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Freenet Project More Stable, In Need
An anonymous reader writes "The Freenet Project is asking for donations to help keep their main programmer, Matthew Toseland. After a long time, finally Freenet, software which 'lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship' is working fine (and fast) again, since their overload problems are almost completely fixed. They even plan to write a paper about the overload problems. If you want to try, be sure to run the latest stable or unstable snapshot."
Welcome to the new world of Open Source, courtesy of the GNU Manifesto.
for my free Kevin. There was supposed to be a free Kevin. I'm not donating anything else until I get my free Kevin.
Moderators, please have some fucking sense of humour.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
If they want money maybe they should change the name to PAYnet..... get it, PAYnet!!!
Its FREEnet but you should PAY because they need money or something..
...I don't want to store kiddie porn on my computer. And that freedom of speech BS - did the kids have the freedom not to be raped?
A shame it comes down to the lowest common denominator, but I'd prefer my internet to be free of laws I disagree with, and to enforce the laws I agree with. A difficult point, which could be summed up as don't break the law, change it.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
Freenet is what the web was before big-business began to gather it in its claws - a true forum for free speech. Well worth donating to.
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
"Hey everyone: Freenet is finally able to cope with the load they've ben having. Let's go post it on slashdot."
Many may, and probably will, complain that Freenet is slow, doesn't work, etc. This is why Freenet needs your donations. Matt has brought Freenet's speed back up to where it used to be before all the routing problems. I remember when you used to be able to DL movies off of Freenet at reasonable speeds. And it's a given the 'child porn on my computer' argument is going to be brought up with the Free Speech for everything but that! vs the Free Speech Perdiod zealots fighting it out.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I just installed it and its running slow as shit. Same as last time. Is freenet being slashdotted or is this just hype?
At least it's not the KKK news letter.
An anonymous reader? Hah! I've traced the pirate back to the ip 234.4.119.181! So much for slashdot anonymity! Which just goes to show...
You should have used FreeNet[tm].
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
They should rename it NoSuchThingAsAFreeLunchNet Project.
I am also in need of a donation for Free 'Net. Yes thats right, with and small paypal donation you can provide me with free cable Internet access! With your donation you will recieve one picture* of me using the Internet, and a monthly status update on my browsing expierence. Sure you can mod me down and ignore this post, but that doesn't do anything to help the problem of us who pay our own bills.
*Content of picture my be inappropriate and disturbing. 18 and over only.
...when trying to pull up the freenet website results in something like this (what I see at work):
Request for URL http://66.35.250.209:80/ denied by WebBlocker (Status: denied Category: questionable/illegal/gambling). This site has been blocked per Company [or country] policy.
Are there alternate sources to get Freenet in the first place?
You probably shouldn't click this.
While I don't have much to add other than I was using the software for months on end, I wanted to point out that free speech is only one of the many valuable resources available.
What if it was YOU that had your personal information dragged all through freenet from an Ex-Wife or Disgruntal banker? I bet then you would wish for some control to the service.
is freenet free as in beer or free as in speech or free as in free base or free as in free bsd or free as in free bird or free as free lance or free as in free bsd?
fails to solve a problem that doesn't exist
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
I agree. The trouble is we do not all live in countries which draw a liberal line at law enforcement. FreeNET is a great idea spoiled by the rotting compost in our society which puts so many off.
BTW - if you are unaware - unlike most P2P systems, on FreeNET you do not choose what material to share, rather it gets stored (and served from) your computer according to the network-wide demand. So if someone uploads kiddie porn to the network it may be stored on your computer for others to download. Because of its anonymous nature (well, nearly) it is very attractive for people who may want to bypass local law enforcement - i.e., those that wish to engage in unlawful activities will be disproportionatly drawn to it.
...now give me an implementation that doesn't use 120MB of memory and 50% of my CPU. Freenet has been a total resource pig for quite a while now, I'm surprised there hasn't been more emphasis on reducing it's usage.
I'm glad that they claim to have fixed those issues, because I seriously love the concept, and I'm jumping at the chance to try it again.
Freenet is a great idea for a project, and seems to have some great information on their system, but one thing I hated about it when I remember running it within the last year or two, was the Java VM would eat up memory and CPU like there is no tomorrow. I would be doing other stuff on my system, and notice a very considerable slowdown. While listing my processes I noticed that the JVM was eating like 100-200MB of memory and 50% or more of CPU at times. It wasn't like this all the time, but seemed to happen every couple or few hours. Maybe it was some bug in my setup, but things like this really shouldn't be an issue when you are dealing with a P2P application. I know Freenet encrypts and decrypts lots of information, but on a system with decent specs (2GHz CPU, 1GB Ram), it shouldn't be that noticeable.
I'm sympathetic to Freenet's idea, as I understand it, but still a little hesitant. I have two questions.
First, is it relatively safe? Does it do what the directions say it does and no more? Is especially vile content a big problem and will I feel guilty once I get into it?
Second, Is it being run efficiently? I really don't know what it would take. One programmer plus a herd of volunteers sounds good, but please do let me know.
Thanks. I have a new bunch of parts coming in and will soon have more than 500MB of disk space to spare, so this isn't an entirely idle bunch of questions.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Are there alternate sources to get Freenet in the first place?
Home?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I downloaded Freenet last week and installed it on an vanilla SuSE 9 box. I let it run for 2 days on a fixed IP and I couldn't even get off my node. Obviously I did something wrong but I'll be damned if I can figure it out. No errors during install and no errors during run time. Double-checked IP and port, set up forwarding in the firewall like the dozen other ports that work just fine through it.
Is there something else going on big picture? Do I need a secret password or handshake to get let into the club?
Speak truth to power.
I don't believe in freedom of speech as an absolute right. It's not. The principle is "You're freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." In other words, the obligation to do no harm trumps the right to free speech. I'm free to call you an asshole, because presumably that does no harm. However, I'm not free to publish your credit card numbers! How does this relate to Freenet? I don't know... most of the anonymous remailers got shut down due to their inability to prevent themselves from being used for criminal behavior. What checks does Freenet have in place to preserve privacy, and yet prevent the distribution of illegal material? Do the developers beleive in an absolute right to distribute copyrighted material, or child porn?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Well, I downloaded and installed this java client only to find out the Freenet is not yet searchable. I've read several articles about the freenet over the last few years but have never figured out how to find anything of value (to me) on it.
In fact, further reading of the FAQ states that if you don't want your node to harbor child porn, you should not run a Freenet node.
I'm all for freedom of speech but i don't support anyone who would take other's freedom away. Child porn is exploitative and robs children of their childhood. The concept of freedom of speech is only useful if it promotes freedom. For example, supporting the right of Nazi freedom of speech can only lead to the growth of a movement that wants to take your freedom away. Logistically, this makes absolutely no sense to me.
I'm uninstalling the freenet, sorry.
Funny, THEMians criticizing the United States' legal system without understanding it. We believe the same thing here, epitomized by the famous hypothetical that you don't have the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater because of the stampede danger.
I'd love to contribute but they do not have a version built for osx
Apparently its hard to pay the bills with "free" these days.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Anyone know of a production quality native code implementation of the FreeNet protocols? I'd love to set up a FreeNet node, however all the systems I have free to dedicate to that purpose are not powerful enough and lack sufficient RAM to run the standard FreeNet Java implementation.
Reading its philosophy, especially the part about "child porn, offensive content or terrorism", it sounds good. However further down in the security section, it's not real anonymity at all.
So if the government really wants to find out who posted what, it is still possible.
Can someone please enlighten me? Is Freenet a false sense of anonymity?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
What about the Communist dissidents in countries like China where their government won't let them publish their views? Should they also be deprived of their freedom of expression?
If Freenet is so useful to dissidents, then an oppressive government will simply make its use and distribution illegal. They don't need to monitor what's actually being traded on it by specific individuals.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't believe in freedom of speech as an absolute right.
I'll do you one better -- I don't believe in freedom of thought as an absolute right.
Consider that speech you want to censor. The underlying thought must be illegal as well. We shall set up a sting operation to crackdown on your illegal thoughts, which you cleverly hide by never speaking them. How about mandatory brain scans, once we learn how to decode your thoughts? You will not hide for long, you traitor!
Without censorship,
Our kinds will be teenage sluts, working for pyramid groups, worshiping some pagan god, while indulging in transgender, transpecies, disgusting courtship rituals that involves ritualistic sacrifices of viginity, then eBaying their souls to the lowest bidder, which of course is horrible since it strays from our capitalistic ways and eventually turn us all into slutty transgendered pagan communists.
Anyways.. in our society where we expect the world to educate our kids, we're not ready to move away from censorship.
Hmmm....I'm failing to follow your logic. Please explain the part in between "no censorship" and "all hell breaking loose".
Thanks.
I hadn't heard of Freenet before, so I decided to see what it was about and started reading their rather extensive FAQ.
Soon, I came across this precious gem:What about child porn, offensive content or terrorism? While most people wish that child pornography and terrorism did not exist, humanity should not be deprived of their freedom to communicate just because of how a very small number of people might use that freedom.
WHAT???
I don't believe I'm a prude, but this is fucking crazy! "Humanity" wouldn't feel deprived when it's "freedom" to post pictures of little kids being raped is revoked.
Thanks a lot you bunch of "I'm-part-of-the-intellectual-elite-cos-I-never-ta ke -a-stand" idiots!
...but I don't believe in freedom of speech as an absolute right.
Why? When is it ok to silence speech? When it goes against something you belive in? I personally don't agree with your post
but that doesn't mean that I think you shouldn't be allowed to speak your opinion.
"The road from legitimate suspicion to rampant paranoia is very much shorter than we think." - Picard
I already pay $34.95 a month for my internet. Why would I want to pay more money for a free one?
'Same speed C but faster'
The version on the download page is ancient. If you read VERY CAREFULLY to the bottom of the download page then you might end up running the "upgrade.sh" script which might actually give you performance. Then after about a day of struggle you may stumble upon the "Nubile Tutorial" so that you actually know how to use Freenet.
It had always seemed that Freenet leadership is obsessively interested in getting press, yet at the same time embarrased enough by the actual system that they make it impossible for anyone but the most dedicated techies to get started using it. Considering that at startup some of the first content encountered is (quite unfortunately) child pornography collections, I wouldn't be surprised if this is almost intentional to keep the Press talking about the high ideals without seeing the current reality. Maybe it's even best for the project at this stage.
If freenet is to succeed, and we all desperately need it to, it's going to have to make itself both USABLE and RESPECTABLE. That means new potential users should not be confronted with stomach wrenching content even if such things are available by the nature of the system.
-braddock
Freenet will blatantly be used for child porn, and probably already is. While I'm sure there are lots of chinese people who will find value in it, there are lots of child pr0nographers rubbing their dirty little fucking hands with glee. "Oh look, something free and uncensored! Better puts some child porn on it! (uploads)."
Yeah, free speech is nice, but at the same time providing free speech to child pornographers and Nazis is both hypocritical and wrong.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
Must those in extreme need of free speech suffer for the crimes of the abusers of free speech?
Usually, the privledge is taken away from both parties. With Freenet, we have the chance not to take that path.
