it? If nobody searches for it, it will fall of freenet, never to be seen. The only way of using freenet for whistle blowing would be to upload it, and then tip someone off. This takes away the whole point of it being anonymous as you could just tell the reporter rather than telling them to look at freenet.

Re:no legitimate use

[R.Caley]

If i remember correct the UK does not ban crypto but does requires you decrypt it on demand or be assumed guilty

I believe the current position is that no one knows what the UK situation is. The government put through some legislation which was messed about and fuzzed and so on until no one is sure what it means, and nothing has been tried in court, which is the only way to know what it really means.

Re:no legitimate use

[evbergen]

Why would anyone feel morally bound to pay /any/ attention to the nonsensical criteria of "substantial non-infrining use", especially when it comes to /information/ processing tools, for crying out loud?

It's guns we're talking about, you know. If the "substantial non-harmful use" of anything needs debate, it's guns, not anonymous free speech.

I still wonder how the U.S. is able to rationalize its decision that tools to disseminate information needs to be better controlled than tools to disseminate metal objects at deadly speeds. It doesn't strike me as particularly civilised, to be honest.

Re:no legitimate use

[R.Caley]

What's wrong with usenet for anonymous publication? Posting is over SMTP,

No, usually NNTP.

so you can put whatever you want in the from block, and you can post through any public SMTP server you want.

Which will (potentially) log where you came in from. Spooks get NNTP server people to hand over logs (or, if they have any sense, they are running most of the public posting enabled NNTP servers), talk to your ISP to see who was dialed in on that line and come pay you a visit.

Yes, you can be more indirect etc. but so can they, will you bet your lievelihood (or in some countries your life) on your ability to be better than their staff?

The penet vs scientology case is an example of what even a private organisation can do in one of the more free states of the world.

Re:no legitimate use

[happystink]

This would have saved karen Silkwood? How? More likely is she would have put the info she was gathering online, and then still died, and then someone would have found the info 3 years later after horribly mistyping a search term, for some video game and gone "this is just text {delete}".

Re:no legitimate use

[Greg W.]

I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.

Free hosting for your daily web comic. You could even have normal World Wide Web URLs embedded in the Freenet page, pointing back to your web-store for merchandise, etc.

Free hosting for your own music, that you composed and recorded yourself. See above for merchandising. ("If you like these lossily-compressed songs and want to buy a better-sounding copy on CD, click here....")

Free hosting for a personal web log.

I hope you see the pattern here. In addition to this pattern, we have:

Uncensorable criticism of your employer, the Church of Scientology, the government of your country, etc.

Uncensorable expression of unpopular opinions (hate speech, underage erotica, racism, sexism, negative religious speech of all flavors). Publishing these forms of expression on the traditional Web could lead to unpleasant repercussions.

That's just "shooting from the hip". I'm sure someone with different needs and perspectives can come up with even more legitimate uses for this application. Use your imagination.

Re:no legitimate use

[Greg W.]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way to find something on freenet is to search for it.

Actually, you can't "search" as most people use that term. You retrieve documents from Freenet by specifying their key. You have to learn the key somehow, usually from another Freenet document.

The whole point in whistle blowing is that nobody knows about whatever you're uncovering. If they don't know about it, how can they search for it?

Some of the popular Freenet site authors have a way to send them messages using KSK@ keys. This is normally used for Freesite submission -- for example, it's how TFE learns about new Freenet sites so that he/she can list them.

So if I were going to do some whistle-blowing, I'd create my Freenet site (could even be a single text file), insert it into Freenet as a one-shot or edition site (certainly not a DBR), and then submit the key to TFE's submissions bin. And possibly a few other Freesite authors' submissions bins as well.

Re:no legitimate use

[Greg W.]

Oh yeah, because searching freenet for "deep throat" is sure to give you secret information right at the top of the list.

You can't search Freenet. You surf it, the way you surf the World Wide Web when you don't have Google. (Don't any of you remember the WWW before search engines?) Then you bookmark the good sites you find.

If you want to search Freenet, then you'll have to implement a Google of your own. Spider it, then index everything you find, then search your index. I know at least one person is working on this right now.

Re:no legitimate use

[evbergen]

Guns *do* have substantial non-harmful uses that cannot be performed by any other device. It's actually less clear that FreeNet meets this standard.

Well, surprise me. I cannot imagine how humanity can benefit more from guns than from communication.

Not that I'd say weapons aren't needed to protect a country's sovereignty, but I truly cannot see how a democratic government's monopoly on warfare is more dangerous to society than unrestricted human communication.

I know that some Americans feel that when the constitution proves too weak to protect democracy (and it's sure starting to look like that, considering the amount of political power held by private corporations), they can use their weapons to re-establish it.

I think that's quite optimistic; since the industrial revolution, people have become so addicted to the abundance of cheap products that they're too easily bribed and too easily manipulated by commercial propaganda to start an armed revolt against any government that keeps them supplied with cheap gas, coca-cola and cable TV.

Personally, I highly doubt that there's any substitute for a government that is bound by its constitution and its constituents to protect democracy at all cost, fighting relentlessly against /all/ concentrations of power /within/ its state borders. (No, USA, power contentrations outside your borders may only be fought when they attack first. That's civilized rule of conduct since 1648).

In my opinion, the tree laws of democracy would seem to be:

1. protect the equal distribution of the state's power among its citizens,
2. do not go to war, unless that conflicts with the first law (eg. when any group, local or foreign, tries to grab the state's power),
3. work in the public interest, but only if that does not conflict with the first or the second law.

