Freenet 0.5.2 Released

FurbyXL writes "With the RIAA roaring to grab peer-to-peer users by their IP addresses, Freenet - fully anonymized production and consumption of content - is gaining renewed attention. Articles in New Scientist, ZDNet UK, Wired and CNET (and here) set a somewhat typical context for Freenets major release 0.52. Significant performance improvements through NIO-based messaging, probabilistic caching etc. should provide increased rest to Chinese dissidents, but may finally wake-up the RIAA's Matt Oppenheim..." The announcement on the Freenet home page lists several improvements found in the new version: "a new NIO technology that brings improved performance using less CPU and system resources," "Individual nodes are now more efficient," "the speed and routing of the entire network have significantly improved," probabilistic caching, user interface improvements, and more.

Comments

Good idea, bad content

[nsideops]

I love the idea of freenet, but after reading how it works, I have to agree with a few complains I've heard. I'm not really happy about the idea of "anything" being able to be shared on my computer. Kiddie Porn comes to mind as one thing I want nothing to do with, and I have no controll over this being shared on my computer or not.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[RPoet]

Yes, Freenet is not for everybody. If you don't believe in total, indiscriminatory, complete freedom of speech and expression (an information anarchy, as it were), Freenet is not for you. On the other hand, if you believe there can be such a thing as "freedom of speech, but only when I agree," you probably have some thinking to do.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[nsideops]

The stand on kiddie porn for example...the kids are not adults therefore, under law, they can not make adult decisions for themselves. Realistically, they are not mature enough to make those kinds of decisions for themselves. I do not consider that a freedom of speech. It is infringing on the rights of children, hurting children, and should be illegal. As far as freedom of speech, I'm all for it and defend it, but that has nothing to do with the spread of free speech, ideas, or thought. It's simply praying on the defenseless.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[GooberToo]

Doing so would potentially create legal trouble for all other freenet users which allow those types of files. That's the whole point of it.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[oxygene2k2]

freenet is a routing network..

should ISPs be allowed (or forced) to filter out content they're unhappy with on their routers and not pass it on because a request was made?

first you (not you directly, but several people here) blame china because they exercise that control, then you blame freenet because it takes away that control.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[Henry V .009]

Of course, and every normal person agrees with you that a perfect world shouldn't have child porn.

But does the threat of child porn mean that you should give your government regulatory powers over speech in order to stop it? I'd think very carefully about that. Government abuse of power over speech is far more dangerous than individual abuse of free speech.

Your line of reasoning can be logically extended. Murder is bad. Far worse than child porn. The government could theoretically end murder with current video surveillance technology. Should government have the power it needs to do that? Of course not, the abuse would be horrendous. It is one of the costs of liberty.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[Lemmy Caution]

The question is this: if you can technologically censor some speech, you are technologically capable of censoring any speech. If you can find a way to determine what's on your hard drive, you can be held accountable for it - and freenet's entire raison d'etre as a failsafe protection for free speech is destroyed.

In other words, one of the costs of ensuring free speech on FreeNet for Chinese dissidents is that it also gives a channel for child pornography and snuff films.

Also, there's a big gray zone when it comes to child pornography. The production of child pornography is clearly the exploitation of children. However, is documentation of a criminal act also criminal? Are all depictions of the sexual acts of or with children criminal? Should books like "Lolita," or dramas like "Romeo and Juliet," which describe relationships and sexuality with or between minors, be rightlly censored? Most of our ancestors before the 18th century or so were bearing children by the age 15 - do we want to treat their journals and love letters as kiddie porn? (I do believe there's a line between pornography and literary portrayal, but that line can at some places become blurry, and Nabokov is one of those places.)

Also, "kiddie porn" has extended to include pictures of kids taking a bath that were deemed just a little too sensual by some photo clerk, who brought them to a judge and got an indictment. Guess what: pictures of one's wife or husband as a minor can be treated as child pornography! There's a level of hysteria on the topic which has clouded the subject, and the desire to protect children from sex has become, in itself, a source for real censorship. And one that I'm sure the PRC would happily take advantage of while pursuing dissidents.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[Lt Razak]

Very true. This sick person could (and will) put the content up somewhere else, if not on freenet.

And to the poster who is concerned--> I don't agree with the K.K.K either, but I do realize that they should be allowed to speak their stance. And the fact that you & I support our local/state/ government when they grant permits for these types of gatherings, doesn't mean we're promoting the K.K.K.

I would say the same thing about Kiddie Porn. Supporting FreeNet is about so much more than possibly supporting (a very very small fraction of) the Kiddie Porn out there.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[RPoet]

I share some of your view about my own statements; they could be taken quite to the extreme. What you have to understand, and accept, though, is that if a system like Freenet were to have some kind of built-in mechanism for removing extremely objectionable material, it would (as several others have commented now) need to have mechanisms to remove any material (and who would make the removal decisions?). And you can't have that and still have a system implementing the ideals of Freenet (total anonymity for both publisher and consumer).

