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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.
Okay, so let's say Freenet works perfectly and you can't trace anyone by IP address. But someone from the RIAA uses it to download a copyrighted song, wouldn't they then be able to sue all users of Freenet as accessories to the crime? (Assuming each node handles traffic from transactions it may or may not be involved in - that's the way I remember it working.) And then get a court order for Freenet to give up IP addresses of users who have downloaded the client?
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
For the same reason that a gun is not sent to jail after a homocide, the tools (software and networks) cannot be held liable for the actions of the people that use them.
Now, let me have my new anonymous data transfer protocol already!!!
comment directly in my journal
Or close to it.
I'm one of the main developers for freenet (see zab_ on the opn irc logs the cvs logs)
When 60% of the code (measured in locs) is workarounds for jvm bugs, you know you have problems.
If the sun QA dept. had pulled their act together, this release would have happend at least a month ago.
zab
Don't go silently into that peaceful night
I have been running a node with 10k down, 5k up and a 1gb store forever now (niced at -15), and the new version of the software has made a huge difference.
No longer is my CPU at 100% all the time - before when I got put in seednodes I was flatlined, even with the thing niced to -18. Now it's not even noticable.
Bandwidth usage also seems to be more steady, rather than spiking every now and again it holds steady at one number. (~85-90% of allocation.)
Responsiveness has increased slightly - it's about what you would expect from a 56k modem connection.
Run one in the background for a few days - you won't notice it, really. The more people running these things the better, even if they have no use for the system yet and throttle it right back. (10/5 on DSL adds less than 1ms to my ping on ut2k3.)
Beep beep.
just to read that article? I think they're starting their monitoring from their own site. I rejected them all, but I'm thinking about going back to read the content. If those cookies are trackable through ad sites..........
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Summary of my experience: I found it nearly impossible to use and it was giving me massive Gopher flashbacks.
Hey, since we're all throwing intellectual property rights to the wind by trying to deceive the RIAA, how can I apply FreeNet to misusing GPL'd software for my own benefit?
I'm sure none of you would have a problem with that, because you're not all about double standards, right?
Unfortunately, while freenet might be somewhat secure and private, it would be pretty clear by monitoring a link to an ISP that you were using Freenet. If the Chinese government were to do this they could easily identify and round up the Freenet dissidents. What can we do to help protect freedom behind the bamboo curtain? You can do your part by making sure that Freenet is also used for downloading music! Everyone knows the Chinese like to download and pirate copyrighted material. The Chinese gub'mint will not give it a second look as long as they believe it's being used for piracy and not for dissident speech. We can all do our part for freedom by making sure that Freenet becomes a popular tool for file sharing.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
The fact that someone may have produced kiddie porn and shoved it onto Freenet does not mean that it is sitting on your machine. Since the content on your machine is encrypted, you'll never know for sure anyways.
The problem is not with the storage mechanism, it is with the sick person creating the content. That's where the problem lies, not in the bits and bytes on your hard drive.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
The issue is complicated. Suppose someone takes a kiddie porn image, chops it into several thousand rectangular bitmaps and scatters them across thousands of computers on the Internet. Which computer can be said to contain kiddie porn?
Suppose someone takes a KP image and XORs it with online copies of the U.S. Constitution, an image of Julie Andrews, and a PDF file of U.S. census data. They then take the result and put it up on the net, labeled as "white noise". Then they delete the original KP image. Where is the kiddie porn now? It can be reconstructed by XORing all the remaining files together, but none of those files by itself is kiddie porn. Is the kiddie porn really in the instructions on how to assemble the files to recreate the original KP image? Or does the KP image not exist until someone actually XORs the files and recreates it?
Well, that's sort of wrong.
In freenet, you are ALWAYS searching. You're searching for a KEY, that LOOKS like a URL but doesn't have any information about where it's stored, that translates to a piece of data. When you make a request, you tell your fellow clients what you're looking for, and they either return it, or keep looking for you.
The problem with "keyword" searching over freenet is that somebody, somewhere has to index everything -- make a list of keywords, associate them by "URL," etc. On the internet, the indexing is performed by spiders that work for massive database engines. On Freenet, there's not really any way to perform indexing without exposing the data inside keys being passed back and forth.