Re:no legitimate use

[swillden]

Keep looking; there are other non-harmful uses of guns. If you grew up where I did, in the wide-open spaces of the Western US, where the population density averages less than one person per square mile (sometimes *much* less), they would be obvious.

Re:no legitimate use

[Twirlip of the Mists]

"Publishing is different now?" Not really. I dare say it's a lot easier today for a person to write, print, and distribute something like the Federalist Papers than it was 250 years ago. In a place like China, North Korea, or Iraq, you can reach a lot more people by printing off a thousand copies of your document and handing them out like a chain letter than you can by posting your document on the Internet. In those places, the Internet is a vast billboard that nobody reads, and that many people don't even know is there.

All I'm saying here is that the Freenet project is probably a waste of time and effort. In any situation where it would actually be useful for a legitimate purpose, it's not going to be practical! Internet access in the free world is hardly ubiquitous, and access in places with oppressive governments is unheard of. Freenet would therefore be absolutely useless to people in those situations, who are incidentally the people that the Freenet guys claim the work is for.

Arguably, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was the most oppressive, repressive place in the world. Do you know how many Internet cafes there were in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Zero. The first Internet cafe in Afghanistan ever opened this past August. If the world had had a vast and extensive Freenet network in 1999, nobody in Afghanistan would have known about it.

That's why I say there's basically no legitimate use for this technology. The people who have access to the Freenet network don't need it. The people who need it won't have access to it. So it's pointless.

Re:no legitimate use

[Valdrax]

In addition to what other's pointed out, anonymous publishing is utterly useless if anonymous reading is not allowed. Your ISP can easily track what you download and read over NNTP. If your ISP is controlled by an oppresive government, then you're hosed for using Usenet.

Also, I'd like to point out that many, many ISPs don't carry the alt.* hierarchy, especially the alt.binaries.* hierarchy as it takes up way, way too much storage space and bandwidth to host. Heck, even Google doesn't carry any alt.binaries.* newsgroups due to what a hideous burden it would be to archive them.

Re:no legitimate use

[aqua]

Silkwood died in a car accident on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter; she was carrying documents incriminating the plutonium plant at which she worked for criminial negligence. Various aspects of the accident suggest that it was likely caused by another driver deliberately running her off the road. The alleged documents then vanished from her wrecked car before the police investigation began. IOW, foul play is strongly suspected. Had Freenet-like technologies existed at the time, she could have published those documents, and even had she then been murdered on the way to talk to a reporter, some evidence would have survived.

Source: Ken Smith's _Raw Deal_, "Whistleblower"; Blast Books, 1998. Definitely a book with some axes to grind, but good nonetheless.

Re:no legitimate use

[ealar dlanvuli]

I can think of one off the top of my head.

I discover a fatal flaw in TCPA/Palladum that allows remote hackers to gain pre-bootstrap access to any MS machine. I send MS a bug report, but they decide to cover it up because it's unfixable.

I then have two options:
1: Call CNN and go to jail.
2: Distribute the source and documentation on Freenet, call a random slashdot user I've never met before (google is your friend) using a payphone and tell him to advertise it for me.

I choose number 2. That is a valid use for the system, without any more draconian laws than we have today.

Re:no legitimate use

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Same thing applies here. If you make known a flaw in an access control system or device, then you're free and clear under the DMCA. You can even discuss the flaw in great detail if you're so inclined... although there's no good reason for you to. The point at which you violate the DMCA is when you distribute either a mechanism for circumventing the access control device (and that includes handing out source code, algorithms, or pseudocode that could easily be turned into source code), or when you distribute instructions on how to circumvent the access control device.

If I said, "CSS is flawed because one widely available implementation stores the decryption key in plaintext," that'd be fine. If I said, "The Xing decoder includes the CSS decryption key in plaintext at such-and-such byte offset, and here's how you can extract it," that'd be going too far in the face of the DMCA.

The DMCA is obviously flawed-- it may, in fact, be unconstitutional-- but I think it's going too far to say that it's evil. Read the legislation itself before you jump to conclusions on that point. A lot of the commentary on the law is exaggeration, misinterpretation, rumor, or innuendo, and shouldn't be used as a basis for evaluation.

Re:no legitimate use

[Alsee]

I meant to say, it's not guns we're talking about

I assumed it was an intentional sarcastic comment on them thinking of freenet as a dangerous weapon, lol. I kinda liked it :)

-

Re:no legitimate use

[Twirlip of the Mists]

First things first: the DMCA is not contrary to the founding principles on which our country was built. Freedom of speech-- which is what this is really about-- is a founding principle, but so are reasonable limitations on that freedom. The old cliche goes, "Freedom of speech does not give a person the right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." In other words, some speech is dangerous to the individual or to society and is not permitted. Freedom of speech does not give you the right to reveal secrets indiscriminately. National secrets, trade secrets, personal secrets, these are all recognized by the law and our legal tradition. If an access control device is based on a secret-- be it a secret algorithm, or a secret encryption key, or any other secret-- then you don't automatically have the right to reveal that secret in a public forum. The DMCA is, as I said before, imperfect. But it does not violate any high principles upon which our country stands.