And no, freedom of expression does not include the freedom to break into my private sphere and make noises during RotK. OTOH, that won't happen by running a Freenet node ;-)

Re:Good idea, bad content

[lysium]

Research has definitively shown that infant males get erections, and that infant females have vaginal secretions. Should infants be having sex with each other, or adults? No!
BUT.....Should we be pretending that they are sexless until older? NO! We are creating our own demons here.....

-----------

Re:Good idea, bad content

[trout_fish]

Yes, but it'd be nice to make the kiddie porn pushers lives a little harder by not storing their data (or being able to trace & report them).

The problem is that as soon as the source or location of information is made available the system ceases to be anonymous and is rendered pointless.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[Loki_1929]

"Government abuse of power over speech is far more dangerous than individual abuse of free speech."

Beautifully stated. What many people fail to grasp is the simple fact that liberty is hard. Your own liberty is not what makes it hard; it's the respect for the liberty of others which makes things nearly unbearable at times. In order to ensure that some poor soul has the ability to speak out against a repressive regime without being shot for it, I must in turn allow some sick bastard to get his kicks? This is difficult, but it's outright dangerous to start picking and choosing who should have which liberties.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[zangdesign]

The problem is not with the storage mechanism, it is with the sick person creating the content.

That statement is entirely true. HOWEVER, I doubt any court in the United States would see it that way and you could end up spending a whole lot time next to some hardened killer who "just wants to cuddle".

I'm not sure that sort of indignity is worth some wierdo's free speech rights.

And yes, I am aware that people in China die because of government repression. But it is entirely within the power of the Chinese people to settle their problems with the government, WITHOUT our intervention, and so I leave it to them to do so.

Re:Good idea, bad content

[Ian Bicking]

I think it should be clear that child pornography is different from KKK material. If the KKK beat up some black guy who they didn't like, then taken pictures of it and distributed it, then it would be analogous. As it is, the KKK mostly just distributes at worse incitement to commit crimes, not actual evidence of crimes. There's a qualitative difference.

Searching on freenet?

[pv2b]

As far as I've understood, freenet is designed to be somewhere where you can access content, as long as somebody has given you the exact address to the file.

The problem I see here, is that there are no easy ways to search for content, except for out-of-band stuff like the web or e-mail, which mostly defeats the entire concept.

What Freenet needs in order to be a viable platform for not only publishing content anonymously, but also for finding it, is a search mechanism built into freenet. Before that happens, there is no way that it will become any popular with the file sharing masses -- it's just too find to hard something to download.

Re:Searching on freenet?

[42forty-two42]

Frost

Re:Question

[hawkbug]

That's why freenet needs to purge their webserver logs once an hour :)

Re:Huzzah!

[Abcd1234]

Ahhh, the now-infamous kiddy-porn rhetoric. I know you're probably joking, but this always comes up... "Oh no, private communications! But, now they'll distribute kiddy-porn! Think of the children! Oh god, won't someone please think of the children!" Puhlease... yes, something like this will be used for illegal means. So does the US postal service, or PGP for that matter. Does that make it any less useful? No.

The fact is, the minute you guarantee anonymity (something which, IMHO, is required for free speech... after all, what's the point of free speech if you're afraid to exercise that right?), people will abuse it. However, if you truly believe in the right to free speech, you must be willing to take the good with the bad. Anyone who suggests anything else doesn't truly believe in free speech.

The Arms Race Begins

[Foofoobar]

As it has been stated before, this is nothing more than an arms race with each side escalating the threat and the defense with each move. The problem howver is that the RIAA is fighting against ALOT of techies and as such, not just in the US but worldwide. Even if they manage to pass laws against it in the US, people will still be developing tools to bypass in and will host them on international servers.

The sooner they discover they are fighting a losing battle and just accept it and look for a better marketing scheme, the better.

Re:The Arms Race Begins

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is a war, then I find it interesting that the RIAA are on the same side as the Chinese government. Says a lot about the RIAA.

How do you spell "clueless"?

[djeaux]

How about "O.P.P.E.N.H.E.I.M."?

From the C|Net interview:

Oppenheim: How does this have anything to do with corporations? This has to do with artists and creators. Artists and creators, like anybody else who creates something, should have the right to sell what they create...Indeed, most artists spend a lifetime trying to sell the result of their efforts to record companies so that they may make a living making music. At the end of the day, that is a great thing for music lovers--otherwise artists would have a lot less time to create the music we all love.

Fine, let's take the corporate aspect out of it & pay only the artists' share for compact discs. That would be somewhere on the order of 30 or 40 cents per disc, if that much (if the artist has a good contract). OK. Throw in $2 for the media & production. CDs start selling for $3 (like vinyl in the early '70s) & P2P would be irrelevant.