Freenet is about censorship, not business. The claim that Freenet is what the web "was" is invalid. Was the net free of censorship before?
As explained in this post, Freenet tends to be a concentrator of filth, which is to its detriment in many ways. Is that what you mean by "what the web was"?
Lasers Controlled Games!
I exaggerate things for comic relief.
What I want to say is free anoynomous speech has it's draw backs. We have liable and slander law suits for a reason. We have regulations that prevent companies from running false claims about their products.
I personally feel people need to take responsibility for what the publish. It influnces a lot of people.
it's not MY understanding of US law that I'm worried about ;-)
e.g. many Americans point to the 2nd ammendment as an absolute argument against gun-control, conveniently ignoring the parts about "well-regulated" and "milita being needed".
Is a fact of life. There is NO way to prevent it when people want it.
Be it on freenet, the open web, or the US-mail.
If that offends you then dont contribute time/energy/resoruces/money to freenet.
Oh, and dont buy stamps, or buy gas or anything else.. As there is nothing in this world that isnt tainted somehow..
Just get used to it, and move on.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"What checks does Freenet have in place to preserve privacy, and yet prevent the distribution of illegal material?"
Aren't the police supposed to enforce laws?
"Do the developers beleive in an absolute right to distribute copyrighted material, or child porn?"
Maybe they believe in clean coding practices. Maybe they don't know about your local laws. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? (Unless you are just making an indirect argument for government censorship.
)
> Freenet contains NO spyware or adware , it's Free
> Software!
But it requires the Sun JRE, which is proprietary bloatware.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
With Freenet not really an option, I guess their only choice is to go for a coup.
True story.
their overload problems are almost completely fixed
Sure they are. How many times have the Freenet kids said that before? "It's only using 40% of my CPU now!"
I won't be running Freenet until I hear from somebody uninvolved with the project that it's miraculously become effective and easy to use. I've burned too many hours trying to get it to work.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
lots of times, here's two easy ones:
1. libel/slander
2. harrassment/threats
In China, Freenet is a tool used by mystics and political criminals to spread destabilizing propaganda and destroy the lawful government. The mystics and propagandists hide their subversion by claiming they're only interested in undermining America by hosting child pornography.
In America, Freenet is a tool used by scuzzball freaks to spread child porn. They hide their scuzzball freakism by claiming they're only using it to support the activities of pro-democracy activists in China.
Doesn't matter where you live. If you install Freenet, you're providing an attractive nuisance, and because the documentation clearly states that by running a Freenet node, you may be hosting content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you knowingly make yourself an accessory to any and every crime committed by whatever brand of criminals happens to be living in your nation and trafficking data through your node.
FreeNet was a superb demonstration of how decoupling the right to speak freely from the responsibilities that come with that right can lead to disaster.
It was an interesting social experiment, but it's served its purpose, and IMO the time to pull the plug is long overdue.
Finally, on a practical level, for all the high sentiment about "countries with sane laws" touted by Ian and Matt, if you run a Freenet node, it's your door, not theirs, that will be broken down. If Ian and Matt want to take such a radical stand for free speech, let them host the illegal content, and let them take the risks.
Foisting that risk off onto a bunch of noobs who think "oooh! P2P shiny! MP3z and b00bies!" without being made fully aware of the legal risk that comes with the phrase "attractive nuisance" in a Western legal system is reckless and irresponsible of the Freenet team. When the first Freenet test cases come down (and these cases will come down as traffic analysis without a warrant is now fully legal under USA PATRIOT, and always was legal behind the Great Firewall), I hope that those charged in the test cases conclude that they have civil grounds to sue the organizers, maintainers, and contributors to the Freenet project into well-deserved legal oblivion.
Users on the Western nations' monitored networks have it easy - they only get faced with seizure of their hardware, a sex crime record, and 10-15 years. Users of Freenet in China get to supply corneas, kidneys, and lungs to Westerners smart enough not to run it.
Ian, Matt: You made your point -- absolute anonymity means we'll have to face some things we don't like. Now pull the plug before someone gets killed.
is freenet finally searchable, that one can find information for sure?
the basic problem with the inet and networks these days is, that everything can be kinda identified and shut down. webpages, server and all that stuff.
only p2p means could prevail and be immune to this problem, but only then, if everything would crypted (freenet-project, mute-net.sf.net and the like), but information also needs to be searchable and being able to be found.
people can download all kinds of stuff, be it legal or illegal on p2p, but if you cant get the links/urls/entry points to this world, or the information that gets censored/forbidden/blocked then you cant use p2p/freenet any more.
so can anybody point out the problem of freenet being almost unsearchable and how do you communicate by secure means with your chinese dissident friends, or U.S. citizenz who get lied to by george dubya bush, and them european or aussie people wanting to help and point them to the real information.
u.s. government decides to block unpopular and problematic facts about the war on iraq and all these kinds of examples, so how u gonna find your iraq/interesting information on freenet-project?
i propose, that we finally need some p2p based or somehow similar to the p2p aproach, with the security and anonymity of freenet-project or mute-net for example, for a forum/newsgroup/offline/storage communication service, that people can search through, get messages and read information that is being stored in this distributed p2p-like secure and anonymous forums, and that is distributed all over the nodes and stuff...
is this idea feasible or anyone else understanding the problem i am refering to? would be great if slashdot could finally tackle this problem and put it up on their webpages/YRO/developer or some section for discussion.
anyone? thanks.
No I don't think so. I think Freenet is a reaction on unjust authorities cracking down on people, be it political suppression in China or the because of the devious idea of "intellectual property" (a concept I utterly reject) in the "free" world.
It is the authorities that provoke the extreme reaction of using an encrypted network to protect peoples rights and privacy. If the authorities would not be so unjust, normal and decent people would not have anything to hide, and freenet would not have to exist.
What checks does Freenet have in place to preserve privacy, and yet prevent the distribution of illegal material?
That's kind of the point. Illegal != immoral != harmful. It's up to each individual user to determine whether what they're doing is "right" or "wrong". Is it wrong to wail against communism? The Chinese government thinks so. Is it wrong to spread child porn? The U.S. government thinks so. But, what does the USER think. It's THEIR responsibility to do the right thing rather than the government forcing them to do it. I must say, I don't participate in freenet because I'm not convinced that the benefits of using my computer to help spread democratic propaganda away from the prying eyes of the Chinese government outweights the negatives of some sick fuck using it to spread kiddy porn, but that's MY decision, not the governments.
When you rely on the government to hold people to certain standards, you're just asking for trouble. Look at the gay marriage thing. Does it hurt anybody? No. Still, there are people who say it's right and people who say it's wrong. The government wants to stick it's big nose in the mess now and that's just begging for trouble. They'll try to legislate morality which is just plain nuts. The government is hear to PROTECT and SERVE the public, not be a self-appointed moral watchdog. Freenet is an interesting experiment in putting the power of deciding one's own moral course back in the hands of individuals.
Unlike the screwball grandparent poster, I like Freenet in principle, I'm just not convinced that I like it in practice...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The archetects of the liberal society's user manual -- J.S. Mill in particular -- simply assumed that obviously bad things would be (to update his language) modded down by the 'marketplace of ideas' (his language.)
The Freenet project, from reading the FAQ, seems to be fundamentally flawed: the people that we'd most like to help out (dissidents, oppressed cubicle drones, etc.) must reveal their identity at some point in the process.
On the other hand, here is a device that will enable you to test your own committment to J.S. Mill's original thesis. Here is software that will contribute to the free functioning of the marketplace of ideas (no question there.) Do you want to install? [y/n]
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
What I want to say is free anoynomous speech has it's draw backs.
And this free anonymous speech can be filtered, since it is free, and it is anonymous. Filtered in the sense that I'm more likely to trust something my mom says than some voice I hear whispered in a subway. We've gotta teach our kids to moderate that free speech and figure out if it's trustworthy or not, before they let it convince them to become teenage sluts building pyramids for alien-worshipping monkey gods, or whatever it was you alluded to. Anything you read on Freenet should be treated as an unfounded rumor. Which doesn't do much good for our Chinese dissidents, I guess.
I think it's not that Freenet isn't a success because it needs money, it's just that it isn't really free in the sense that the money isn't there. I also think that it's inability to be fast having being fixed is not really true because it's non-existent lack of slowness remains. As for the child porn argument, that is really a moot point just because it's free doesn't mean that you can't do everything with it.
The difference is that only popular items becomes memes as they are spread to other servers when requested.
Things that are not popular eventually go away as the servers they are on smoke them when more popular content is downloaded.
So, if your server is storing lots of kiddie porn (and there's no way to tell without trying to download it and seeing how fast it goes), then that means many people are downloading it...which means that you are probably living next to child pornographers, and probably have some in your church, synagogue, temple, job, and home.
Hell, you might even be one yourself and not even know it.
Yeah, right.
to the next story, cuz what Freenet should/will do was all covered and done better in Winny, except for Winny has only Windows and Japanese version.
Full Disclosure: I've never installed Freenet, but I've been following its development closely since its inception. I'm subscribed to the notification of new releases from Sourceforge ...
And therein lies the problem. The last release on that page is dated July 17, 2003. And by Clarke's own admission in his 'State of the Freenet' letter, it doesn't work very well. He *thinks* this new algorithm will solve the problems, but nobody knows that for sure.
Projects that deliver results have an easier time attracting donations *and* volunteer developers. Sourceforge lists 4 project admins and (count them!) 60 developers! Is Freenet so hard that this many programmers can't deliver a working version in close to a year?!
The goals of Freenet are lofty, and for that maybe they deserve more patience, but when does the community just cut and run?
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
...if I were to set up NotSoFreeNet?
What if I "forked" the FreeNet code and started a parallel project that was completely identical, and lock-stepped in development (i.e. I'd be leaching every update from the original branch), with the exception that it creates a completely autonomous network not connected to the original FreeNet.
One more difference: you have to agree to a licensing agreement in order to use it that consists only of the following:
I promise upon all that is important to me that I will never intentionally store or retrieve child pornography using the NotSoFreeNet system.
If everyone agreed to that license agreement before joining the NotSoFreeNet, I wouldn't have a problem joining myself. Yes, I know it's just a statement and there's no way to enforce it, but the point is, the attempt has been made, and an effort at achieving a common understanding about what is appropriate with respect to one fundamental issue has been made amongst the responsible users of the system.
illegal material
And exactly who is going to decide what's illegal?
What?
P2P has more than ideology behind it.. I was on a JURY where fellow jurors talked about using Napster/Kazaa. I've talked to lawyers that felt they did no wrong getting hard to find music from Napster. I feel confident that jury nullification will find the one and two song people Not Guilty, despite the esoteric arguments for/against intellectual property. Once you mention Terrorism, or Child Porn, any sympathy from a jury evaporates. You'll get put on a sexual offenders list, labeled for life for clicking one bad link. This is bad, morally, legally, and especially in this case pratically.
who forced all 'freenet' BBSs in the early 90's to change their name or be sued? My local freenet became Vancouver CommunityNet, and I had to change my email address.
As I understood it, they were complete bastards about it.
Ok, thats valid, but those aren't covered under the 1st amendment anyway.