Now, that said, you can learn everything you need to know about the DMCA, or any other law, at http://thomas.loc.gov. All the laws-- including bills not yet signed into law-- are available there in handy cross-referenced forms. I guess you could say that ours is an "open source" country. The laws that define our government are freely available, and pretty easy to understand if you take the time. To read the DMCA, search for bill HR 2281 in the 105th Congress.

Re:no legitimate use

[Greg W.]

Where is the hardware going to come from to build these Freenet archives? Is it just going to fall out of the sky?

It is already here. It's provided by the users of Freenet.

But you failed to notice that writings in these categories published anonymously would be basically of no value to anyone.

The second category in which I used the word "uncensorable" was opinions. Opinions are of value to whomever values them. Period.

And the first category was "criticism" (of various authoritarian or pseudo-authoritarian organizations). Now, you're implying that expression of criticism is of no value unless you know who wrote it. I disagree -- I think that an anonymous tip is of enormous value. Imagine what would happen if the police never investigated anonymous tips. Imagine the opposite scenario, in which an anonymous publication describes corruption inside a government office and gives details. Those details can be checked and amplified by regular journalists once the story has been exposed.

But in a Freenet world, where anybody with a computer could publish anything, the lies would soon vastly outnumber the truths. Freenet would be a vast collection of bullshit with a few pearls buried in it.

You've just described the entire world -- books, magazines, newspapers, television shows, radio shows, world wide web sites, Freenet sites, slashdot. All of it.

If you can't handle the burden of analyzing written material yourself to see whether it's of value to you, then go ahead and continue in your little spoon-fed world where only the texts on the Big Brother Approved List (To Save The Children) are worth reading. But for me, I'll take freedom of choice, thank you.

Re:no legitimate use

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Now, you're implying that expression of criticism is of no value unless you know who wrote it.

When it's impossible to confirm the truthfulness of the criticism, it is essentially of no value. Particularly so when for every piece of legitimate criticism, there are ten lies that look like legitimate criticism.

Imagine what would happen if the police never investigated anonymous tips.

Despite what you see on television, they hardly ever do. Police resources are limited. They can't investigate every tip that comes in. They have to start with the ones that appear plausible, and those are usually the ones that come from people who identify themselves and who are available for follow-up interviews. Virtually all anonymous tips get filed away and never investigated.

You've just described the entire world -- books, magazines, newspapers, television shows, radio shows, world wide web sites, Freenet sites, slashdot. All of it.

Wrong. It's impossible to publish a book anonymously. You can publish under a pseudonym, but you agent and your editor know exactly who you are, and can verify that you're not just making stuff up for fun. The same is true of magazines and newspapers, television shows, and radio. It's impossible to participate in those types of media outlets anonymously. Somebody will have to verify your identity and your truthfulness somewhere down the road before you ever get your message out via that outlet.

Web sites, Freenet sites, and Slashdot are different, and they're the exceptions that prove the rule. Anonymous publications through these types of outlets are widely ignored. Nobody reads your web page, or your Slashdot postings, until you've created a reputation for yourself, or offered some kind of proof of your credibility. If every web page were anonymous, and the only way to link the authorship of one page to the authorship of another were to take somebody's word for it, the web would be completely useless as a source of reliable information or opinion.

That's what Freenet is. Completely useless as a source of information or opinion.

If you can't handle the burden of analyzing written material yourself to see whether it's of value to you

But that's just the point, dude. If everything is published in completely and perfect anonymity, there is no way at all to verify it. If I said, "Kennedy was killed by Fidel Castro, John D. Rockefeller, and the Queen of England," nobody would listen. The only way to get them to listen would be to provide some kind of credibility, like saying that I was the press secretary to the executive assistant to John D. Rockefeller in 1963, and I heard them plan the whole thing. Which pretty much eliminates anonymity from the equation.

Anonymous information is worthless because it is impossible-- or, at best, extremely difficult-- to separate the truth from the lies.

Re:no legitimate use

[BCoates]

But that sword cuts both ways. It'd be easy for an anonymous whistle-blower to publish confidential information for noble purposes, but it'd also be impossible to verify the authenticity of that information. In a Freenet world, I could construct a detailed and damning fiction about SunnyElLoco and publish it anonymously, and it would have exactly the same credibility as everything else. Freenet would make it impossible to separate the truth from the lies.

Why does knowing someone's name give you any useful information about what they're trying to say? It's not like I personally know almost anyone who publishes anything. You tell truth from lies by applying critical thinking, looking for internal and external inconsistencies in the text, considering opposing works... Legal names are virtually worthless as a measure of truth.

To trivialize the example, imagine a Slashdot where every poster was an Anonymous Coward. How could you separate the truth from the bullshit? The signal-to-noise ratio would plummet.

Like slashdot, most of what's on Freenet is pseudo-anonymous, where an author has an identity they can use to link their various uploads. Also like slashdot, I don't have any useful information about the real-world identity of any of the participants unless they tell me.

--
Benjamin Coates

Freenet makes loads of enemies.

[spacefight]

As the Freenet Philosophy says it all:

You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law

This is exactly where the big media/entertainment industry should get to. Either you forget freedom of speech or you forget copywright laws over there in the U.S. or maybe your whole country will end in a bigger destater (internet related) that it already is.

Re:Freenet makes loads of enemies.

[mcubed]

This is exactly where the big media/entertainment industry should get to. Either you forget freedom of speech or you forget copywright laws over there in the U.S.