Yes, artists deserve to be able to sell what they create. That's why the record company moguls, agents & hangers-on often make as much as or more than the artists themselves.

20 years ago, I remember the high price of CDs being explained as "recouping research & development costs." Ummm... Methinks those costs were recouped long ago. Corporate greed is what it is...

But yeah, Oppenheim, let's take the corporations out of this. Who do you think is paying RIAA in the first place? Roadies?

When the guy equated file sharing with bank robbery, he showed that he is a nutcase.

What concerns me about Freenet

[jeremyds]

Taken from Freenet's FAQ:

I don't want my node to be used to harbor child porn, offensive content or terrorism. What can I do?

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. However, keep in mind that freenet is not designed so as to only allow communication between people if a sufficient number of people agree with the communication. Freenet is designed to make communication possible even if there's just one publisher and one reader, and this is already reasonably feasible on the current freenet.

I'm all for freedom of speech. However, I really don't like the idea of my computer being used to trade child porn. By running a Freenet node, I give up control of what information gets shared from my computer. Sorry, but I'll pass.

Re:What concerns me about Freenet

[goldspider]

Now that's pretty creepy. Wouldn't a FREEnet want people to have the freedom to determine what they do and do not want on their computers? Giving up that control doesn't sound very free to me.

Re:What concerns me about Freenet

[EllF]

You are not "all for" freedom of speech, then. You are partially -- perhaps mostly -- for freedom of speech. Just not speech which crosses your own personal boundary, in this case, pornography involving children.

Re:What concerns me about Freenet

[Abcd1234]

No, it's the ultimate form of freedom for the publisher. No one can censor you, not even the members of Freenet. Heck, I could post a massive rant about how much I hate the authors of Freenet, and they couldn't do a thing about it. THAT is the ultimate protection of free speech, and that is what Freenet is all about. The fact that you don't get that just proves that you don't really understand what free speech (and Freenet) are all about.

Re:What concerns me about Freenet

[salesgeek]

whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting.

If child porn were speech, it would be just talk. As it stands, at the best it is evidence of a crime that was committed in creating it. At the worst, it is a product that required the rape of a child to create and is a tainted product.

Child Porn != Speech.
Child Porn != Expression.

Re:What concerns me about Freenet

[alwsn]

If child porn were speech, it would be just talk.

Clearly the logic you suggest isn't true, as many forms of non-verbal communication have been deemed 'speech' and are protected.

There are some (no, I am not one of them) who view adult male, child male sex as not only good, but a requirement for a healthy life. The North American Man Boy Love Association is an example of such a group. Until recently their motto was "sex before eight - or it's too late."

I personally find this sort of behavior abhorrent, but it certainly is an expression of personal belief.

Re:What concerns me about Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Trouble is, bits is bits. If you trust your government to protect the right bits and only outlaw the nasty bits, then you don't need Freenet. If you don't trust your government, then your only option is to protect the bits by technical means...and if you do that effectively, you end up protecting child porn just as much as Chinese dissidents, because either you can censor the bits or you can't.

The saving grace: relatively unpopular content drops out of Freenet. The more people use Freenet for legitimate purposes, the less useful the network will be for child pornographers.

Re:Different purposes

[aztechClanIII]

yes, privacy is *very* good. Don't get me wrong. It just seems like this type of network is only for people who can run the client 24x7 (the more you run it the faster it goes). There must be some way to speed up the connection process so that mobile users can have quicker access to freenet content. It would be nice if mobile users could have a "buddy node" that would always be 24x7 that they could connect to in order to get online with more nodes faster. Perhaps 2 types of clients are needed? ahhh, nevermind. this project is slated for the far-reaching future when no one can do anything anymore. Maybe then, everyone will run their nodes 24x7 "for the cause". For now, I'll just stick with bit-torrent. ~

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

why even bother to keep them at all? Don't track the downloads at all.

Re:Question

[Henry V .009]

It's worse than the RIAA. There is a large quantity of child porn on Freenet. Now, because of the way Freenet works, you have no idea what's being served from your computer at any given time -- and no way to find out since it's encrypted. So if you run Freenet on your computer, you may be hosting child porn. Can the government go after you for that? If it wants to it can. Are there good reasons to take the risk? That's up to you to decide.

Is having truly free speech where some people inevitably abuse that speech better than having speech regulated by governments who inevitably abuse their regulatory powers themselves? Participatory democracies don't have a great track record when it comes to allowing unpopular opinions to be heard. In most of Europe today -- to pick one example -- you will serve jail time for questioning the holocaust. To pick another example, anti-hate speech statutes have been sucessfully used in Britain and Canada (and elsewhere, no doubt) to supress supporters of immigratation reform. Libel law is commonly used to supress opinions of those who don't have the money to defend themselves in court.

