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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."
I just would like to be the first to say a big "Thank you!" to the entire FreeNet team.
When I first heard of FreeNet, I thought, "I live in America, what would I need of this?" No, this isn't a troll. I was happy and complacent and slightly distrustful of the Big Bad Brother. Now the purpose of a network like FreeNet has become quite clear, as I'm neither happy nor complacent and I'm more distrustful of Big Brother with each passing day, as he takes further swipes at the freedoms my Constitution tells me I'm supposed to have.
Thanks, FreeNet, for standing up. More importantly, thanks for the foresight. Imagine if they'd waited until it was really necessary.
Freenet is free software designed to ensure true freedom of communication over the Internet. It allows anybody to publish and read information with complete anonymity. Nobody controls Freenet, not even its creators, meaning that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or shutdown.
Yeah.... but what is it? P2P? Blogger? Messenger?
I thought that Freenet just received a large 'donation' from Abiword's PayPal account a few weeks ago. :^)
... is a little lacking. Having dl'ded and installed the program, I can't seem to connect to anything. Helpfiles are not helpful. Being a computer geek and not getting it running in 2 minutes flat annoys me to no end. Cool Idea thou.
I am the Barber of Seville.
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.
the package appears to not be gzipped (despite the suffix). Hence use tar -xf freenet-0.5.0.tgz. Also the shell scripts in the package don't have the proper executable attributes set so that also needs to be modified. After that just follow the instructions :)
FreeNet is essentially the bulletproof P2P data exchange. It's practically impossible to destroy, or track down people who are on it. It is NOT designed for swapping MP3s or porn for those who have got the wrong idea, it's purpose is (as the name implies) to guarantee freedom of speech by allowing totally anonymous yet scalable publishing.
Scalable? Yes, one of the more interesting aspects of Freenet is it's intelligent caching and retrieval system. This isn't Gnutella, when you request a file it traverses the nodes being cached at each level. Therefore, the more a file is requested, the more distributed it becomes and the easier it becomes to get to - the opposite of the web.
FreeNet takes the form of a web for new users, you can "surf" the FreeWeb, and there was at one point a google-style search engine for it, I have no idea if that's the case. Some of the problems I remember were that it was often hard or impossible to reach certain pages as they hadn't propagated enough to be found before the timeouts were hit, and even then the timeouts were pretty high (like 2 minutes). On the more popular sites the owners would have to manually request it from different parts of the FreeNet in order to make it accessible.
Another problem was that because nothing can ever be deleted from the FreeNet once published, it was hard to do news/blog style sites: at the time they used JavaScript date based redirects, I think that shows how long ago I used it. Suffice to say that I'll be trying this release with interest.
From the explorers area of the freenet pages: ..Governments seek to prevent people from advocating ideas which are deemed damaging to society....The second argument is that this "good" censorship is counter-productive even when it does not leak into other areas. For example, it is generally more effective when trying to persuade someone of something to present them with the arguments against it, and then answer those arguments....
6. Isn't censorship sometimes necessary?
But what about questions that are not answerable? For instance, some anonymous person "places" a file containing the source codes for all the windows operating systems+MATHEMATICA source code+xyz corporations major software. The software companies attitude could be bad, and mainly oriented towards profit and monopoly. But do even such companies deserve such a death blow? At one stroke, their entire product goes down the drain.
While I am not against freenet, it is not without its disadvantages. Taken to its limits, nobody can control us, yah, but nobody can control this "network" either!
"Do something man. Right now."
Isn't this the nightmare of all anti-freedom lobbyist organisations: Any one can publish anything, while still being anonymous.
IMHO there are three optional futures:
* It is deemed illegal and shut down.
* It is stopped by Palladium and shut down.
* All developers and users are sued and it is shut down.
I still wounder why everything good has to go.
Ugh! Bad time to be asking for donations via Paypal!
Please set your node up as non-transient as long as you're online most of the time (where most is something like 75% and above). The network desperately needs non-transient nodes (high bandwidth is not that important). Also, your anonymity is a lot higher when running a non-transient node.