If only Europe and the Far East would let us here in the U.S. If you read the Eldred v. Ashcroft transcript, you'll see that harmonization with European copyright term was an important part of the government's argument that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was perfectly legitimate.

And then, of course, there are the RIAA Big Five:

AOL Time Warner - U.S.
Bertlesmann - Germany
Vivendi - France
EMI - U.K.
Sony - Japan

Michael

Paypal?!

[mattbee]

Will they take a cheque, do you think? :)

Re:Paypal?!

[e8johan]

Yes, just look at the donations page (liked from the article):

Alternatively you can make donations by mail. Checks should be made payable to "Freenet Project Inc". The address for donations is:

Freenet Project Inc.
2554 Lincoln Blvd #712
Venice, CA 90291


Just fill in a nice figure (lots of zeroes), sign it and post it!

US Free Speech?

[mobileone]

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.

Re:US Free Speech?

[Whispers_in_the_dark]

As it reads to me, the first amendment or the U.S. Constitution only stipulate that the U.S. Congress can't create laws that regulate free speech (although there are a number of times the congress has tried and somewhat successfully). However, combined with the tenth amendment the individual states (and localities depending on the state) do have the ability to limit speech. As far as I can tell, the idea here wasn't to necessarily keep all limitations of speech off the law books but to preserve local custom/traditions and avoid setting a national standard for decency that could be quickly eroded towards totalitarianism.

Admittedly, IANAL, but one of the features of the Constitution and its amendments was supposed to be the ability for the common man (i.e., me) to be able to read and understand it. That doesn't mean different people won't have different opinions as to the meanings and intents. I am also aware that the U.S. Supreme Court has made several rulings that modify (they prefer "interpret") the limits, but those generally involve allowing localities to place limits on their own areas.

So, ultimately, when we speak of the freedom of speech we are only really talking about keeping the federal government from abridging it. Individual states and localities have differing views on how much or how little they can choose to limit any of the basic freedoms. If you don't like your local government either petition to change the law locally or move.

PS: The citizens of the US have never voted to ratify, AFAIK, any law that would grant the UN any ability to dictate law to the US. It would, if I understand correctly, require ratification by the states themselves, not just any one president. Unless something has changed radically, the UN is a treaty body not a super-government that we all live under.

PPS: As an aside, as you may guess, I think that the solution to racist speech and other like rubbish is to simply ignore it not to further regulate it. The more you give it lip service the more attention it gets. IMHO, don't abridge others' rights to be an idiot - apply your right to make more sense!

Re:US Free Speech?

[tongue]

However, combined with the tenth amendment [cornell.edu] the individual states (and localities depending on the state) do have the ability to limit speech.

This is not so. A state cannot pass a law which supersedes either the constitution or federal law. The tenth amendment merely says "Anything we've left out, assume belongs to the states."

With regards to slander and libel, they are not protected speech. There are no laws abridging our right to talk about patents and such--any nda's you sign are responsible for that. the right to speech is NOT "inalienable", meaning that you can sign it away if you choose, unlike your right to life.

Re:US Free Speech?

[Guppy06]

"On the contrary the legal system in the US poses a number of restrictions on free speech."

Being held responsible for what you say and being able to say it are two very different things.

"This includes libel"

You can be as libellous as you want as long as you can pay the fees/fines. After all, a libel suit is civil (ie. another individual sues you), not criminal.

And most states have a clause in their constitution mandating that the truth cannot be considered libel, so the plaintiff is stuck with demonstrating that it's not true.

"porn"

Some of it depends on what you call "porn." A good deal of it isn't considered "speech," but the only restrictions on it (beyond anti-kiddie-porn laws) are a few minor restrictions (no pun intneded) on distribution and advertising. Unlike some/many countries, your porn can be as hardcore as you want so long as you're over 18 when you purchase it.

Hell, from what I've been seeing in recent days, it may soon be easier to get more/hardcore porn in the US than France.

"patent and copyright laws"

As practiced? Hell yes. In theory? A toss-up at worst. The inability to make a profit off of what you publish can in itself be considered a barrier to 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. "

Hipocrite. Bans on distributing pantented and copyrighted material are bad but bans on hate speech are OK? And I'm sure you're more than willing to decide for the rest of us just what else is OK and what is not? Personally, I'd rather be able to decide for myself what I should read and what I should not.

You are a shining example of why "hate" speech should be allowed.

"Look at it as a sort of class action libel case"

Can you prove it's wrong? 99.9% of it is so vague and baseless that very little of it can either be proven or disproven. But in a libel suit it needs to be disproven.

"Also rasism is one of the key points governed by the UN Human Rights declaration."

And I'm sure said Human Rights declaration decides for us what is racism and what isn't? Crimethink?

People should be allowed to have whatever opinion they damned well please, so long as they don't act upon them. I'd rather have to deal with the occasional poor judgement of individuals than government-sponsored thought control.

Re:US Free Speech?

[bwt]

Amendment X - The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Thus the 10th Amendment shines no light at all on whether a state has the power to regulate something which the Federal government cannot. In fact, the 14th Amendment prohibits states from enforcing any law which "abridge[s] the privileges or immunities of citizens". The Supreme Court has ruled that the priviledges and immunities therein includes the right of Free Speech.

Re:US Free Speech?

[mesocyclone]

You forget that the 14th amendment extends the bill of rights to all citizens, thus prohibiting states from violating the first amendment.