Is this a power you want to trust the government with? I don't trust mine with it. That's why I run Freenet. And hopefully, Freenet -- or the idea of Freenet -- will have enough popular support to make my government wary of cracking down on it. And as long as Freenet exists, there is at least one forum for truly free speech.

Re:Huzzah!

[egg troll]

So does the US postal service, or PGP for that matter. Does that make it any less useful? No.

You're right. One can use these means to acquire child pornography. My concern with Freenet is that it could be hosted on my PC...without my knowledge of consent. Right now, its this factor that keeps me from adopting Freenet. But that's just my opinion....

Re:Mark my words:

[comnenos]

You may not need encryption now, but what if somebody (The RIAAA, the government) wants to start tracking what you are doing. In that case, you'll start feeling a lot better about a network where no on can tell who published what, and who downloaded what. All nodes might be requesting something for themselves, or just forwarding someone else's request.

If you think K++ is going to cut it, you're in for a bit of a surprise. That isn't going to hide you're ip address because of the very way that network is designed. When it comes time to download/upload something it will go straight from your computer to their computer and they'll know who you are.

As for SOCKS proxies, etc, those aren't decentralized. If you're in a situation where a few machines are serving many people, then it's easy to take them out. Not too mention who will pay for the bandwidth of enough proxies for everyone in the world. You need a self-supporting system.

IRC over SSL would only protect you from people in the middle. However if you connect to bad guy, they'll know who you are.

There's a lot to making a network anonymous, and I only know a part of it. I do know though, that freenet works fairly well and was actually designed with the goal of anonymity in the first place.

As soon as you censor one thing ...

[jstockdale]

Remember that as soon as you censor one thing, you must censor everything. If the system has the ability to say restirct kiddie porn then it must have the ability to arbitrairly restrict anything, therefore undermining the system in its entirety. Also, remember that freenet functions to keep alive items that are most frequently accessed, so if the world were free of perverts we wouldn't have the problem in the first place ;)

Re:NIO - the buggiest api ever.

[*weasel]

and yet whenever i try to tell people in the 'woe is java because of MS' threads that java has its own problems - i get called an MS plant and troll.

i'm just a developer who's run into these kinds of things too, and java left a damn sour taste in my mouth.

it's portable ansi C for me.

liberty or death

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use Freenet much, but I leave my node on always. The way things are headed, freedom of speech is gettting more and more suppressed. I want to continue to support something that we may all need in the future just to communicate. We may all end up like the Chinese dissadents... just read some of the babelfished stuff on their site... can you imagine going through this?

Re:Flaw in your analogy.

[Abcd1234]

So, if someone hacks an FTP server you run and copies kiddy porn to it, that makes you liable? Somehow, I doubt that... it's called plausable deniability.

Another example, you own a field and someone grows weed on it, does that make you liable? I double that, too...

The fact is, Freenet protects the node operator because they honestly have no idea what content is on their computer. Moreover, they aren't even likely to have the full contents of any given file... only parts of it. Therefore, I suspect there's a real defence for people running Freenet nodes.

Re:There is a difference

[Lemmy Caution]

What if I want to refuse to store criticisms of the People's Republic of China on my hard drive? Or criticisms of G.W. Bush or Bill Clinton? If I find a mechanism of discerning the content on my system and becoming selective about it, then so can the people who wish to squelch the speech to begin with.

Truly free, truly anonymous speech, if speech is understood as any text or image or sound that can possibly be stored or transmitted, whether it is secrets vital to national security, pornography, slander, libel, copyright violations, or my recipe for waffles, does really demand, in this case, that someone risk hosting materials they might find detestable.

Otherwise, it's like saying "I support your right to live, but I'm not going to pull you out of the water while you're drowning." At best, the "support" is just so many words - it's really support for "nice" speech.

Re:bull

[pv2b]

The goal of bittorrent is to distribute content quickly. Anonymity is not an issue, you can easilly get IP addresses of lots of people downloading, as well as find the source of the .torrent file of the tracker.

The goal of freenet is to distribute content anonymously.

What's your point? They are two different tools, with different issues involved.

Re:Flaw in your analogy.

[Anonymous Coward]

> So, if someone hacks an FTP server you run and copies kiddy porn to it, that makes you liable? Somehow, I doubt that... it's called plausable deniability.

You said it right there - someone cracks the FTP server and makes it do something which its owner didn't intend. Same with the field and someone sneaks in (presumably by cutting the boundary fence or climbing over it) and grows weed. The fence and "No Trespassing" signs give public notice of intent.

Now, contrast with Freenet: the whole purpose for you running a Freenet node is to allow ANY content to be stored and retrieved from your computer. No plausible deniability at all:

Prosecutor: "So, you had no idea that *any* content, including child pornography, could be stored and retrieved from your computer via Freenet? Isn't that what Freenet's all about?.."