The idea of Freenet is really great, but there were two things in the implementation that really annoyed me:
1) I cannot control what is in my datastore. Free speech or not, I'm not going to cache your kiddieporn for you. So if I know that there's a file I don't want, give me a way to blacklist it. If it's encrypted then it's another story.
2) My files aren't shared permanently. If nobody requests the files I injected, they are thrown out after a while, even if my node is online 24/7. That's just plain stupid.
If I'm wrong or this has changed, please feel free to correct me.
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
I know I'm going to get moderated back to the stone age for saying this, but I suspect that I'm not the only one thinking it. I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.
Consider for just a minute that given a situation in which one individual distributes material to which another individual or group objects, most of the time there's a good reason for the objection. Maybe the material being distributed is copyrighted (like movies or music), maybe it's dangerous (like blueprints to a nuclear reactor), maybe it's offensive (like child pornography). Most of the time when the distribution of material is opposed, there's a good-- or at least understandable-- reason for it.
Now, it's possible to imagine a scenario in which it might be justifiable, or even imperative, to distribute certain pieces of information. "Soylent Green is people" is a silly example, but a more realistic one might be distributing news of the outside world to a society whose media is heavily controlled. But in that sort of scenario, is the Internet really going to be a useful communication pathway? Assuming the people who need the media have access to the Internet at all, what are the chances that they're going to have unrestricted access to the network of Freenet servers? If you think about it, I think you'll agree that it sounds pretty unlikely.
What I'm saying is this: it sounds to me like there's no realistic, nontrivial, legitimate use for this software. The idea sounds cool on the surface, but I have some serious doubts about its practicality.
I write in my journal
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.
"'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.
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 FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it. But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal ways.
On the other hand, the fact is that the more popular information is better found, and the marginal info is hard to obtain.
Moreover, the control of the net is in the hands of users. If this technology became a widely used criminal tool, people would decide to turn off their servers and the proyect would die. The purpose of the FreeNet will be decided by the majority.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Has anyone had any luck getting the proxy to bind to interfaces other than loopback? The docs refer to fcp.allowedHosts, fproxy.allowedHosts, and fproxy.bindAddress. I've tried all these, and fcp.bindAddress, in all possible combinations, binding to all interfaces and allowing all hosts. And yet still "telnet 127.0.0.1 8888" works, and telnet "192.168.2.1 8888" fails.
Without this, I have to run a server on every computer on the network ;-(
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
[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!
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
Some people...
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Why don't you do the same if you care about free speech? Freenet is already used by the chinese opposition. Some european countries like france, greece and germany already censor the internet, so freenet is also important for western "democracies".
Some day soon something like freenet will be nessecary even in the US if you want to say something critical about bush or ashcroft without getting on some list of potential terrorists.
regards,
mrright
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
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!
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.
The problem with freenet is that its ideology gets in the way of any
practical use anyone might want to put it to. You can agree with the
ideology all you like, but fundamentally freenet is so concerned about
providing free anonymous speech that in practice what it's going to
provide is the ability to shout in the forest where nobody hears.
I'll explain. Because they want everything to be anonymous, they
made sure content gets spread across all nodes (flooding) and can
not be (easily) traced to the given originating node. Consequently,
there's no reliable addressing mechanism. You cannot, therefore,
create content and make it available at a certain address all the
time. All you can do is create the content and watch it get mixed
with all the other content.
Survivable? Sure, if you mean by that that as long as people run
nodes they'll be sharing _something_, but if you want a particular
piece of content to remain available, the only way to ensure that
is to keep injecting it again and again and again -- like the way
spammers use email. Otherwise, it goes through each node once,
in the midst of whatever other content is being injected, and soon
is gone. That model is _anything but_ survivable in practice.
