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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.
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.
True. But the people who use the guns can be held liable.
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.
Legally, would host computers be analogous to the phone company -- a common carrier? If you use a telephone to plot to kill the president, the feds don't bust the phone company as part of the conspiracy. Just like they don't bust AOL for providing chat rooms for 35 year olds to pick up 12 year old English girls. Are people hosting files or parts of files like the phone company in the eyes of the law?
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?
Not according to current legal theory. If you provide a service (in this case, hosting encrypted fragments of files) but you have no control or even visibility of how that service is used, you're not liable for the details of how it's used.
The people who use it are still liable, of course.
I have no idea how this is going to turn out. Freenet sounds like a great idea, but it's so obviously useful for such horrible uses, and there are other tools that handle most of the useful uses... I don't see it surviving legally (I mean that it'll be outlawed anywhere it'll be useful).
-Billy
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