Defendant: "No, I had no idea!" (BANG, perjury)
Defendant: "Yes, but -" (BANG, guilty of possesion of child porn)

It's not called "plausible deniability", it's called "willfull blindness" and it's not a defense, it's a support for a prosecution.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

> So if you run Freenet on your computer, you may be hosting child porn. Can the government go after you for that?

Not legally. The only way they could determine what is on your PC is to request that data. (Or randomly confiscate it and brute forcing the encryption.)

If they make a request, and you supply the data, there is no way for them to prove that you ever had the data on your PC. And if you ever did, chances are pretty good that they caused you to have it by routing the request through you.

They can't go after you for compliance, because you have no way of knowing what is on your PC, or what is being requested of you.

So while it is true, that in running Freenet, you may be helping the distribution of child porn. However, the way Freenet works there is no way you can do anthing about it, or even tell.

So while it is unluckily that you could ever legally be punished for running a Freenet node, the decision of wether you think it is right is up to you.

Re:Questions About Freenet

[illuvata]

I don't want my computer to be used to store somebody's kiddie porn.

pretty hypocritical, isn't it? i want free speech about issues i dont mind, but not for stuff i find offensive
if you would limit free speech, it wouldn't be very free, would it?

Re:Huzzah!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I disagree with you that free speech requires anonymity. If you have something worth saying, you should be willing to stand behind what you say."

Sorry but your an idiot. Voting is private, the federalist papers written by the founders of America were written anonymously.

Why?

Because free speach cannot not exist if people must restrain their speech out of fear of reprisal.

P.S. Open your eyes and realize that is also why Slashdot allows users to post anonymously here.

Re:Flaw in your analogy.

[Ultra64]

Another example, you own a field and someone grows weed on it, does that make you liable? I double that, too...

It definitely does make you liable, they will sieze your property and you will go to jail. The law doesn't care if you claim that you didn't know about it.

Re:Flaw in your analogy.

[Anonymous Coward]

you own a field and someone grows weed on it, does that make you liable? I [doubt] that, too...

Tell it to this guy.

Re:If all content could be encrypted ....

[Single GNU Theory]

Encryption is not the same thing as anonymization, authentication, or authorization. Encryption is a method for hindering the decoding of your communications. It is not a method of disguising the identities of parties in a transaction, verifying an identity, or granting privileges to an identity.

Encryption everywhere without the rest of the infrastructure means that there is a better than average chance that the spam in your inbox has not been snooped in transit.

Re:Huzzah!

[dasmegabyte]

Actually, it will have your knowledge and your consent. You know that Freenet has, is, and will be used to deliver content you don't agree with. You consent to allow this, or you don't use freenet.

It sounds like you are not ready to be free. The first step towards freedom is the release of control. As long as somebody is able to make a decision affecting somebody else's use of the medium, then it is not free. It is censorship -- and it doesn't matter how righteous you want to get about it, it's absolutely anthithetical to Freenet.

"But Freenet could be used by pornographers, theives, or terrorists!" True. It can also be used by artists, musicians and governments. It is a tool of the oppressed, with absolutely no background checks. Hell, if I had the ability to censor Freenet, I'd stop every picture of Hitler, every hateful word, and everything pro-conservative and I'd refuse to serve requests for these things, either. In fact, self censoring scripts have been proposed to allow users to "ban" offensive keys. However, none of them would work. Because data flows over and around the machines that won't serve it. New keys will be created daily to lift the ban.

If you don't like it, use the WWW. Freenet is a big, scary idea. A big data bath of absolute freedom. I feel I'm responsible and patriotic enough to use it -- because if even one intelligent, oppressed thought floats to the surface amid the gallons of smut, it'll be worthwhile.

Re:Anonymity?

[shatfield]

Easy. All communications in and out are encrypted. Your usage data just shows that you at IP [w.x.y.z] connected to IP [a.b.c.d] on such-n-such date and time, and transmitted some unintelligable data. It doesn't say what you did there, or every how you did it, aside from a port number that you used.
Without certain peices of information, they would have no case.

RIAA: "Your honor, we show here that said defendant connected to this other person at noon on the 15th. We suspect that they downloaded a copyrighted song file!"

Judge: "And which song was it?"

RIAA: "We have no idea, your honor, and they won't tell us!(stomps around courtroom and waves fist in the air)"

Defendant: "I'll use the Chewbacca defense! If it doesn't make sense, you must aquit!"

Judge: "The defendant has countersued you for his attorney fees. I find for the defendant on the grounds that you have wasted all of our time here today. His lawyer fees came to $5,000,000. Now pay up."

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a large quantity of child porn on Freenet.

On what authority do you make this claim?

Censor air to stop KP !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Stop Kiddie Porn" is just a more extreme form of the "Protect The Children" argument that governments are always eager to support as a catch-all, since you cannot argue with it for fear of social death or worse.