Sure, it may work now, when everyone running a freenet node is
genuinely concerned about free speech and wants the system to work,
but if it ever catches on, it will rapidly devolve into a shouting
match, where injecting your content only a few times will ensure no
one can find it in the sea of _stuff_ that gets repeatedly injected.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
By allowing child pornography to circulate over it.
As I understand it, freesites proliferate based on usage; the more people who look at something, the more widely it gets distributed.
The main "portal" freesite contain several links to kiddie porn, and thus supports the distribution of it.
I would love to run a machine or two as a freenet node, but am afraid that supporting that filth and subjecting myself to 20+ years in prision because I cannot control the cache on my computer is not acceptable.
And before you say "it anonymous, nobody can see your encrypted cache"... I call bullshit. There are plenty of bugs out there, and I'm sure that governments have found flaws in encryption algorithms that the public doesn't know about.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
The freenet fund paid for a month of full-time development. This was enough to take it from a relatively unstable 0.4 to a nearly rock-solid 0.5. I think this is a great example of putting together some donations and giving them to someone who can spend eight hours a day looking at the code.
I think this is similar in some ways to the street performer protocol.
æeee!
The FreeNet principles are a good things, but I'm concerned about the possible wrong uses of freedom.
.
"Wrong" as defined by whom?
The Bush family thinks it is wrong to leak information emberrassing to the family out to the press, and they punish people severely (within their power) when they do so, yet what they do is clearly constitutional.
Supporters of Clinton felt it was severely wrong to have private, political groups fund and possibly incite lawsuits by private citizens for poltical ends, but clearly that was within the bounds of the constitution.
I'm not worried about nazi propaganda, I think is a good thing that the normal citizen have access to this information in order to study it.
Ah. So are you the person who gets to tell us what is "right" and what is "wrong?"
But pedophilia images and personal information can also be published through this channel with no ways to remove it. My only hope in this case is that these crimes can be pursued by police through other normal way.
Pedophilia is an illness, and people who act on those feelings are criminals. It was never necessary, nor smart, to subvert the first amendment by making information (child pornography) illegal to possess. Illegal to sell, yes (that falls under the commerce clause), but making the possession of child pornography illegal was a serious mistake.
Why? Two reasons I can think of off hand
1) Possession doesn't imply any intent or even desire. Ever get child porno SPAM in your mailbox? How about child porno popups when surfing completely unrelated adult pornography, or perusing newsgroups some looser has spammed with their vile crap? Most people have, and have immediately become guilty under the law for possessing child pornography (it is copied to your machine's memory). Worse still, that crap is cached on people's hard drives, often without their knowledge, for extended periods of time.
2) Any photographs are by definition evidence of a crime. Instead of banning information, such evidence could be routinely siezed, to be returned to its owner only after the crime (child molestation) has been solved. That would have had the twin benefit of not eroding the 1st amendment and building a strong incentive to squeel on the seller into the entire process.
The "dark side" of freedom is a red herring. If we are free, we are free to do things others disagree with. The only limits should be when those freedoms reduce the freedoms of others (that was what the founding fathers intended, after all). IN other words, in the case of pedophelia, the crime is the molestation and harm to the child (and the selling of a regulated, in this case banned, product), not the mere possession of the photographs. However, the police can and should seize any such photographic or video evidence, and keep it on hand in a file, until the case is solved and the child raping perpetrators convicted and put in prison. Of course, such evidence couldn't be returned until said perps had exhausted all appeal opportunities
A little clear thinking would go a long way toward solving many of the 'problems' that come out of people's misuse of their liberties, without eliminating those liberties altogether. And those downsides which can't be eliminated through intelligent application of the law, within the bounds of the constitution, should be viewed as the price we are obligated to pay for liberty.
A price, by the way, which is laughably small compared to that which our forfathers paid in establishing and protecting those freedoms in times past.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
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.
I'd guess there will be some much improved builds comming out within the next couple of weeks as they learn more about today's stress test.
In other news, supposedly the great firewall of China started filtering out http packets with "freenet" in them today. (Source is questionable.)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.