The 14th amendment was passed after the civil war to prevent the former Confederate states from continuing slavery and other racist practices, by extending the constitutional protections to include state law. It wasn't fully enforced until the courts started finding segregation to be unconstitutional in the middle 20th century.

Re:US Free Speech?

[mesocyclone]

It is important to realize that libel is *not* illegal in the US. Libel is only a civil violation, and requires that the injured party sue in civil court to recover damages.

Freedom of speech, like all freedoms, can never be absolute except in a society of total anarchy. Personally I think that in some cases we have too much freedom of speech in the US - specifically where newspapers publish secret documents which damage national security. Of course, there is the argument that without that freedom, the government can declare most anything secret (like they can in the UK) and thus cover up for themselves.

Re:US Free Speech?

[Penguinoflight]

Yeah, but who desides if what you are saying is Racist?? Lots of polititions in the united states accuse others of being racist, just to get people turned against them, and often the person accusing is actually far more "racist". For example, Jesse Jackson is a very aggressive black racist, and he is always throwing fud at republicans, and just spreading totally untrue propaganda.

How?

[neroz]

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"?

Re:How?

[PerryMason]

[Whore mode on]

Whats new in 0.5

Far too many improvements have occured between the 0.3 series and the newly stable 0.5 release. A few highlights are in order, though:

* Security
o Strong public-key cryptography used for inter-node communication which prevents man-in-the-middle attacks.
o Node announcement protocol which eliminates the need for any central directory.
o File-sizes enforced to a power-of-two to prevent traffic analysis.
* Publishing
o Support for splitfiles and redundant encoding (improves reachability of large files)
o Enhanced Freenet Client Protocol (FCP) for application developers.
* Usability
o FProxy (The Freenet Gateway) beautified and improved
o Node Status information readily available
* Resource Utilization
o Improvements made in performance, memory usage, and threading.
* Tool Support
o Many third party tools ready for website authoring, bulletin-board style discussions, and some near completion like Internet Streaming Radio, and more.

And perhaps most importantly, It Just Works!

quotation

[jukal]

Today is a role-play day. In my normal role, I like the idea of free speech, but lets take a role of those on the other side. Quoatation from the front page:

"'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.

Re:quotation

[amck]

Yes, its not so simple.

Unfortunately, censorship increasingly is becoming easy (with Palladium, etc.). As information transfer gets increasingly automated (ie happens via the internet) then censorship becomes automated, too.

We get forced to a hard choice: either censorship, or freedom. Freedom means not being able to censor the stuff we don't like (racism, paedophilia, etc). We have to look to other ways to fight these .

If you believe in freedom of speech, then your're defending that right for your enemies, too. Free speech means spending some of the rest of my life countering the arguments of holocaust deniers,etc.

But I'd rather do that than live without whistleblowers, in a world where employers, politicians, etc can use technologies like palladium to convince us all is right in the world, and stop us from hearing about, and _fixing_ the cruelties that exist. I don't believe for a second that most CEO's, etc. out there, given the tech. to prevent bad news of toxic waste , pollution, etc. problems in their factories killing people, would actually fix these problems if they could guarantee their workers could never tell anyone.

Our daily quality of life is guaranteed by freedom of speech. Its not just for wierdo politicos.

Re:quotation

[abe ferlman]

The world is a tough place.

What would you do if you had to choose between marginally easier availability of nasty pornography and a democratic revolution in China, or perhaps a return to power of the legitimately elected government of Pakistan?

Re:quotation

[jukal]

What would you do if you had to choose between marginally easier availability of nasty pornography and a democratic revolution in China, or perhaps a return to power of the legitimately elected government of Pakistan?

Do you mean this can be achieved by Freenet - or why did you use it as an example? I believe Freenet can only exist if it is wanted to exist (or if anyone does not want hard enough it to not exist). Let's say a country with heavy censorship says : "if we find freenet sw in your computer, you and your relatives will be put in the jail - or killed if the jail is already full.". Time will tell.

Re:Just some info

[e8johan]

It is nice to see that one can get +5 Informative by simply copying the What is Freenet? page and saying that it is a bit like Kazza.

It is not like Kazza! This is because it is not spyware and has/will never be accused of being. It is an open source (GPLed) reaction to the growing restrictions of the on-line rights of expression. The point is not that you can copy your warez and p0rn, the point is that you can express yourself anonymously.

Dear moderators, if you haven't read the article and followed at least some of the link, do not moderate! Does "...some kind of a cross between Kazza..." and "...provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth..." sound like something written by the same author in the same message?

the Dark Side

[TuringTest]

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.

Re:the Dark Side

[pongo000]

But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it.

This is the price you pay for freedom. You take the good and the bad, and hope the good outshines the bad.

I'm sure the pediphiles and crackers would find other ways to distribute their shit if it weren't for Freenet.

Re:the Dark Side

[Uruk]

Yes, there are a lot of people who are concerned about how this will be used. But the people who built it are free speech absolutists, and although it can be used for evil, you can hardly argue with their right to guarantee themselves an anonymous secure method of communication.

It's on networks like freenet where you find out what people are really made of. In freenet, people can say anything so there's no concept of people "holding back" because they're afraid of what the consequences might be.

Freenet is just a tool though. It does not make a hammer evil that it can be used to kill people, just like it doesn't make freenet evil that evil people can subvert it for their purposes.

Re:the Dark Side

[Sanity]

The FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.

"Wrong uses of freedom"? The problem is, that if you get to decide which freedoms are wrong, then they aren't really freedoms now are they?