"The road from legitimate suspicion to rampant paranoia is very much shorter than we think." - Picard
"their overload problems are almost completely fixed"...lets see if all those slashdotters can test that out
The way it works (afaik) is you host material on your node that you didnt ask to host.
Now forgive me if im wrong but freenet, to me, and I have used it is freedom of speech by depriving your freedom of choice!
Think about it, you can do/view and say what you want on their but in return your hosting material you do not have a choice about what its hosting and dont have a choice not to host?
Thats why I dont use it. Not because it deals with many taboo subjects, but because it is conscripting my machine into helping others view taboo material.
will it play in it's own sand box and not access any parts of the disk without asking? Can I throttle it's connection down when I need to? That kind of thing.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
"1. libel/slander"
Public deception designed to harm one person.
"2. harrassment/threats"
Extortion and intimidation.
In both cases, speech is incidental, a means to an end. Many others, however, use such arguments to negate the freedom of speech and the promotion of the concept of speech crime (little sister to thought crime).
Incidentally the standard argument is the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" one. This doesn't work either because such an act constitutes deliberate reckless endangerment, not speech crime, as proven by the fact that the same result could be achieve by pulling a fire alarm.
I don't really care about the 1st ammendment, it's the principle of free speech as an absolute, which is what Freenet IS based on, which I don't like.
apparently, our biggest beef with freenet is that it is littered with child pornography, and a demand for child pornography leads to more of it being made, and therefore more abused and exploited children. however, freenet is free, as in beer, as is all of the content. so what do the pornographers get from having their collections on freenet, and how does it lead to more child porn being made?
> It was an interesting social experiment, but it's served its purpose, and IMO
> the time to pull the plug is long overdue.
If it's popular, people will use it. Which third party should pull the plug?
> Ian, Matt: You made your point -- absolute anonymity means we'll have to face
> some things we don't like. Now pull the plug before someone gets killed.
LOL! You drama queen! I love Slashdot! "Oooh, look at my serious face! I am the conscience of the internet, and I have determined that that is a Bad Thing!" What, so things can happen now with the internet which couldn't have happened before? No doubt you're thinking of bomb making or something? That's the example you always here. You know how easy it is to make an explosive? They practically tell you how on the news every time there's an attack on the American troops currently occupying Iraq, or on Israelis.
Do the developers beleive in an absolute right to distribute copyrighted material, or child porn?
That's the fucking point. Read the fucking site already.
Look, it's the internet designed by facist anarchists. It's antimoral and antilegal, as opposed to just amoral and alegal like the regular internet. The internet anarchistically allows morality and legality to be imposed on it, Freenet facisticlly doesn't. The differences between one illegal/immoral document and another are academic. CC numbers are the same as naked babies are the same as censored news are the same as dissident manifestos are the same as racist calls to violence are the same as the Matrix Revolutions.
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.
Yeah, right.
Goddam hippies.
Seriously.
Nearly all of the posts i'm seeing talk about how horrible freenet is because it may be used for child pornography or other illegal things and then go on to say that freenet should not exist and how terrible they must be etc. etc. I've even seen posts saying (to paraphrase) 'everyone should have free speech except kiddie pornographers and nazis'.
get a clue and go fuck yourselves! If you want to filter what someone says because you dont agree with it than it's not really free speech, is it?
Further, these morons arguing against freenet are using the same argument i see used so fervently in defense of DeCSS or any other tool that allows them to pirate music or do something 'cool'...
'Hey! you cant make this tool illegal! Just because I have a card programmer doesnt mean I am stealing. i have rights, man! Free speech!'
So, which is it?
(a) Tool X can be used for illegal things and therefore should be banned.
(b) Tool X can be used for illegal things. It does, however, serve useful, legitimate purposes. Keep it legal.
I vote for option B myself.
i would've been running a freenet server ages ago except that there is no usable jvm for my machine. annoying choice of language from the start.
First off, in the information age there is no difference between, free speech content, copyright content, or any other type of content. You are just going to half to get used to that, either we half to appoint someone to watch all of it or none of it. Just because people worship evil cults doesn't mean that we shouldn't have freedom of religion. Just because people write bad things and tabloid trash doesn't mean we shouldn't have freedom of the press. It's no different with content, it's sad that some people find such trash entertaining, but that's just the way it is. Maybe you should disconnect from the internet because your computer uses the same routers as that stuff too.
Second, there is no such thing as evil content, only evil choices. How do you know that you aren't looking at a digitally created police photo used for training purposes? I think it's sick that you would put such an evil act on the same level as the evil content.
And finally, from the time of Moses, to the American revolution, to Rosa Parks not sitting at the back of the bus. History has prooven that the only way to mak
e a serious change in the system is defiance - and that freenet is! People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people. When it comes to copyright imposition, and content sensoring the system is failing and stacked
against us. Freenet is a real solution.
valid points though I'm not sure what your argument is.
if you're saying that "free speech is still an absolute because I can describe those things in other ways", then you're wrong because either way speech WILL ultimately be censored.
if you're just saying that in these cases censorship is a secondary effect and it's not "censorship for its own sake" then I agree.
It's impossible. If an authority can declare a file illegal, it will be abused. We cannot make the system safe for chinese dissidents publishing files that happen to be illegal locally (most political or religious texts, for example), while being able to censor it in the West.
"I don't really care about the 1st ammendment, it's the principle of free speech as an absolute, which is what Freenet IS based on, which I don't like."
Freenet is based on some code dsigned to be robust under censorship attacks, just like the internet itself. The reactionary tirade it provokes from folks like you stands as evidence of how important it is to have these programs in place.
To update your client to the latest version! Either run the update.sh tool or right click the rabbit icon and click update!. This will give you access to the faster network!
"The network is busy, please try again later"
I actually don't know what I'm doing wrong....
Hmmmm.....
I'm getting nowhere, just like the last time I used it.
This post has gone from starting at +2 to -1 then to +5 now back to +2. Where else can you make it go mods [on crack]?
Stick with your decision, but know that child porn isn't exhalted or even condoned on Freenet, and it isn't even specifically accepted as a necessary evil. Freenet merely redistributes in-demand files (as collections of bytes like all others) across a network in a way to prevent the ability of any party to suppress them or know their originator. This is to guarantee freedom of speech and expression. That some combinations of bytes form graphics that any responsible and/or balanced person would find repugnant, doesn't change the fact that they're still just bytes which freenet can't distinguish from "Das Capital", a treatise on democracy in China, a mirror of RIAA subpoenas or the latest episode of Enterprise.
If you want a system that can censor a particular kind of data, it would require a central authority to make that judgement -- and the entire point of a decentralized network of expression is lost.
where'd my typewriter go?
"if you're just saying that in these cases censorship is a secondary effect and it's not "censorship for its own sake" then I agree."
Speech is the secondary effect. Censorship is always political and has nothing to do with "speech crime."
In other words, what I'm saying is that the crime is not speech, and speech is not crime. The concept of speech crime is bogus, and censorship won't stop any crimes involving speech. Instead it will be used to stop legitimate speech. Check out your history books. Stopping "crime" is just a pretext, just like Janet Jackson's boob is a pretext for US rightwing fundamentalists to clamp down on the media.
The problem is that in a system like freenet there is no way of only censoring the stuff you seem to disagree with, if there was then it wouldn't be FREEnet. Of course your always free not to run freenet, but based on this conversation I'm guessing your not anyway.
"The road from legitimate suspicion to rampant paranoia is very much shorter than we think." - Picard
An interesting sidenote is that KaZaA (and clients under the fastrak network) had the exact same problem in the begining when it's popularity sprung up....
Not entirely true. While some laws serve the master of political expediency many, especially the biggies, are based on a moral code derived from (take your pick). Murder, theft, assault, rape and so forth are all punishable based on the assumption that they are morally wrong.
Now one might argue that most societies punish the above crimes because it promotes the health and happiness of the populace as a whole, regardless of morality. I would respond that shame, guilt, and morality exist to promote the health and happiness of the populace and therefore enforcement of laws against the above is support of a de facto morality.
This is all irrespective of my opinion on gay marriage. Just felt like I needed to comment on that one part.
It's not so much motivating the production of more porn, though that's also a concern. The problem is that the way freenet works, you might have child pornography on your system even if you have never intentionally downloaded it. Freenet mirrors chunks of files that are in high demand on many nodes. You would never even know any of the chunks your node stores are porn, since freenet storage files are encrypted. By U.S. law, possion (even unintentional posession) makes you just as guilty as perverts who download it intentionally and the sick bastards who made the porn in the first place.
If the encryption functions are pooorly written, or if a pornographer's key is compromised, you could enjoy a one-way trip to federal "pound me in the ass" prison.
0 1 - just my two bits
well I don't agree with the idea of "speech crime", but neither do I believe free speech should be absolute, maybe this is inconsistent by your definitions?
for me it's simply a case of
-absolute free speech means no censorship
-censorship is often necessary
-therefore there should not be absolute free speech
I think people should just accept free speech isn't and shouldn't be absolute and accept it. I think there are lots of "think of the children"-fundamentalists who want to make things "absolute" e.g. abortion is ALWAYS wrong/speech should ALWAYS be free, but imo that's just stupid.
"When is it ok to silence speech?"
I like to think when it interferes with someone else's freedom (speech or otherwise). I don't define "someone else" as a government, corporation, non-profit, etc. I mean individual. I'm sure there are cases where this simplistic view fails.
Uhhhhh.... hmmmmm.... the legal system?
I still have problems using the "stable" branch. I frequently get horribly slow access.. and very little content seems to be available. Go to the Next Generation Routing page for instructions on getting the Unstable branch. Browse this. First, install the normal, stable Freenet then replace Freenet.jar and seednodes.ref with the appropriate "unstable" files.
r 79zB30tA/
Browsing common pages is much more reasonable. If you're behind NAT, make sure to read this
see if you can request this:
SSK@l4Kq8dXYucgTzJlhEHOiBWj~A~sPAgM,WvqLp6tz7psph
Make sure to remove the inserted space.
p
Your point is tangential to the problem.
The idea that pure speech/information can be morally wrong does in fact come from self-appointed moral watchdogs, using morality and pretection as a cover for control and subjugation. Check the history books.
So what you're saying is that you trust my judgement will keep me from publishing all your credit card numbers on Freenet? If we could trust everybody engaged in doing harm to have the good judgement to avoid doing harm, we wouldn't need any laws, would we?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
That should be:
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Freenet gets all the publicity, but have you looked into GNUnet?
It solves some of the problems with Freenet. GNUnet's number one goal is security/anonymity.
By the most sensible definition of location of data, the child porn is not on your computer.
What you have on your computer is indistinguishable by all known statistical tests from random noise. The sum of this pseudo-random data on all nodes, viewed in a particular way, i.e. through a suitable client, is the Freenet network. The child porn is there, all right - if you're sick enough to seek it out. But the nature of Freenet means that no mapping can be found between data in it, and encrypted data on nodes. That's the whole point. So why worry? If there was a scheme by which you mailed your hard drive to some island and they added it to a pool of storage anyone could access, would you have the same qualms about your disk being possibly contaminated?
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/ ?