To get around this, applications have been written to publish indexes of the data to common KEYs (like "INDEX07162003"), so you can download them and maintain a search engine on your own PC. One such application is Frost. They work pretty damned well.
In the early days of freenet, OFF freenet spiders created search engines, but these are by nature not anonymous -- and they were kind of crap. There was also some experimentation with english language keys -- eg, KSK@GPL.txt -- but the problem was that people were uploading FALSE data on top of what was supposed to be there. So most freenet content is now published using a private/public key system, so only change requests from the initial producer are honored.
The result is this system which works in the exact opposite way of the regular internet. On the regular internet, the client can only handle static content, so manipulation is handled by the server. On Freenet, the content on the server is static, so manipulation is handled by the client. You don't get the full understanding of how strange this is until you've used some of the funkee freenet messaging systems.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
But the whole point is that the information is encrypted, so neither you, nor the "predator" would know that the images were stored on your computer. You might as well say "wouldn't it be ironic if a drunk driver someday used a car I sold to a used car dealer years ago to run my children down?"
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
You know, it's funny. I'm a bit fuzzy on the dates, but child pornography was only made illegal in the US about 40-or-so years ago.
Of course, you have to separate pornography into two categories: 1) a media work showing an explictly sexual act (masturbation, penetrative sex, oral sex, etc) 2) a media work of a prurient nature that does not explicitly show "sex."
The former was illegal (minor consent laws and all that), but the latter was kinda legal.
When I say "kinda" I'm not being wishy-washy, it's that we're coming up against anachronism: according to experts on this sort of thing[1] attitudes of the "man on the street" have shifted drastically concerning photographs/drawings of young children. What would be considered "cute" and "childlike" back in the 1950's would be considered "grotesque" and "unsuitable for public consumption" now. Most of this can be linked to the witchhunts regarding child pornography.
Even more amusing, since the enactment of child pornography laws the average age of actors involved in sex scenes and -- and this is very odd -- in just plain romantic kisses in movies has gone way down. Way, way down.
I think it was Ebert (or was it Stephen King? King wrote about this a bit as well) who commented that youngsters used to go to the movies to see oldsters in a sex scene. Now it's reversed.
Salon commented[2] that the rabid and far-reaching bans on child "pornography"[3] has caused us all to think like pedophiles. Reminds me of the joke about the sexaholic who goes into the psychiatrist, who gives him a rorschach test.
Ah well.
So my point is that it's tough to say what's child porn and what's not, with the fact that we've gotten hypersensitive about it recently. I don't really feel like having the morality police check out all of my mom's photo albums to see if they're kosher. Especially morality police from the MPC[4]. Though being a smart son who knows the power of embarassment blackmail from mothers, I have removed all of my naked baby pictures. Now if only I could get the picture of me hugging then penguin at Sea World when I was 12....
And to spare myself accusations: no. I'm not "into" kids. To be honest, only recently has my age group become somewhat appealing to me at all: I've always been after older women, which is a real drag as women are used to young guys being...well, young guys.
So, just something to think about.
[1] I'm thinking of the historians interviewed in Salon concerning the somewhat-recent Paul Ruebens case. Interesting article.
[2] Again, the Paul Ruebens case.
[3] bare-butt baby picture arrests, anyone? Traditional Brazilian breast feeding family photos getting your kids under the care of CPS, like just happened in Dallas about a year ago?
[4] Most Persnickity Country
Same problem there. Let's say a truck driver doesn't know exactly what's in all of the boxes, and can't break them all open to look. The truck driver has to take somebody else's word for it that the goods to be delivered are OK.
Most of us are not truck drivers, so I propose yet another analogy, that might be easier for everyone to relate to:
You know your tax money is collected to be used for purposes that you don't even know about. You know that you would probably disagree with some of the uses for it, if you knew what all of them were. You don't. You can't. However, you still contribute your tax money, because overall, the positives seem to outweigh the negatives.
It is even worse than this. Even if you could agree with every last expenditure in every budget, this year's money helps to pay for next year's. Therefore, if you have ever paid taxes, you are implicitly agreeing to pay for any future decisions too, and you know some of them will eventually be wrong!