Okay, hate to be the first "help me post"...

[tunah]

... but at least it's not an ask slashdot :).

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 ;-(

Re:Okay, hate to be the first "help me post"...

[Shadeborn]

try mainport.allowedHosts. FProxy and nodeinfo servlets are obsolete, mainport replaces both of them.

Re:Okay, hate to be the first "help me post"...

[amck]

You're not supposed to bind it to other addresses.
The point is that everything is proxyed through your local server (on 127.0.0.1); then traffic analysis can't tell the difference between traffic from your node and traffic proxy'd by your node (which communicates with the other servers).

Yes, ideally in freenet there is a server on every computer in the network. (at the moment due to transient nodes, some/most aren't true servers), but of course, you're not running them, just your one.

Re:Okay, hate to be the first "help me post"...

[tunah]

Okay, I'm running a network at home with a DSL external modem/router/hub. There are 6 computers hooked up to it. 5 are transient workstations, one is a server that is on 24/7. These computers share an external IP.

Does this mean I have to run slow transient servers on every node rather than just running off the proxy for the internal server?

My network is closed and trusted, I don't see any privacy issue in distinguishing between computers (or not).

Re:Okay, hate to be the first "help me post"...

[Greg W.]

The docs refer to fcp.allowedHosts, fproxy.allowedHosts, and fproxy.bindAddress.

The docs are out of date. The "fproxy" service was renamed to "mainport" about a month ago.

mainport.port=8888
mainport.bindAddress=*
main port.allowedHosts=127.0.0.1,209.142.155.49,192 .168.2.1,192.168.2.2,192.168.2.4,192.168.2.20
mai nport.params.servlet.1.params.tempDir=/home/fre enet/tmp/

Also note that "nodeinfo" is gone. It got merged with fproxy into mainport. For more details, please read The Freenet Wiki FAQ.

Some small things

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :)

Re:Some small things

[Greg W.]

FCP is an ASCII protocol - very easy to use.

Almost. It's ASCII after the first four bytes, but for some reason that I don't quite grasp, the Freenet developers decided that you would have to send \000\000\000\002 at the beginning of each FCP request.

pegasus:~$ echo -e '\000\000\000\002ClientHello\nEndMessage' | nc 127.0.0.1 8481
NodeHello
Protocol=1.2
HighestSeenBuild=60 3
Node=Fred,0.5,1.46,524
EndMessage

Re:lack of choice.

[tunah]

Quit bitching. It's open source, and written in java. It would take all of 30 seconds to port.

Some people...

I just donated 50 Euros.

[mrright]

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

Re:I just donated 50 Euros.

[Thenomain]

Then let them put me on some list of potential terrorists. When enough* people do this, it will become obvious to the senators (who are in fact concerned about being voted in -- even if it's to collect those big checks from major companies) that the system is flawed. And since it is always easier to keep something from happening than to change it back, I'd rather shout out now and encourage other people to be as visible as possible. At least in countries where this tactic works; the list of countries where it doesn't matter makes projects like Freenet important.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Freenet project is a great idea, but I don't think it would be a good idea, to those of us living in countries where a mass movement of people can make a difference, to go into hiding.

okay

[khuber]

I think someone is storing something on my node. Well, you know what I mean. I am receiving data.

What do you think it is? Beautiful artwork? Lovely poetry? pics of the goatse guy?

-Kevin

Re:okay

[Greg W.]

What do you think it is? Beautiful artwork? Lovely poetry? pics of the goatse guy?

All of the above. I mean that literally. (Well, OK, "Beautiful" and "Lovely" are subjective.)

Re:Just some info

[bluFox]

The reason why i said it was *some kind of a cross between kazza and everything2* is that kazza provides a kind of fail safe collection for files to be stored, with the files duplicated in many nodes. and the reason why i copied the *what is Freenet* page is that I thought it was a nice and polite thing to do, as i have seen too many pages going down after being slashdotted and mostly because *I could not find any information on what it was in the story it self*. And it seems nice to point out another thing also, namely that Even in their website, the mode of working, and usage are not very clearly explained.

Re:Just some info

[e8johan]

But still you miss their greatest point: to defend and preserve the freedom of expression and the ability to express oneself anonymously.

I'm not critisizing you for copying stuff from the site, I'm trying to point out to the moderators that that info isn't very interesting as it is available on the site. If the site went down, then they could have modded you up, or perhaps you could have waited for it to come down, then posted a quote from your local cache. I feel that some sort of netiquette (not necessarily mine) needs to be added to the FAQ. The job of the moderators should be to enforce such rules and promote good replies. (Ok, sorry, I'm going off-topic...)

Anyhow, nothing personal towards the original poster!.

DistribNet

[kevina]

Freenet is nice but it has some fundamental limitations. One of the biggest ones that it is all about the here and now. That is in freenet really popular documents are available quickly, not so popular ones may be available, and un-popular documents will just fall off the network. Freenet is nothing but a large cache and there is no real way to provide permanent storage of data. Freenet is also, in my view, overly concerned with anonymity, to the point where it hurts performance.

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.

Re:p2p alternative media?

[hispula]

Well, actually we will soon have a new law of publicity here in Finland. This law means that all discussion boards etc. should be monitored and there must in every case be a person (ie. editor) responsible for the discussion published on the board. So if somebody publishes some slander about somebody the "editor" of the discussion board would be personally responsible for it. This would naturally be disastrous for open publishing web sites like Indymedia.