Seems a lot of people are failing to understand that Freenet is not about free speech, it's about anonymity. The funny thing about anonymity, it's a little like pregnancy. You are either anonymous or you are not. I can hear some of you objecting, that with enough effort, almost any anonymity can be pierced. In reality though, you are anonymous until you aren't. That's where Freenet shines, because it makes it VERY hard for you to lose your anonymity. For those who say anonymity isn't important, think about secret ballots, police informants, journalists' informants, talking with your lawyer, talking with your doctor, etc. What Freenet does is it takes free speech and anonymity and bundles it all up into one inseparable whole and then thumbs it's nose at the forces of fascism and says "if you want to take away our free speech, you have to take away our anonymity and every right connected to it."
Good point. "Illegal" is a poor choice of words, because it is subjective and varies based on locale. A better critera would be material which poses a clear threat of harm, e.g. your credit card numbers, the source code to WinXP, the launch codes for NORAD missiles, etc.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Not really the original poster made a statement I have heard often. That statement being that the government is not a moral watchdog. Well, of course it is. Whether all pure speech/information is legal and whether murder is legal are both questions of morality. It just so happens that the answer to one question is agreed upon more that the other.
/me removes Tackhead, who usually has interesting and insightful opinions, from Friends list
Not necessarily government censorship. I do beleive that the government that governs least governs best. But there will always be assholes that abuse freedoms, and it seems like there needs to be some consensus on how to deal with extreme cases of this... why do you think there is a moderation system on slashdot? Does that mean there is no freedom of speech on slashdot? No, that just means the freedom of speech is not absolute. Insisting on absolute freedoms is a good way to get yourself crapped on by the very institutions you were seeking to circumvent in the first place. How helpful would Ashcroft invoking the Patriot Act against Freenet be in furthering it's development? Don't give him an excuse!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Read Clark's paper on Next Generation Routing.. then click the link for instructions on using Unstable. Unstable is much nicer for browsing, in my experience. Just install the stable version, then replace freenet.jar and seednodes.ref with the appropriate "unstable" files.
freenet is a scam to collect donations and to finance Ian Clarke's drug habit
(he uses designer drugs, aka "research chemicals")
I think you've got it wrong -- opponents of the FreeNet philosophy are not trying to SOLVE social problems by technical measures. Instead, proponents of FreeNet are, by THEIR technical measures, aiding and abetting real social problems. The anonymity provided by FreeNet undoubtedly attracts child pornographers and other criminals while providing little obvious benefit to the rest of us.
While I understand that Chinese dissidents may have legitimate need in their country for anonymous means of criticizing their government, and radicals and extremists in the U.S. may want a forum insulated from Ashcroft-led witch hunts, FreeNet users must at least admit that they are very very likely to be facilitating illegal activities. And they do so at their own risk.
When some kids spraypaint "Dave Rules" on my car.
Damn Punks.
I don't use Freenet, and I don't currently have anything controversial to say. But I believe, that the principle is important. I signed up for a $5/mo recurring contribution.
That's nothing compared to what I spend on stupid crap that the monolithic media corporations have convinced me I need to be happy while they work to take away my freedoms.
And just preemptively: I don't think everything should be free. I don't download songs illegally. I am an creator/artist who has been paid for my creative/artistic work on occasion, and would like to make that my life, though I've yet to be able to do so. Still, I think the current lack of consumer rights is appalling.
I am glad to support this project that gives us the technilogical means to work around the crap that's become acceptable in our free country.
Cheers.
I'm not involved, but I'm a regular user.
It's not working as good as it has. just prior to the v0.5 release, and the first 4 releases of v0.5 were pretty much ideal; after that... pffft.
It's getting better, if a site can get inserted, you can pull it up 100% of the time, but getting a site inserted is still a nightmare.
It's pretty good for file sharing using Fuqid, and if you wanted to download MacroHard source, cash register software, the dirt on Kerry, it's all there.
FROST was killed by it's abandonment by Jantho, the guy who came up with the idea; as he was leaving you had a pretty rocking little usenet-like interface searchable interface for freenet, but the guys who took it over killed it deader than a doorknob; the old version still works, and works well, but apparently i'm the only one who knows it.
so, if you want to use it for file trading, use IIP to contact people for keys, and the web interface to see the sites from people who have enough skill or luck to insert frequently.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
"Freenet is free software designed to ensure true freedom of communication over the Internet. A portion of all proceeds on go to the Freenet Project."
? af fid=-1&productID=68
http://www.jinxhackwear.com/scripts/details.asp
"From this page you may purchase a variety of items bearing the logo and slogans of The Freenet Project. All profits will be used to support Freenet development. If you have an idea for new design or slogan that you would like to see made available here, please contact Ian Clarke."
http://www.cafeshops.com/freenetproject
Time for Thinkgeek to support this.
Is it okay to judge your credit card number by the same standard? Where your child goes to school and what ice cream stand they frequent? What the code is for your home alarm system? Are you copacetic with that because other people should know to treat it as unfounded rumor?
I don't know--I'm torn. I do believe that anonymity is probably required to achieve truly free speech. There are, after all, the Chinese dissidents to think of. But it also results in absolute freedom of speech, where you can say anything you want, anytime, consequence-free, which just doesn't work for me either.
Maybe what's needed is pseudonymity, that is, a way to disconnect one's real identity from their identity in various contexts (i.e. as a Chinese dissident), but where they can be held accountable, at least to the extent of being silenced, in that other context.
demi
Is your problem that they are trying to do something really hard (on an almost entirely voluntary basis), that they ran into some problems, that they worked hard, and that after 6 months they think they now have a solution? Is that their crime?
When it gives up on free software ever producing anything truly new, as opposed to just trying to emulate commercial software.Err, using credit card numbers in this argument is severely flawed. In my opinion CC#'s are security through obscurity, if you don't have them, then you cant use them. I only give my CC# to parties I trust. If you have my CC#'s and your not trustworthy, then what the hell does freenet have to do with this or matter anyway.
I believe in the principles of Freenet.
I am willing to dedicate disk space
I am on a broadband connection where I can affort x GB / week.
I have tried freenet carefully setting the supposed bandwidth controls. At first everything was fine, but as days and weeks went by my node got more and more popular. Eventually it was way above the limits I had set and I could find no way to throttle it back to a reasonable rate, so I was forced to remove the service. This was far more problem than even it's slow speed -- it made it impossible for the average user to use. Normal users get into trouble if their bandwidth usage keeps going up without limit. I also run web pages that eventually become unusable if they get too much competition. That is the make-or-break feature for me. I must have bandwidth controls that put a real cap on bandwidth.
This would be clear to anyone that bothered to read the article.
Hey, Toad. You must be busy as hell on here today. The good thing is that I would assume some donations are flowing into the project now. With the help from this, perhaps you and Ian can feel a little better about putting off the 0.6 release for a little bit in case further testing is required. Just don't get all Duke Nukum Forever on us with it. ;)
Take care, and keep up the good work. You folks have been doing an outstanding job, especially recently. Don't let the nay-sayers and trolls here, or anywhere, get you down. So far as I can tell, you guys are coding your way into uncharted waters, and it's downright impossible to get much of anything right the first time around when dealing with something so totally new. Just keep chugging along with the development, and you'll always have plenty of folks ready and willing to run nodes for you guys.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Freenet stumbled on step 2. The language is non-free and has other problems which seem to have caused a lot of trouble in steps 3 and 4.
I have tried Freenet several times. The basic problems that were obvious the first time have never been fixed.
If they would admit the mistake and do it right from the start, I would be tempted to contribute. Anyone else feel this way?
And where would you draw the line?
In most european countries, it's forbidden to say anything 'racist'. This even includes forbidding revisionistic books (books who claim the holocaust didn't happen).
And mind you, these are democratic countries, and they are wholy convinced they are soing the right thing with this. they think it's despicable that anyone would claim different, and is, in effect, unlawfull now.
I hope you realise that exactly the same arguments are used in this respect, as (your arguments) in respect of KP. Yet, I think many USA citizens would think of that as an impermissable limit of free speech. In europe however, it's considered ethically wrong, and legally unlawfull. Do they not have the same right to claim it should be forbidden as you do, with KP?
And in that case, isn't it becomming meaningless, because one can always find things that are objectionable, even in all honesty.
Isn't the goal to have as much software availible to as many people as possible?
Open source is the only way to provide software to the world. Not everyone in this world is a rich white American.
Everyone in this world however needs software and they will pirate it if there were no open source.
Freenet is a service, I like the business model myself because open source is good and donating money for something you want is the same as paying for it.
Yes, but Slashdot provides us with another handy example: The moderation system demonstrates how anonymity is essential to free speech. Here on Slashdot, disagreeing with the crowd only costs you some Karma. In the world at large, differing opinions can cost you social status. In places like China, dissent can cost you your life. Anonymity allows you to express your views without fear of retribution for doing so.
Also, being anonymous does not absolve you from responsibility. You still have a responsibility to say something worth hearing, or else no one will listen, and your freedom of expression is wasted. For example, how many GNAA posts have you read lately? How many goatse links have you clicked on? Even if you read Slashdot at -1, I doubt you would pay posts such as those much attention. The trolls are free to spout their gibberish all day long, but that doesn't mean that they're guaranteed an audience.
True freedom of expression is an all-or-nothing deal, unfortunately. The moment you put limits on it, it's no longer free. Denying anonymity is one such limit. Denying certain forms of expression is another. Most people here, it seems, though they would deny it until they were blue in the face, don't support free expression at all.
Please, get off of the internet.
Look, there are a lot of nazi hate sites that I don't like on the internet. When I pay my ISP, I learn there are hate sites on the world wide web and I have the option to cancel my account to prevent myself from seeing or supporting that type of speech.
You have the right to never use Freenet because there might be harmful speech on freenet. The problem is this, you cannot have free speech without harmful speech just like you cannot have the gun for protection without innocent people being killed and hurt.
You cannot protect children from the internet, you cannot protect the internet from children. You can protect yourself from both.
Leave the internet and stop funding hate sites, kiddie porn, terrorist websites, the mafia, gang members, and other evil people who use the internet to do evil.
Hosting a node on freenet is contributing to evil, paying AOL for an account is contributing to evil.
So choose the lesser evil or go home.
Lets start by creating an official government of slashdot moderators who can and will censor all speech which they personally do not like.
I'd like to be on that government so I can censor your post as my first action. What you seem to not be capable of understanding is that FreeNet exists not as a habor for kiddie porn and terrorists but as a harbor for each and everyone one of us humans on planet earth.
It just so happens that decent people are so afraid of the bad people that they are willing to sacrifice their Freedom for security. You want the government to rule over you, you do not care about freedom and I don't see how you or people like you are any different than the Chinese.
You must understand that forces within our government currently want to control every aspect of the internet, companies like Microsoft and the RIAA want to control the internet, and the only group of people who want to stand up for YOU the internet user is FreeNet.
Look, if you want censorship on Freenet, ask Ian Clarke to build personal Freenet filters which can filter out all content you dislike. This is the solution, personal filtering of the net. This is the same solution we use in the real world, we personally filter ourselves out of bad environments and away from bad people.
There are plenty of murderer killer rapist people who you could hang with in the real world, and no one stops you from joining them. It's up to you to decide for yourself right from wrong, not the government, not the internet government, not Ian Clark, not the technology. It's not the gun that kills people, its people who kill people. Remember that its not the FreeNet that rapes kids, or launches terrorists attacks, its the people.