It can be used to justify practically anything. For example, do you realize that you are supporting kiddie porn by the fact that you are allowing those criminals to breath free air? Indeed a passing KP merchant is actually breathing the air from your own land, you should be ashamed that you are contributing to his welfare!!! I think this really needs air to be regulated ...

It's a bit like Godwin's Law. If you have a useful argument to contribute, don't mention the Nazis, nor KP.

You can't misuse the GPL with it

[sterno]

Well let's see, if you distributed the source of the file, you'd be in compliance. If you distributed the binary without the source, you'd be out of compliance, but who would want it? Yeah, I trust some version of software I downloaded over a P2P network that refuses to give me source code.

So what else would you do? Modify it? Okay fine, modify it. Then what? How am I going to know that this file even exists to download?

Ultimately something like Freenet doesn't really do anything to GPL software because the fundamental thing that freenet alters, distribution, is already completely kosher under the GPL.

Re:Questions About Freenet

[dasmegabyte]

So don't use Freenet!

I don't get this argument. "I like the idea of freedom, but I also like the idea of controlling it." Whoa buddy. You can't CONTROL freedom, by definition. You also can't make somebody ELSE free -- freedom is a choice you make for yourself, a choice to mind your own fucking business and not expect somebody else to mind it for you. If want to be uncontrolled, you have to agree not to control anybody else, either.

My friend (who, ironically, is now in the marines) used to LOVE to tell us how the perfect communism utopia was also perfect anarchy, where people minded their own business because if they didn't, other people would put a stop to it. Freenet's got a slightly different take on this. The data it spreads cannot "hurt" anybody. Only its use can be construed as harmful. So if there's data on your computer, and you're not using it, it's not harming you.

If you're not ready for that, you're not ready to release your "sensitive information." Besides, that kind of information is begging to be controlled, and it's begging to be known. Freenet's anonymity and self-cleaning do not lend themselves to this.

The KP problem...

[NotInTheBox]

Basicly the problem I see is that in the production of KP, childeren are being hurt.
In the distribution there is no one who gets hurt. The comsuption of porn will damage the user (addict) more then they already are, and they will loose every sense of reality.

Think of it: Images only becomes porn if someone uses it in that way. A bitmap is no more then a collection of numbers. -- one day you can make a tool the could generate the image you wanted -- No one got hurt in the process. Would you then still object to the images?
(I would object to you wanting to make these images...)

Regretably there are to many people in the world who enjoy looking at KP, imho they should be locked away for a very very long time. Regretably there are people how do anything for a buck, even rape childeren, imho they should be executed.

However: The only way to get ride of KP has nothing to do with distibution. The only solution is that we need beter people. People who value life, truth and people more then money or there own selfish impulses. Who would not think of childeren in that way...

Therefore: if this has nothing to do with distribution, then it has nothing to do with Freenet.

Re:Question

[William Tanksley]

Yes, I would do the same, but the day it's outlawed is the day it becomes possible to arrest anyone using it -- and it's easy to detect use. This is why we agitate against laws to illegalise crypto. It's hard to tell what's being encrypted; but it's easy to tell that crypto is being used.

Yes, it's technically possible to defend against even this; but most people won't be able to, even technically competent ones.

I guess there's a good defence: everybody think of good uses for Freenet and start using it NOW. The more there are, the harder such a law will be to pass and slip by the judges. To be really powerful such a use should REQUIRE Freenet, and I can't think of any such uses (but I trust that others will). BUT ... don't let that stop you. Use Freenet instead of Kazaa to publish your legally permissible stuff.

If only I had anything to publish...

-Billy

Absurd

[poptones]

Your argument is absurd - posting pictures in the front yard is not at all akin to hosting pictures where someone must request them - but even it if weren't ridiculous you should learn a little history (and some sociology as well). In many places nudity is illegal - you ok with that? In other places pictures of children "having sex" (simulated or otherwise) is not strictly policed - and, in fact, it wasn't even illegal in the US until the 1970's. It should be completely obvious to any thinking individual that this censorship has done nothing at all to "protect" children.

In fact it has arguably harmed both individuals and the greater of our society. Harmed not only directly from the heightened stigma associated with this behavior (which discourages open discussion of the problem, thus further isolating people from seeking treatment), but also because of the witch hunts this stigma has incited, leading to the destruction of a great many lives: (innocent) parents and the children of those parents whose lives were destroyed.

Yes, free speech is all about "shit you don't like." That you and so many others have been so completely brainwashed by the thought police running washington and the allegedly "free" press shows just how fragile freedom is. Polls in Singapore have shown that, by and large, the people think government censorship is a good thing; your comments are emblematic that same brainwashing right here in the good ol' "Land of the free."

What do you get for pretending the danger's not real?
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel...

Re:Questions About Freenet

[The Mgt]

It's not a problem, its a feature. You could only censor your node if you knew what was in it. If you could find out what your node contained then you lose deniability, which is kind of the whole point.
If you don't like it, dont run it.