Yes, you are right. Freedom of speech is seriously threatened. However I feel that this type of limitation to the freedom of speech will not work. If there should be a serious attack against freedom of speech we would just find a way to avoid it.

Ocham's

[AftanGustur]

Freenet's de facto purpose is to subvert the following:
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 ..

Re:Ocham's

[Salamander]

I who thought that FreeNet was meant as a tool to disclose information about those governaments

Um, yes, well. Check out Saving the Whales Using Freenet from last March. Despite the fact that Ian and many other Freenetistas regularly read my site, I have yet to receive any pointers to info about actual instances of Freenet being used in such ways. For that, you might try Peekabooty instead.

Re:Ocham's

[BCoates]

It's not done yet. The NAT issue that people make so much of (which shouldn't keep you from using freenet, it just keeps you from contributing to the network capacity. If you can't use freenet at work, you have some other problem.) is quite solvable, but none of the several solutions have been implemented yet. Getting it working well for people with fully functional internet connections has to be finished first.

Between Freenet's unfinshed state and the fact that it hasn't had anywhere near enough use to have any confidence about its anonymity protections, it's not exactly surprising that freenet isn't a hotbed of dangerous revolutionary activity, is it? I see a few things in TFE that I would probably be at least a hassle to get published conventionally.

I doubt I qualify as a 'Freenetista', but I've never heard of your site until now...

--
Benjamin Coates

Advantages of freenet over the regular internet

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

-> 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

Re:Just some info

[leuk_he]

Well a lot of mod points get the wrong direction lately. Too bad.

A big difference between kazaa & freenet is that freenet only a communication protocol. The searching for files requires an application on top of freenet. standard you get a "proxy" for freenet so you can browse freenet like the internet. But there is not yet a google on freenet, THe other popular appilication on freenet is "frost". This a messageboard where people exchange "links(chk keys)" that contain interesting "documents/files"

The problem with freenet

[jonadab]

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.

Re:The problem with freenet

[bwt]

This also suggests the simple way that the RIAA/MPAA will kill freenet. They will create their own nodes and flood the network with files. I posted a message to the freenet mailing list about how they could counter this and nobody responded back to it.

The basic design of Freenet makes it impossible to control signal to noise.

Re:The problem with freenet

[BCoates]

This also suggests the simple way that the RIAA/MPAA will kill freenet. They will create their own nodes and flood the network with files. I posted a message to the freenet mailing list about how they could counter this and nobody responded back to it.

That doesn't work unless the attacker has substantially more network resources than the entire freenet network, and not necessarily even then. It's a less useful attack than just DoSing every Freenet node at the IP level.

The basic design of Freenet makes it impossible to control signal to noise.

Not really, the signal:noise function for dropping content when nodes are full is popularity; for finding content it is link-following, just like the www.

--
Benjamin Coates

Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[duffbeer703]

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.

Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[duffbeer703]

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.

Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[Senior Frac]

I don't think you fully understand the technology. Or maybe I don't.

I have 100 bytes on my computer [1], mixed in with 100 million others, all encrypted. It's not a picture, it might be piece of a picture, but even assuming I could decrypt the datastore and take those bytes out it's certainly not recognizable as anything. I don't have the rest of the picture and am not sure who does. I might be able to find out, but I doubt it.

That picture could potentially be child pornography. Assuming it is, am I responsible? Are the other 1000 people who have other pieces responsible? I have 100 bytes of data which I volunteered to store for someone else.

Now assume someone wants to prosecute me.
"Excuse me judge, but where's the evidence (porno)?"

[1] How many bytes is a nitpick I'm not interested in.

Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[Dog and Pony]

And "because you cannot control the cache on your computer" is exactly why you won't be held liable in a sane justice system.

And what if you don't have a sane justice system then? I don't think I need to mention any names, or examples to the average slashdot reader...

Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[Sanity]

By allowing child pornography to circulate over it.

Unfortunately it would be impossible to build functionality into Freenet to prevent distribution of child pornography without subverting the entire purpose of the Freenet architecture.

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.

No, those who click on those links support distribution of the freesites they are visiting. If I tell you that child pornography is available in Belgium, and you go to Belgium to look at that child pornography, who is at fault - me or you?

Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[duffbeer703]

Under the current law, yes.

People have been prosecuted for having underage porn received in a spam email that they never read. Possession of it is like posessing narcotics -- it's just a bad idea.

You are also assuming that everything is secure. In January, everybody thought that the current release of OpenSSL was secure too.

Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[Senior Frac]

Actually, I'm assuming it's not secure.

All I have sitting here is 100 bytes. Is it a picture? Is it someone's termpaper? How could I possibly know? I don't have the rest of the pieces. How could a prosecutor know?

I think a lot of the people aren't fully understanding just how distributed this thing is. I don't just have fileX [encrypted] stored. I have pieces of files [encrypted] from all over the place. Breaking the encryption isn't going to help prove me guilty/innocent at all.

This isn't your traditional data-hiding, encryption argument. This is a plausible deniability argument. I have 100 bytes. Definitely isn't a picture. Am I responsible for the fact that it could be joined with 1000 other pieces, which I don't have, to make a picture of porno? If yes, where does one draw the line? I could make a porno picture out of any tidbit on your computer right now. You're now a pornographer and potentially prosecutable under child pornography laws?