FreeNet WILL become a Haven for hate unless YOU actually make use of FreeNet. It's your choice, but either way FreeNet will be created so you can either help put good content on it, or you can let all the bad people claim it and whine and complain how its a haven for them instead of for you.
feel so strongly about enabling criminally free speech (kiddie porn, etc.), then they should feel strongly enough about it to be able to do so without my money or anybody else's
what i would really like to know, do they feel so strongly about free speech that they would be willing to take responsibilty for what's said. someone correct me if i'm wrong, but all other civil rights movements seem to have involved people with conviction (openly) defying unjust laws/etc and being willing to take responsibilty for their actions. freenet seems like it is (or is becoming) all about shirking responsibility or shifting it off onto someone else.
having said that, i think freenet is a fascinating project. but until i can control what i'm hosting, i think it's unacceptably flawed.
someone mentioned in a different thread the MUTE project, which i find more acceptable because i have direct control over what i share
mods: this is not a troll, just my take on the subjectOk. Let's go one step further. A rogue(or maybe not so rogue) CIA agent is killing people in cold blood. Do I have a right to expose that person? Even harm can be considered subjective, depending who is being harmed. Some might contend that the US gov't is illegally harming Iraqis. If they were to attempt to stop it by revealing US military planning in Iraq. Who's wrong here? Many governments harm people, possibly illegally. How can we protect oursevles from that? Now we have to decide who is allowed to harm people.
What?
For those wanting to look at Freenet without installing a node, see this list of public gateways.
And I'm planning to add my gateway to that list. Try the others first. Better bandwidth and more storage.
Bookmark those gateways though, and come back in a few weeks when the major improvements have beein implemented across the majority of nodes.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
Uh, maybe they aren't worried that they are going to get in trouble for hosting child porn, maybe they have a problem with it because IT IS MORALLY WRONG TO DO SO. Screw freenet.
How is paying your ISP any different than donating to FreeNet? How is one morally ok and the other morally wrong when its the same exact act?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Its democratic censorship but its still censorship. Which means if millions of chinese and pro communist people use this network and decide to be Anti-American and censor everything American out of it, you can do absolutely nothing. Slashdot uses the democratic censorship model and you see the flaws Slashdot has cant you.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
>
> What, so things can happen now with the internet which couldn't have happened before? No doubt you're thinking of bomb making or something? That's the example you always here. You know how easy it is to make an explosive? They practically tell you how on the news every time there's an attack on the American troops currently occupying Iraq, or on Israelis.
Boy did you miss the point. (Or you confused me with someone else.)
Seriously, I couldn't care less about Joe "One-beer-short-of-a" Sixpack downloadin' his good ol' self a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook and promptly evolving himself out of the gene pool.
But I am worried about the one really unlucky Joe Sixpacks who get chosen as the first few test cases in the West. Some poor slob who think Freenet's just another way to "freely" swap MP3s with reduced risks of getting a nastygram from RIAA, but who wakes up to black-masked agents screaming "FEDERAL AGENT! WE KNOW YOU'RE HOSTING ILLEGAL PR0N! DON'T MOVE, YOU PERVERTED FREAK!"
The reference to someone getting killed is the fact that Unlucky Joe Sixpack isn't the worst case. The worst case is the prototypical pro-democracy dissident in China -- who (just like Unlucky Joe) thinks he and his friends are free to communicate using Ian and Matt's shiny toy, only to wake up to the sound of a round being chambered, and to never hear anything else again.
Take a close look at how Freenet nodes operate, and realize the minimal amount of traffic analysis that would be required on the part of any government agency to identify node operators and direct queries to guarantee that for any value of "contraband" required, some data corresponding to "contraband" exists on the node of the person selected to be the test case.
When Freenet was created, the technology to perform such an attack didn't exist in China, and the legal infrastructure of the West made any evidence gleaned as the result of such monitoring inadmissable. Neither of those two things are true any longer.
On a moral level, Freenet was a success: it proved the point that arguing for absolute anonymity really does mean having to deal with things you might find repugnant. (And I agree with its creators' stand -- if you can't deal with the ramifications of absolute anonymity, you have principled, not merely practical, grounds not to be a part of it.)
On a practical level, however, due to its susceptibility to traffic analysis and other forms of attack by a sufficiently well-motivated and well-funded opponent, and given that a sufficiently well-motivated-and-funded opponent exists on every chunk of addressable IP space on the planet, Freenet is a hazard to anyone actually using it.
Freenet is not Kazaa. The risks you face from running a Freenet node are far, far, far greater than what you risk from running a Kazaa node. In the case of the perverts, I'm OK with that. But I'm not OK with that when it's MP3 downloaders getting the perp walk for sex charges, and I'm very very not OK with that when it's the Chinese democracy movement getting a perp walk to the organ bank.
As is your absolute right, but if you were the same AC to which I'd responded who thought that by "someone getting hurt", I was playing the old Fed line about "protecting some poor kid who downloads bombmaking information", you you missed the point.
"Freenet is what the web was..." -- Freenet isn't anything yet. I've tried it. Have you?
"Well worth donating to." -- What would we be donating to? Another few years of revisions of a non-functioning implementation using a non-free language?
The web is simple and it works. It started with a simple protocol and a simple markup language. From where I stand, Freenet looks a bit like Ted Nelson's Xanadu -- lots of good ideas, lots of complexity, and no real result.
That's a definitional truism. Ie,
However, it does not follow that all pornography featuring children actually depicts the sexual abuse of children. Child pornography could include images of friendly, happy sex between age-mates. Of course, you could define 'sexual abuse' as being equivalent to 'sexual relations.' But that, again, has more to do with which definitions we choose to use, and less than with an empirical analysis of the material itself.
There remains the question of how much of this material actually depicts children being abused in a way that any normal person would describe as abusive of an adult. We do not, for example, assume that mutual masterbation between adults is abusive. If there is violence, then we would say so. We would also say so if it was coerced, if threats were used. But if the activity were straight up mutual masterbation which both parties (even superficially) agreed to, we would not call it sexual abuse ('of the worst sort').
But in the case of child sexuality, people are quick to argue that all forms of sexual contact are abusive because children by definition (see that--by definition?) cannot consent, or agree to, sexual contact with anyone (or, in some areas there is a complex set of rules on who can and cannot touch whom where, when, and how). But this definitional exclusion of children from the sexual world is not based on any empirical evidence. This fact is proven when you consider that experts on child sexual abuse estimate that around half of child sexual abuse is caused by minors. If minors cannot cause sex to happen, why is it they are constantly, usually without prodding, comitting sexual acts (which must be investigated by the police, tagged by psychologists as deviant, and punished by the courts!)?
The question of what child pornography depicts or does not depict is not a settled matter. The fact that there is nobody actually out there, analyzing the material from an objective perspective (ie. with an open mind as to what the material actually depicts) suggests to me that this issue is more about ideology than knowledge.
Since this issue is about ideology on the sexual level, it must serve ideological purposes on the Internet level. As many people have mentioned, child pornography is a wedge issue. Enemies of freedom of speech use it to divide people, and to push for tighter and tighter restrictions. People who fear-monger about child pornography are threatening the freedom of the Internet based on a provisional hypothesis about what child pornography is ideologically construed to be and not what it actually is.
I leave it to the reader to decide where they want their knee to jerk, and where they demand further investigation...
_khl
I've even seen posts saying (to paraphrase) 'everyone should have free speech except kiddie pornographers and nazis'.
Sounds pretty European to me. A lot of European countries *really* still have a lot of social crap left over from after World War II. Garmany and France, in particular, are incredibly uptight (at least from an American standpoint) about Nazi-related stuff. The UK has some kind of pedophiliaphobia. I mean, sure, nobody likes the worst-case sort of sexual content related to kids -- kids getting abducted and raped or similar. However, the British are absolutely rabid about avoiding any kind of surfacing of pedophilia. Really unusual.
Arguing that a lot of Europeans should loosen up about Nazism is probably a fun debate, but it doesn't have as much impact in the US, so I'll argue the child pornography standpoint.
Frankly, I never really saw how banning child pornography has significant social benefits (especially since posession and distribution of blood sport content *is* legal). Sure, there can be all kinds of bad things associated with child pornography -- people worry about their kids getting abducted and raped or something -- but I don't see quite how eliminating distribution of such material on Freenet does anything to avoid real life sexual abuse.
The first argument I see in favor of censorship of child pornography might be that if there is a profitable industry for producing child pornography, then children will be involved in production of that pornography (as opposed to actors/actresses appearing to be children, or CG doctoring, or pornographic animation containing depictions of underage sex). This may lead to one of two potentially bad things: first, children may be nude in videos. In the Victorian tradition, being seen nude (particularly females) somehow "degrades" or damages future social standing. I've nver seen this as an immutable -- our society happens to have a nudity taboo, but it is arguable as to whether that is at all beneficial to society. The second bad point is that children may be physically injured in the production of such content. There are laws already dealing with injuring children -- I'm not sure why a special point needs to be made for pornography-related content.
The second issue might be that distribution of child ponography tends to exacerbate pedophiliac behavior. This is certainly a decent thought, but I'm not sure how grounded in reason it is. We in the United States allow distributing movies showing images of people being shot (actually, I just posted regarding this earlier today). It doesn't seem that the violence present alone (see my complaints about cartoon violence, which are different) significantly have had an impact on the increase of violence. Why would we think that sexual content alone would drive someone to engage in a sexual act?
Anti-child pornography laws are one of the few near-global laws, and I'm a bit curious why, as they seem to be the product of fear and emotion rather than a particularly reasoned decision -- at the very least, they are inconsistent with decisions about censorship that we have made in other content areas.
I'll let others wonder why the US can get away without censoring Nazi content and yet doesn't have massive Nazi surges, yet France feels the need to prevent people from having Nazi content.
May we never see th
I have tried this, with no success. GCJ still has severe problems working with many Java programs out there (both runtime and compiletime) and the last version I tried was still spitting out compile-time errors.
However, Java as a language imposes certain types of overhead that are very difficult to eliminate with optimization. The type model and other decisions in Java introduce some inescapable runtime overhead. I haven't seen analysis of 1.5, so it may be that some of this is fixed (the generic containers are a big deal), or it may be that the constraints that the designers were working under didn't let them get rid of some of these problems.
May we never see th
I'm wholeheartedly behind the free (speech) arguments for this Freenet Project. What troubles me is its Philosophy statement, which goes off into this half-baked anti-copyright manifesto that suggests that it's more about provding a safe haven for those offering free (beer) access to other people's creative work. I don't buy it
The original poster is saying that in many nations you will be unknowingly hosting illegal material. So your response is that if there was no demand for this material, it wouldn't be on his computer. No one is disputing that there are people who demand kiddie porn. What the original poster is saying is that he does not want to inadvertantly be labled as one of thee poeple.
Nice try, and you got four of your NAMBLA pals to mod you up.
I think we all agree that most everyone hates kiddie porn. What if there were a freenet version 2 with sophisticated algorithms to allow nodes to vote to suppress (but not eradicate) files they didnt like. Granted, this would be completely different from the original idea of freenet which emphasizes the power of the individual to publish *anything*. But at least it would be a democratic means to suppress things (like kiddie porn) that everyone dislikes.