Re:Free speech isn't the issue...

[gilgongo]

By that logic you would be in favour of outlawing the telephone system, since I can use that to make a drug deal, or incite racial hatred.

Or what about beds? I can have sex with minors in my bed. Make beds illegal!

You're right - it's not about free speech, but it *is* about balance. Balancing the good with the evil.

If you can find a way to design Freenet so that kiddie porn is difficult or impossible to upload without altering the system so much as to make it useless for everybody, then go ahead.

Re:Freenet Blocker - is it possible?

[dasmegabyte]

It has been done. It was pretty worthless. It may still be in process, but it is not a part of Freenet. It's a hacked client and you're welcome to use it.

But you should know that the reason it was worthless is that keys in freenet are so easy to create that the second one got blocked, and published to a block list, you could resubmit the same file with a new key. Which would also have a different file size and CRC.

So, no way to identify offensive files until they download and decrypt. So, no useful mechanism to censor them. But a very useful mechanism for filling your hard drive with a useless black list.

It doesn't help, besides. If your computer refuses to serve a file, clients will just request around you. And thanks to the ease of changing keys, you're still not protected from having offensive material on your PC.

Lots of work with no benefit always seems suspicious to me...

Re:NIO - the buggiest api ever.

[alext]

Conscious as I am of the incomparable force of bald assertion in /. debates, I venture to direct the attention of all those interested to the API linked in my earlier post.

Take a look at methods such as getChannel() on stream implementation classes such as FileInputStream.

Now recall that channels are part of NIO and did not exist prior to 1.4. A reasonable deduction is that the implementation of IO has changed to use NIO.

Though reasonable, I cannot claim to have made it since it appears in the book "JDK 1.4 Tutorial". Those possessing sufficient literary stamina and dedication to reach page 2 will be rewarded with the following:

"The New I/O API model coexists peacefully with the original I/O libraries from the java.io package. In fact, to a substantial degree, the original I/O libraries have been rewritten to take advantage of the New I/O API."

For what it's worth (and I appreciate that this may be very little) my experience is that since 1.4, java.io socket calls are throwing additional run-time exceptions, including more descriptive variants of IOException. This, to me, indicates that revised mechanisms are in operation beneath the covers.

I trust that this conclusion will not be too shocking to those of delicate disposition.

Re:Oppenheim still won't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

right on...I bet most software/music dosent really cost much anyways once the development costs (manhours,equipment,etc..) are recouped. Supporting a product might be expensive (but who downloads something then calls in for tech support?). If your building televisions you have the initial development costs there too, but you still have huge overhead and material costs as long as you produce the item.
I think the analogies between the real world and the digital are very enlightining for legal purposes. But I think they should be used more rigourously than the riaa would like to uses them.
As far as humans care about music, it is just sound, or information, which can be collected and saved for later or given to someone else...its dosnet fit the analogy of physical good. Its more like air or dirt that anyone can just collect themselves. Either from the radio, cd, or written down (like tab or lyrics). I thik the correct analogy is that the riaa wants to make it illegal to collect rainwater just becasue they are standing there holding a bunch of bottles they already filled wondering why there buisness model sucks now that people have their own bottles.
Oppenheim's only good point is that artists shold be rewarded for creating something. But why not reward them the way someone gets rewarded in real life? If a guy moe's a lawn, he gets paid for moeing the lawn...he dosent get paid everytime someone notices how nice the lawn looks. For that, he gets pride and recognition.
Last i checked, it heard it was very profitable to organize a concert. But not so much selling ice to eskimos...to that the riaa would convince Orin Hatch to nuke those feking eskimos.

Re:Questions About Freenet

[dasmegabyte]

Exactly wrong. If something you do contradicts a "freedom" of somebody else, neither of you were free to do that in the first place. Instead, you were imposing some control over something which infringed on somebody else's ability to control it. If I am able to own property, then somebody else is not free to own it. That's not freedom -- in the strictest sense of the word, that's robbing someone of their freedom to enjoy the bounty of the natural world. Hence the oft quoted line "property is theft."

Yeah, this is anarchy. No, it won't work in the real world because of what I like to call the "asshole factor." Greed stops it. But in the "computer" world, greed doesn't have to be a factor because there's no scarcity. No greed means no need to delegate your freedoms to a third party to insure "equity." No greed means no need for controls at all.

Freenet is an attempt at structured anarchy with the belief that only complete freedom can protect every freedom. There's no need for tension between conflicting freedoms because there's no conflict. Conflict is external to the system -- it's out here, in the world of pundits and attorneys. In there, it's just zeroes and ones.

Re:Questions About Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Grocery stories feed kiddie porn perps. Apparent buildings house them. They drive on roads built with your tax money. Collect UI, welfare, and old age security based on your tax dollars. You are part of the internet which is used to deliver their porn.