Re:Freenet signs it's own death warrant

[duffbeer703]

I didn't realize how distributed freenet truly is. Is breaking up a file into pieces that small typical?

Even so, I'd say that legislation making tools like freenet illegal are on the horizon. The anti-terrorism, "save the children" and copyright lobbies will see to that.

Navelgazing yanks again!

[Jeppe Salvesen]

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.

How long till we have an adware+spyware freenet

[rnd()]

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.

Porn (Was Re:A quick description)

[Greg W.]

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.

Great "pay for development" example

[Rayban]

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.

Re:lack of choice.

[Greg W.]

It's open source, and written in java. It would take all of 30 seconds to port.

You apparently don't have much experience with Java. (Hint: try searching the Freenet development mailing list archives for "Heisenbug".)

Freedom to only do Right Is Not Freedom!

[FreeUser]

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.

Re:Freedom to only do Right Is Not Freedom!

[BitterOak]

Worse still, that crap is cached on people's hard drives, often without their knowledge, for extended periods of time.

Worse even than that is the fact is that people can and have been prosecuted for having deleted child porn files on their system. According to a recent Wired article (I don't have the link handy), dozens of people were prosecuted and received jail time for having kiddie porn only in their browser cache or as deleted file fragments. (Operation Candyman, I think it was called). Think about it, someone could e-mail you kiddie porn attachments through an anonymous remailer, you download your mail through a POP server, and delete the mail without opening the attachment thinking you've dodged a bullet and avoided a virus or something, but guess what? You now have deleted kidde porn files on your computer and people are in jail for exactly that!

Not to mention of course, that your browser cache might be full of the stuff from the annoying popups on some losers site that you had the misfortune to visit.

The moral of the story? Clean your hard drive frequently. Delete your browser cache and run a utility to overwrite your unused sectors and sector fragments. And if you really are into kiddie porn, you've probably already encrypted your collection anyway, so you're safe.

debs!

[mikeee]

I think it would be cool if this was an apt-get source. Yes, the crypto stuff is overkill for that, but who cares?

Re:Just some info

[Shelled]

Because you know the alternative - a society in which information is regulated by the entertainment industry - is a happy society. :) :) :)

Re:As much as I like freenet...

[Greg W.]

It sure would have been nice for that gpl outfit to make certain their program would run with the current kaffe stable series, eh?

I run a node on OpenBSD 3.1 i386 using Kaffe 1.0.7 with a couple asserts commented out. It only crashes once or twice a week at most.

mjr claims that he has never had his Freenet node crash, and he's running Kaffe CVS from 20010902.

hobx claims that he got Freenet to run on Kaffe CVS head with only one small patch to Kaffe. (He didn't say whether it would stay running.)

All Java implementations suck. Your job is to find one that sucks as little as possible in your environment.

(I am a lifetime member of the "I Hate Java" club. If Freenet didn't exist, or wasn't written in Java, I would purge the evil Java from all of my computers, while capering with a demented glee. If nothing else, my months of experience with Freenet have taught me just how bad -- and how unportable -- Java is.)

Mozilla alert

[Sanity]

We thought this was a bug too - until we discovered that Mozilla 1.2 (and probably older versions) were transparently ungzipping the tgz file.

Re:Mozilla alert

[greenrd]

God. If so, that's at least the third time this bug or similar has recurred in moz. They really need some kind of comment like "DO NOT DISABLE THIS BEHAVIOUR YOU MORONS!!!" in the code.

So help us fix it...

[Sanity]

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.

Freenet vs the GPL

[SiliconEntity]

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.

Re:Anyone gotten it to do anything usefull?

[LM741N]

Yes, all of the $tology upper level stuff is on Freenet. Reading tt was a very enlightening experience. I've never read such wierd stuff in my life. And people pay 100's of thousands of $$ for this.

for what?!

[Lavahead]

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.

Re:It's quite simple

[jukal]

(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.)

Two words: context, audience.

Freedom to restrict freedom is not a freedom.

[nyet]

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.

Logical Fallacy

[FreeUser]

But For me, Child Porn is not free speech.

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 only illegal if it involves an actual, real world, physical child.

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 ... indeed, it only becomes complex when one wishes to disregard that right, and justify doing so.

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 ... 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.

New version 0.5.0.1 just out.

[karlm]

Today has been a huge stress test. It's 3 a.m. for poor Matt and he's still coding, making code tweaks from everythign he's learned today. Freenet has some problems if a huge percentage of the nodes pop on and off the network, because freenet nodes actually learn over time which neighbors to ask for which infrmation. A given node routes things very inneficiently when it first comes on line. Within the past few minutes they released freenet 0.5.0.1 with improved laod balancing code, please update when you read this... it will help everyone. (Yes,they know the README still sys 0.5 instead of 0.5.0.1. Give Matt a break.. It's been a long long long day for him.)

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.)

Re:Anyone gotten it to do anything usefull?

[Loki_1929]

"Yes, all of the $tology upper level stuff is on Freenet. Reading tt was a very enlightening experience."

I agree completely. Oh, one quick question though - did you find the part yet about how to stop levitating? I want to go to bed, but I can't get down. :(

Fourth Possibility...

[tunabomber]

Berman-Coble legislation passes, mercenaries from the ??AA clog the network up with corrupt files and cancer nodes, making it nearly unusable.

(Future) Legal Problem with Freenet

[gnarly]

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?

configuration...

[Loki_1929]

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.