As for what suppression means, off the top of my head, that sounds like a really tough nut to crack. You need some way to anonymously sign a file as good or bad and prevent tampering, double signing, etc. A hard problem. Maybe even intractable.
nt.
Perhaps thou dost protest too much :P
Here in Canada you'd even alowed to screw her 14 year old sister as long as you where not her teacher, a cop, a judge, or another person along thoughs lines. Our, cold Canadian laws still say though, that any erotic picures of the afore mentioned 16 year old cheerleader and her 14 year old sister are extreamly ilegal.
"The hysteria over pedophilia is indicative of a society that has come to the brink of self-destruction and stands there accusing the void." -- Bring Back Stigma by Roger Scruton
Pornographic images of children are no different from images of other illegal acts. I am sure that a Google search for murder victims will reveal a number of them for those whose perverse tastes lie in that direction. I find all such things repellant, and would be happy to put publishers of all such material in jail. In fact, I find the US Supreme Court's current interpretation of the 1st Amendment to be overbroad by far.
But I also advocate a balanced view of such things. We are talking about images, not the acts themselves. When the police can identify such people, I am all for having them arrested. I am not, on the other hand, in favor of closing down forums for uncensored communication in order to create some sort of utopia where all such people are caught.
Leave Freenet alone.
Take a close look at how Freenet nodes operate, and realize the minimal amount of traffic analysis that would be required on the part of any government agency to identify node operators and direct queries to guarantee that for any value of "contraband" required, some data corresponding to "contraband" exists on the node of the person selected to be the test case.
Leaving your argument aside, you don't actually know how freenet works.
'Direct' requests to a node are not necessarily answered by that node. There is no way for a particular attacker to know whether the node it requested the data from answered it directly from it's data store or routed the request to another node which subsequently answered it.
Everything has a benefit and a cost, and to look at it from only one side isn't wise. Life is about trade offs.
For example, thousands of people die on roadways every year. Think of all the lives that could be saved by banning automobiles.
Of course this is ludicrous because the cost of roadways (thousands of dead people) is outweighed by the benefits (billions of people getting access to goods and services).
The same goes for FreeNet. The cost is kiddie porn, and the benefit is freedom expression where such things do not exist. Is this a good trade off?
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Instead of actually viewing porn or pirated materials, they'll simply be waiting for the files to show up instead!
==
Unstable is a much smaller network, so it's easy to make it work well. Stable is not yet working "well", although it MAY have improved a bit recently; it may work better in the near future, as we get rate limiting sorted out.
Small works well. Then, every time there's something that spurs a lot of interest, the performance is abysmal. Now I'm sure the same excuse that this is just temporary growing pains will come up again, but I for one have lost faith in that.
To me, it looks like Freenet has got fundamental scaling issues, as it would appear from the circle of people I know, that Freenet regains its past performance about the same time that the numbers using it are back to where it was.
It's very easy to make something work well on a small scale - small enough, and even a dumbfire search (pick a route at random) works. Rate limiting, load balancing and getting the most out of each node is good, but I don't think it'll solve the real problem.
I'm not saying I have the answers to make it so that it *does* scale well. But I think I've understood enough of what Freenet does to realize it *won't* scale well. Ah well...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Guess what? Before you ask or accuse, I don't like the idea of child porn. Duh. Does anyone other than the small minority of people who have some deep seated issue? Quit parroting every politico seeking reelection.
Just because you find ponography (to you) of any sort, doesn't mean that something like Freenet is bad or not needed. There is an ever increasing inabillity to exercise free speech every day. Read your ISP's TOS. Try and get a letter to the editor printed that is critical of the paper. Try to buy an ad during the SuperBowl.
Why isn't this figured out by now? I kill someone with a hammer. Oh, outlaw hammers! Nevermind that with that same hammer I could help fix a poor family's house. I know, "But you still killed someone with the hammer!"
It's rather obvious to me that those who would filter free speech are the world's biggest pussies. Frankly, I enjoy and use my human! (NOT GOVERNMENT GIVEN) right of free speech every day.
Those who would filter it miss the whole point, and miss the irony of the fact that they are encouraging the removal of any personal responsibility, free action or speech.
Yeah! Freedom of Speech is great as long as I like it! You can recite that over and over, when you're in prison for saying something that your new leader didn't like.
When they need support or money, they're the last best hope for freedom online. When you want them to actually produce something that looks like results, they're a research product and they claim that any useful code they produce is only a biproduct.
I wish slashdot would quit passing them free publicity. Better projects have gotten farther without getting a dime.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
My daughter just turned 1 yesterday.
I really don't like Freenet's attitude on child porn.
While most people wish that child pornography and terrorism did not exist, humanity should not be deprived of their freedom to communicate just because of how a very small number of people might use that freedom.
This attitude just isn't good enough. It just isn't.
Don't like that Freenet is slow? It doesn't need donations, it just needs to stop using Java!
No, I would be going after my ex-wife or banker, not complaining about freenet.
...of course assuming you know who did it. Won't do much good if you don't know who. And even if you "know", you need to prove it. Neither of which Freenet is going to help you with.
Basicly, Freenet is open to libel, slander, fabrications, pump&dumps, fraud, disclosure of trade secrets, personal information and whatever else you can imagine that involves misuse of information.
It's not just the kiddie porn. And if you want to combine the two, imagine photoshopped kiddie porn of you and your kids. Wouldn't be able to stop that either.
Freenet is merely one of many ways to achieve the same though. You might want to ask some of the free webspace providers if they ever had cases of encrypted/password protected files being traded over their webspace.
The uploader doesn't know the downloader and vice versa, and the hoster doesn't know the content. Throw in some anonymous proxies and basicly noone knows nothing.
Freenet just claims to be a little better at it than that. And a little simpler rather than having people find proxies on their own. It is merely so disturbingly visible to people - kinda like Napster was, despite all the mp3 trading on irc/ftp/usenet before that.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I downloaded it and installed it (again), and it's still incredibly slow. If there's any speed improvement, it went from 20 minutes to load each page to 15. I had an easier time getting pr0n out of the 'Net in 1992 than I do getting text in Freenet.
I respect the goals that Freenet is trying to accomplish. And contrary to what some people say in here, it's not the spread of child porn. The ability to say things without fear of reprisal is important. Not just from the government, but from corporations, too. How many times have we heard about a big corp coming down on a whistleblower?
That said, I believe anonymous systems are important to the future of communication, especially with the orgy of civil surveillance that's going on in the US right now. But regarding Freenet specifically, I have to wonder what the point of anonymous system is if it's completely unusable.
-R
Is this really Flamebait? I think it's at least worthy of discussion (which would be much more likely if the AC put it with more tact, of course). What little I've read of the FreeNet architecture does not instill confidence in me. For example, building encryption, signing, and searching (have they done this yet?) into the low-level protocol, when we all know that the Internet is successful because the Internet is so stupid.
Bandwidth can only be properly throttled by the network stack in the kernel. Yes, many applications have approximate throttling, but if you're serious about it you should do it properly.
Do NOT underestimate the intelligence of these so called "n00bs", people are capable of making their own decisions. Look at file sharing in general, it is associated with a strong youth/anti-authoritarian streak in america today. Do you think that simply because people are not technically literate they do not see the content on p2p/freenet and understand that the material is dangerous to themselves?
Are you saying they, the masses, do not see what they are doing?
Why do they still use those technologies? because they psychologically don't give a flying fuck what the government says. We are a morally bankrupt society that will take what it can get and always eyes politicians and the government with a certain distrust.Fuck it, I say do foist these technologies onto the noobs, they can make a decision on their own,let it pervade the technosphere, let the information flow where it will.
Oh, by the way
"it's your door, not theirs, that will be broken down. If Ian and Matt want to take such a radical stand for free speech, let them host the illegal content, and let them take the risks."
What does it matter to you what people do? Your commentary almost sounds like those opposed to peer2peer networks in general. Are you opposed to p2p? Are you opposed to freedom of information? Should there be restrictions on what a person can KNOW?
Now pull the plug before someone gets killed.
people are dying every fucking day.
Immaterial vs. material goods. It's a different issue altogether. You cannot compare software with crops.
Software only needs to be built once. Then it can be multiplied infinitely with practically zero costs.
Crop however needs to be built separately each time and it costs a lot of money and time and effort to multiply it.
The Open Source world would work if all people followed it and we could tweak the system so that those for whom which nothing is enough (new boat, new jet, new car, five houses etc.) could be gotten rid of.
So what happened to all the alternatives to Freenet? MojoNation? M-Net? Zero-Knowledge Systems? Zero-Knowledge went out of business, didn't it? I seem to recall some talk about it opensourcing its code. What ever happened to that?
Are there any other anonymity initiatives left that aren't mired in the bog that is Java?
I'm not involved, but I'm a regular user.
I am the opposite in a way, I am not a user at all. But I run a node because I want to support the project and its ideals. Yeah, it uses java, and I am not thrilled about that but I run it and kill and restart it when it spins out of control. I may dedicate a separate machine to it soon. I would run an IIP IRC server/proxy but I haven't read the docs to figure out if that is possible (anyone have the one line answer?)
I have run Grapevine because it looks promising, but as of now doesn't do alot yet. I will also run 6/4, these guys may not have received as much press and recognition as freenet but they have put alot of thought into their license, I would put it in the category of seminal documents that make a stand for freedom like the Magna Carta, US Bill of Rights, GPL... that may seem overreaching, but you can check it out for yourself at 6/4 License
I want to do what I can to support people doing experimentation, sometimes you need stuff running out in the wild to be able to move your project forward. I use plenty of low profile Open Source stuff that is imperfect in various ways. One of the main reasons I use and support Open Source software is to support innovation, freedom and liberty - I don't look at every package as "What can this do for me?" esp since the cost to me of helping out is relatively low compared to people who risk their lives to speak out whether it is standing in front of a tank or publishing articles.
Depends on Sun? You don't want JRE from Sun? Download it from IBM (http://alphaworks.ibm.com/java).
Still wrong? Try Blackdown (http://www.blackdown.org/.
Still not satisfied? You could try running it with GCJ (licensed GPL, http://gcc.gnu.org/java/, and probably succeed after some tweaking.
--Coder
In the cases of kiddy porn where kids have been raped (which is rather a minority of it, AFAIK), the rape has already happened. Nothing can keep it from having happened. The fact that a video exists does not change anything. Distribution of that video, while it violates the child's privacy, does not tangibly harm anyone. In fact, one could even argue that distribution of such material on Freenet reduces actual child rape, because material on Freenet is by definition free as in beer, so the original "content producer" isn't getting any money for it.
...that's a lot of flawed assumptions.
First, why do you think child pornography legally made in the 70s is illegal? Because the forever on-going debate about whether it provokes latent pedos to action, or satisfies pedos who'd otherwise go for the real thing.
Second, you assume only pedos would watch it. How about I send it to your kids, if any. Sell it off as "normal" behavior, lots of kids do it, the adults just don't want you to know about it. And if they'd like to be movie stars too...