No matter what you do, you are supporting them, so kiddie porn is really a side issue.

The key issue is what can you do to safeguard your children's future? Freedom of speech (even if the government or corporations or popular groups in your area) is essential. Education to ensure that your kids aren't victims is another. (It's a big cruel world out there. If you shelter them too much, they *will* become victims).

And if you want a freenet-specific solution then why not use the freenet itself to define kiddie porn filters? Think outside the box. You can't search the Freenet so you have to rely on well known indexes that are floating around the freenet. Why not write a filter that automatically downloads these indexes and filters keys on you machine to ensure that you don't carry kiddie porn? Let the perps help you fight them, but don't hide your face in the sand and home that it will all go away, because it won't.

Re:RIAA and 30 years of permission to copy

[dasmegabyte]

They don't have to show you anything. All they have to do is prove to the jury that your file sharing harmed their industry.

Legislation is against human nature. If we weren't all naturally inclined to steal candy bars, shoplifting wouldn't be illegal. The RIAA is trying to tell the world that what you are doing is just as wrong, morally speaking, and as long as the people signing the papyrus and reading the verdicts believe what the RIAA is telling them, it's going to be illegal.

You know, a lot of murderers don't understand why what they did is wrong. This doesn't get them free.

Your recourse in this battle over the freedom of music is twofold: one, you can stop trading and fight tooth and nail in the courts and on the streets to legalize it. Or two, you can just make sure you don't get caught.

Ask the millions of Americans who smoke marijuana, drive over the speed limit and don't pay their fair share of taxes which of these two courses of action is most effective.

Re:Questions About Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

What a strange point of view!

It's like saying: I don't use the highway because a terrorist may use it to deliver a bomb.

Re:Questions About Freenet

[stealthv]

If Freenet is at all helpful to those who distribute kiddie porn, then I do not wish to participate in it.

What about the internet, TCP/IP, image file formats, and computers? Or even cameras and artificial light? These all help the kiddie porn distributers. I'm willing to bet you use these. I'm not sure how else your comment would have gotten here.
Just about anything you do in life, that is of any public use, could be helping out someone you don't like. If you don't want to participate in anything that could remotely benefit a kiddie porn distributer then you better lock yourself up in a room somewhere.

Just an idea..

[jetmarc]

> Freenet's about PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

What about this idea to increase the deniability: Imagine a trojan
that installs Freenet on the infected machine and makes it part of
the network, then erases all traces of itself. This trojan could be
put up on a web site, with a notification to the usual anti-virus
companies.

Later, when someone gets under legal pressure for running a Freenet
node, he could claim that he didn't install it. He didn't know he
was running that "Freenet thing". Most probably it was installed by
a Trojan, and in fact there is one known to do just this (reference
to anti-virus company press release).

That would be even more plausible deniability, wouldn't it?

Marc

Re:Huzzah!

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not have posted AC, but cristofer8 is as good as anonymous to me. You don't even have your email address listed. Seems pretty hypocritical. Please give everyone your name, email, and address. Then, if you ever get busted/sued for posting/saying something, we can all have a good laugh.

You have a job? Know of anything at your workplace that's not right? Well, here's your chance, big man, post it all here on /. -- your name, employer, greivance, etc. 1000 people will forward your post to your boss. But you have nothing to fear, right? No one in a position of power ever tries to fuck the little guy for speaking the truth, do they?

Re:guns dont kill people ...

[stwrtpj]

As an earlier poster pointed out, the problem with this is that a user's home computer could be providing kiddie porn. It's one thing to steal songs and software, but it's another thing to host pictures of some 7 year old getting raped. I don't want to even have the possibility of that happening, so I think I'll stick with another distributed client.

Perhaps the biggest freedom of Freenet is the freedom not to use it.

The firing squad

[DoctorFrog]

This is the same scenario as the firing squad -- everyone knows that one gun contains a blank, but noone knows which one it is... therefore each person has a lingering hope that they were the one with the blank.

Not exactly. The blanks prevent anyone else (such as the deceased's buddies) from knowing who fired the fatal shot. The soldier firing the blank knows it; blanks mostly just make noise, firing a lead slug at high velocity makes the gun kick back against your shoulder with unmistakable force.

The analogy does work for the originator, though; the non-paedophiles (deceased's buddies) won't know who fired the shot (put the kiddie porn on Freenet). The one who did fire the shot (the pervert) will know it, though.

What Freenet's anonymity offers is the ability to leave moral choices (in the manner of its use) completely up to the individual conscience. The price of that is that you have to leave the manner in which others use it up to their individual consciences.

Re:Looking forward to trying it

[PhilHibbs]

Donate 200 megabytes to the cause of Freedom of Speech,

I'm all for supporting worthy causes!

and the fight against the RIAA and its ilk

But that isn't one of them! People like you will bring FreeNet down by reputation.