Third, you assume the only reason people make those vids is for the money. You think some of it might be primarily for their own enjoyment, produced for friends, for swaps with other producers, or any other reason not involving money? Or that some would enjoy the mere attention and "fame" it'd bring them, knowing people all over the world "love" their vids?
Fourth, you assume there's no way to make money off using Freenet. I wouldn't be that sure. What's to say it couldn't be used as an advertisement? Make you post something equally illegal on Freenet to establish trust (read: not sting), then sell (non-anon) for $$$?
But it's not like Freenet is the only source of any of these things. You'd just have to work a little harder...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That was funny! Please mod this up!
But I am worried about the one really unlucky Joe Sixpacks who get chosen as the first few test cases in the West. Some poor slob who think Freenet's just another way to "freely" swap MP3s with reduced risks of getting a nastygram from RIAA, but who wakes up to black-masked agents screaming "FEDERAL AGENT! WE KNOW YOU'RE HOSTING ILLEGAL PR0N! DON'T MOVE, YOU PERVERTED FREAK!"
/entropy /pick your own anonymizer will never be good for downloading big files. This is because for a good anonimyzing network without a central server there will be always a multiple of network traffic required. There are networks-protocols that are better suited for this. (typical: if data travels a average of 6 hops, you will have to transfer 13 MB of data to download 1 MB)
First of all: You can always be sued by someone. The point is however that the charge will not stick(under western laws) if you are running a freenet node.(and if you do not store the download files on your HD to view them offline). Maybe you can sue back for damages, but this will not be fun.
Second: Freenet / Gnunet
...(whether or not by design) is a "harbor house" of sorts for child pornographers, terrorists, and other criminals."
Oh, you mean like the Internet? Or maybe you mean SCO's definition of Linux? Or maybe how China looks at any sort of freedom of expression that isn't sanctioned by the gov't?
I'm NOT taking anything to extremes here - as I sometimes do to prove a point - these are all realistic and reasonable examples. I could also mention guns (if you outlaw guns than only...) or even democracy itself (even well educated people can make stupid decisions!)
Child porn and other filth exist because there is demand for it. Arrest the bastards responsible when possible - what else can be done? Should we also ban digital cameras and/or color printers because of their possbile infringing uses? There is a point at which we must realize that technology will bring us both good and bad consequences - but this does not mean that it is necessarily evil.
Is your argument about Freenet that it can be used to distribute bad stuff, or that YOU can't find any other legitimate use for it?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I just happened to run Freenet (latest stable snapshot) over the weekend, because I like the idea a lot. Being written in Java, I thought that my spanking new XP2600+/1G RAM box could cope with the load, and indeed it managed to stay running after I added some extra swap space. But even major popular content (index pages and porn, probably ;-)) failed to load (I let it run during ~24 hours), and when I did too many parallel requests, the thing hung up.
So as far as I'm concerned, they're a bit too early being proud of themselves. And I'll leave out the rant about why they have chosen the completely wrong language for this experiment....
Where would I draw the line? I already _have_ drawn the line. Your points do not seem relevant to me:
In the case of racism, adults have the ability to fend for themselves.
In the case of terrorism, countries have the ability to fend for themselves.
In the case of intellectual property theft, companies have the ability to fend for themselves.
But children for the most part do not.
After you try freenet, and realize sending hand-written letters back and forth would be several orders of magnitude faster than this steaming pile, your computer will be POUNDED by computers that still try to contact you as part of the network. It is killing my connection as I write this. Freenet is DDOS-ing me.
As if that's not enough reason for me to NEVER try this again: Freenet pretty much maxes out your bandwidth while it's running, all the time. I think maybe you'd be able to connect to at least ONE freaking resource every once in a while if your bandwidth wasn't being killed nonstop in the first place. I cannot emphasize enough how poorly this whole thing has been implemented.
I'll download it when Java's free(dom) or when it's not in Java. Then maybe I'll think about donating.
The article specifically refers to the problems they were having with bandwidth overload, and the pretty cool and promising solution they have found.
Fuckin' A, man.
Who the HELL here seriously thinks that we can eliminate child abuse by eliminating child porn?
Let's say al-Qaeda uses pictures of the WTC falling down as propoganda for recruitment. Does that mean that we should criminalize posession of the photos? Do you think that would make them stop distributing them? Even if they COULD prevent them from distributing the photos, do you think that it would significantly affect our "war on terror"?
To switch analogies for a moment, if ALL of the porn in the world disappeared tomorrow, would your sexual desires disappear, too?
If I thought for one minute that we could put a dent in child prostitution/abuse by stamping out child porn, I'd be the first to call for Freenet's demise.
There is a difference, however, between actually fighting evil and sticking your head in the sand so you don't have to witness it.
Abuse will continue regardless of whether the photographs are easy to find, and I for one do not a point in denying freedom-fighters in the rest of the non-so-free world--China, Middle East, etc.--of my support just so I can have the luxury of not accidentally running into some horrific picture of some a little kid whose life will probably remain a hell on earth no matter how much regulation we throw at kiddy porn.
Tell that to a baby girl in China--you know, one of the thousands that are abandoned or killed each year due to one of the government's (many) oppressive policies.
Some Chinese choose to fight this government, but without anonymity of speech they wouldn't get very far. Freenet is one such source of anonymity.
I, for one, would sleep better at night knowing that babies in China (...and students, for that matter) are safe from slaughter. It would be nice if I could also say for that if someone circulated pictures of your daughter on the net you could stop them, but alas, these two things are mutally exclusive.
The difference is, in this scenario your daughter is still alive. Hell, she might live the rest of her life and never be affected by the pictures at all (if they weren't abuse pics, I mean.)
The Chinese baby, on the other hand, is dead, and the disidents still struggle in vain.
What was your point again?
...child molesters do. It's quite possible that Chinese dissidents will fail without tools such as Freenet that provide ANONYMOUS free speech.
On the other hand, I sumbit that it's utterly impossible to wipe out (or even dent) child molestors by targeting kiddy porn. If our only means of tracking abuse is via pictures, then something is TERRIBLY wrong. I, for one, would like to catch ALL pedophiles, regardless of whether or not they're dumb enough to photograph their activities.
Anything you read on Freenet should be treated as an unfounded rumor.
It doesn't have to be that way. Use cryptographic signing--you can choose to reveal your true identity, or you can build up a good reputation for your alter ego while maintaining 100% anonymity (or as close to that as Freenet provides.)
Of course, like everything else in the world, this can be used for good or for evil.
Accept that you cannot solve social problems by technical measures.
So that means you agree that the social problem of child molesters cannot be solved by the technical measure of regulation and censorship?
A P2P network might be a tool usefull for those working on these change, but it is neither sufficient on its own, nor is it really neccessary.
Nor is banning said network necesarry (or even effective way) to combat child molestation.
snail sex
by the time you get anywhere you've lost interest in preforming the headboard mambo and all yah wanna do is roll over and go to sleep but something ( the fact that free net is an interesting idea ) keeps you awake like a woman who thinks cuddling is an excuse to suffocate you.
so you attempt to become amorous again even tho you know it's going to be another bout of sexing up tha slug... your hopeing that you'll just be able to get something out of it this time. ( like freenet living up to it's interesting idea )
I'm a little curious about this. Conservative religious influences (well, okay, Christian sects) in the United States have always had a major impact on many laws and standards. Does Christianity have less secular impact in Canada than in the United States?
Come to think of it, I don't believe that the Bible ever forbids sexual interaction with someone of a particular age. The Bible contains a number of standards that are now frequently considered quite conservative, but I don't believe age is ever mentioned as a standard.
May we never see th
Troll? Gimmie a fucking break...
This is the ultimate slippery slope, my friends. If you give someone the power of censorship, you CANNOT control what will be censored.
And when it comes down to it, the parent is 100% correct. Information is never evil. Reading Mein Kampf doesn't make one a Nazi, and looking at a naked kid doesn't make one a child molester.
Censoring these kinds of these doesn't make the kinds of people that typically want them disappear. Why do people always assume this? One could EASILY make the case for the opposite.
What if the FBI embraced Freenet, gave 'em a few million dollars, and then set up a database of faces (...just the faces) garnered from all new kiddy porn pictures? Put it in a promenent location on their website, have teachers and daycare center workers glance through the new faces every day.
(Think of it as an "open source" method of protecting our children, whereas we currently use security through obscurity.)
I dare you to say that this will cause MORE child porn to be produced, or MORE children to be molested... and this is just one possibility. There are all kinds of fun and easy sting operations you can pull when your enemy has gotten complacent (as I'm sure pedophiles would, if Freenet became their Mecca.)
No, information is never, EVER evil, and the sooner the general public realizes this the better.
You are misquoting the Supreme Court opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that one does not have the right to falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater. The decision, in Schenck vs. United States, resulted in Schenck being convicted for mailing anti-draft literature to draft-aged men.
I've been told that Holmes later said that that decision was his biggest mistake on the Supreme Court, although I haven't found a reference to confirm it.
>We've gotta teach our kids to moderate that
>free speech and figure out if it's trustworthy or
>not
NO. We must teach people to CRITICALLY EVALUATE free speech, and judge it based on merit. "Trustworthiness" is only one small part of critical evaluation. And, anonymous trustworthiness is possible through cryptographic signatures. You might not know the real name of who wrote an article, but if it is cryptographically signed with a unique cryptographic signature which was used to sign other meritable articles, then there is proof that the information came from a reputable, though anonymous, source.
Kiddie pron and terrorism. Music and movie sharing. All the usual suspects are dragged out whenever [lobby group] needs to implement a new measure to watch you online and offline.
Your point about even viewing kiddie pron being a crime is at the heart of why their "studies" are fundamentally flawed. Anyone who has any "evidence" that kiddie pron is a massive problem is themselves guilty of viewing it, possibly downloading and categorising it. How did they do their study? By guessing how much is out there?
To me, kiddie pron seems an invaluable tool to frame someone (as with Scott Ritter) such that the court of public opinion will convict them regardless of the real truth of planted evidence. The fact that no one acknowledges this scares me, because it means no one will question when some is found on someone's computer, whether it really WAS downloaded by the person found with it.
Visceral Psyche Films
Speaking of freedom networks, has anyone got any links for people trying to produce durable wireless networks - `gorilla wifi`?
A blog I run for the wealth
Maybe what's needed is pseudonymity, that is, a way to disconnect one's real identity from their identity in various contexts (i.e. as a Chinese dissident), but where they can be held accountable, at least to the extent of being silenced, in that other context.
Hrm, so the thing that would get Chinese dissidents arrested or killed in China - because what you've just described is IPv4 or our current "internet".
I think children are represented by adults/society who defend them, wouldn't you say so?
Also, in a lot of countries, minority groups can not fend (unless they are put in prison or killed) for themselves. Following your reasoning, they should be forbidden; a reverse world. And yes, being *represented* is good enough, otherwise if I wrote an article that said removing/killing foetusses is ok, it should be forbidden, because the foetusses themselves can't very well fend for themselves, can they?
So, it's not a question whether or not someone can fend for themselves or not (otherwise, we could simply say that no laws are needed, and revert to a pure survival-of-the-fittest). What IS the question, is whether or not the individual/group in question gets abused or not, and it's the *abuse* that is wrong.
However, Freenet, just as the regular internet, is a medium and a tool for (among others) free communication, it does NOT abuse on itself...it can be used for good or evil. If you want to stay coherent, you should then forbid the use of the regular Net too. And even digital cameras, of which one could rightfully say it makes it far more easier for the abuser to make pictures of his abuse(d) victims.
There is no end of things to forbid, in fact. And as technology continues, there will be ever more. But I doubt many will feel much to revert back to the middle ages; they'd rather be inconsistant and hypocritical in their reasonings and handlings.
"I think we all agree that most everyone hates kiddie porn."
Well, exept the group pedo's themselves, and maybe some broad-minded libertarians.
So...I think we all agree that most everyone hates the current USA government; let's outlaw them!
So by that logic, the UK should be after the extradition of every single IRA sympathiser in the US?
Would you be happy to stand up in court and say that you were running software which set your computer up as a server for a network which you were fully aware had illegal content on it and you knew that there was the possibility that you'd be storing this illegal content locally?
I'd be interested to see how that turned out. The normal argument (you don't know what's on your disk at any one point because it's encrypted chunks of a mixture of files) sort of falls apart when you've admitted in a public forum that you're well aware that you could be hosting child porn.
You are helping support the infrastructure of the mail system by your usage of it.
So in reality you are 'aiding' the people you disagree with. True its only in an indirect manner, but the fact remains....
Much as the taxes you pay for road repair also supports the people that run drugs
across state lines in their car.
its a fact of life if you I've in a 'society'.. Doesn't mean we have to like it, but one does need to accept the reality of the situation.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And it's really pretty good. It was fast, efficient, and had no hiccups. For those of you running stable edition, and complaining about speed problems: switch to the unstable version. Unstable Freenet for me really sped things up. I would have to recommend it.
"I do believe that anonymity is probably required to achieve truly free speech. There are, after all, the Chinese dissidents to think of. But it also results in absolute freedom of speech, where you can say anything you want, anytime, consequence-free, which just doesn't work for me either."
Like it or not, you can't have free speech without true anonymity: if those Chinese dissidents don't have real anonyimity then the Chinese government can bust down their door and kill them. Either you support free speech with all the downsides that entails, or you support the oppression of dissidents, it's up to you.
"Maybe what's needed is pseudonymity, that is, a way to disconnect one's real identity from their identity in various contexts (i.e. as a Chinese dissident), but where they can be held accountable, at least to the extent of being silenced, in that other context."
That's just silly. Do you really think that a Chinese government that has the ability to break people's pseudonymity _won't_ do so when dissidents speak out against it? Anonymity that can be broken when someone breaks a thought-crime law is worthless, because it's precisely intended to prevent persecution for thought crimes.
If someone had access to, and revealed, nuclear access codes... would you know what to do with them? Who of us would have the ability to even make use of such information? You don't think there are safety mechanisms in place? Like, if someone had a "nuclear launch code" all they would need to do to start WWIII is go to www.bombtheshitoutofsomeone.gov, pick a target, and enter the "secret code" on an insecure webform?
The only "real world consequence" of "bad speech" is MORE SPEECH. If you let child molestors trade their wares in public you give us all more opportunity to identify the victims (fact: few of the children in these pictures ever are identified, and of those few it is well documented that information sent to law enforcement by recipients of these materials has led investigators directly to he culprit). Assuming everyone who hangs about in child molestor trophy trading groups - again - assumes the worse about us all.
The problem here is you're really just making up excuses. There is ALREADY an "anonymous accountability system" in place on freenet - it's been there all along. It's called a pgp key, and there's no reason at all I cannot "mark" each and every one of my posts to freenet using my pgp key to generate a tagfile. There is nothing to stop me from having a dozen such keys, either, which means you still don't know who I am unless you know who I am. You think the people who post kiddie porn don't hang out in other forums, too? I mean, it's not like someone in real life can be both a child molestor AND a priest... right?
Making the argument "free speech only empowers bad things" is assuming the absolute worse about all people. Don't you think anyone will post rebuttals? Don't you see how allowing someone to spew hatred into the world only provides the rest of us an opportunity to more clearly define the boundaries of civility by rebuking it in a very public (and NON-anonymous) fashion?
Your first post also makes another really silly assumption: that people who spread bad stuff are just waiting for the chance to send it to you - to make it sneak up on you; to "indoctrinate" you somehow. Like the people who trade child pornography are just waiting for the chance to "trick" you into viewing it so as to instantly "pervert" your senses of right and wrong.
If you need someone else to take that bullet for you - if your sense of right and wrong is so feeble that "accidentally" seeing something might turn your around - then you should not only avoid freenet, you'd do well to avoid tv and radio and the internet altogether. Not just for yourself, but to help keep those around you safe as well. And by all means, avert your eyes from the cover of ANY "women's" magazine (where 12-15yr old girls are known to appear looking uncannily glamorous and, dare I say, sexual).
Understand? The only accountability is to yourself. There ARE no excuses: either you believe in free speech, or you don't. So what if someone shouts "fire" in a theatre? I've actually been in a theatre when the fire alarm went off, and there certainly was no mad rush: most of us sat there for a minute or more hoping the damn thing would shut off so we could hear the movie; as we stood around the parking lot waiting for the "all clear" we were simply annoyed that our evening had been interrupted by such nonsense. Ever see those videos of the Whitesnake show? The one where all the people died? Even when the fire started there was no panic - the panic only came when it became obvious the danger was real.
No excuses, not imaginary dangers. What killed those people was lack of an alarm system - lack of information. and I'll spare us all, at this point, any further metaphors about society and burning buildings and people wandering around blissfully ignorant to the dangers hidden in the smoky haze...
Don't you find it ironic that folks use a platform for free speech and opinions (slashdot) to anonymously criticise another platform for allowing anonymous free speech and opinions.
Freenet isn't great and it isn't going to be the solution but it's a step in the right direction.
The demand for anonymous data sharing is growing daily given the best efforts of the RIAA and its international counterparts.
Worst
"Your Honor. Agent Smith clicked on this link, which he reasonably believed to contain illegal content. A request went out from his machine to another machine on the network. Some packets got sent back from different machines. Illegal content was stored on our hard drive. Our client happens to have been modified to record the IP addresses of each encrypted chunk of every file as it's being downloaded. Our logs tell us that the 12 chunks that make up the illegal content came from the following 12 machines. With data shared from a source we're not necessarily going to talk much about, we were able to determine that 12 of these nodes were relaying requests (trafficking) but that 8 responded to requests from within their datastore (possession).
In order to prove that the owners of all 20 of these machines are cooperating as part of an illegal content distribution ring, we require a warrant that enables us to seize their equipment."
*flash-bang*, your life's over.
"After we have the warrants, we plan to take the copies of the hard drives from all 20 machines, set them up on a 21-machine lab LAN, and with a few fancy routers, re-create the network as it existed at the time of the crime. By clearing the datastore on our machine and requesting the same key, we intend to prove that all 20 users were engaged in the distribution of the illegal content. Else there's no way we could recreate the illegal content as the 20 seized machines are the only machines on the lab LAN."
A smart adversary will file based on a bunch of "popular" keys that are likely to be stored on any subset of 20 nodes based on its traffic analysis and/or profiles of time-taken-to-respond-to-request certain requests versus certain nodes as sampled over time, but even if the adversary is dumb and only gets a warrant for one key and is unable to recreate the content in the crime lab, you're proven Not Guilty.
Big deal. It doesn't matter if you don't get the Grand Prize of 15-20 years. The damage (to your gear, your reputation, and your career) is done when the warrant is signed, not 6 years later when the dust settles.
If you want to run a Freenet node because you believe in anonymous free speech, and you understand that you could well become the test case for Ian and Matt's political stance, go right ahead. If you agree with Ian and Matt's stance, go right ahead -- it's a free country, which means you're allowed to do things that are of untested legality. You just have to be prepared to face the charges when people with differing legal opinions, differing political agendas, and overwhelmingly superior firepower decide to bring the matter before the courts.
I have a principled objection to running a Freenet node. My gear, my network, my rules. Freenet doesn't allow me to enforce my rules. So I enforced my rules the only way I could -- by not installing it.
I'm pointing out that there's also a practical objection to running a Freenet node. "Your gear, your network, your rules" -- but your government has a very different set of rules on what you can do with your equipment, and an even more different array of enforcement techniques at its disposal.
Ok, first of all, I was not aware it was illegial to run a freenet node. So I can't see how(in the west, specifically USA) you could be arrested or charged for running one. That would be equivilent to being arrested for having a fax machine or a camera because illegial child porn may be transmitted through those.
To charge you - doesn't the government have to have some proof that you are trading, hosting, or otherwise involved with whatever they are charging you with? To me that would mean they would need to decrypt the data going in and out of your computer. Now - even if they come to you and ask for the keys - you can't give them to them, because you do not know the keys. Again, It's not illegial to not tell someone something you don't know. And this comes back to the law in the US. The government can do traffic anaylisis. That is true. I haven't seen where they can question you, search your house, arrest you or anything else based on using some LEGAL(so far) computer without anything else towards probable cause.
At least with Kazaa or whatever, the government(if they were actually interested in anaylizing all the data the hundreds of millions of home computers transfer over the internet, they could read the data(as it is not encrypted) and then arrest you for trafficing in illegial material.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
And this protects you from the following scenario, how?
"Your Honor. Agent Smith clicked on this link, which he reasonably believed to contain illegal content. A request went out from his machine to another machine on the network. Some packets got sent back from different machines. Illegal content was stored on our hard drive. Our client happens to have been modified to record the IP addresses of each encrypted chunk of every file as it's being downloaded. Our logs tell us that the 12 chunks that make up the illegal content came from the following 12 machines. With data shared from a source we're not necessarily going to talk much about, we were able to determine that 12 of these nodes were relaying requests (trafficking) but that 8 responded to requests from within their datastore (possession).
In order to prove that the owners of all 20 of these machines are cooperating as part of an illegal content distribution ring, we require a warrant that enables us to seize their equipment."
At this point, your life is over. You just don't know it until the flash-bang hits. All that's left (in the West) is to determine who get part of their life back after six-digit legal fees and several years in the legal system, or whether you get the Grand Prize of 15-20 in the Federal pound-me-in-the-ass pen. (The Chinese get no such choice; a healthy supply of organs is a nice source of hard currency.)
"After we have the warrants, we plan to take the copies of the hard drives from all 20 machines, set them up on a 21-machine lab LAN, and with a few fancy routers, re-create the network as it existed at the time of the crime. By clearing the datastore on our 21st machine and requesting the same key we did in the warrant, we intend to prove that all 20 defendants are engaged in a conspiracy to distribute illegal content. If we get the content from an air-gap isolated LAN, we've proved our case - the 20 defendants' machines collectively hold the illegal content and distribute it to anyone requesting a key."
Furthermore, a smart adversary will file based on a bunch of "popular" keys that are likely to be stored on any subset of 20 nodes based on its traffic analysis and/or profiles of time-taken-to-respond-to-request certain requests versus certain nodes as sampled over time without even making a request itself, simply by passively monitoring data from many chokepoints on the network for a sufficiently long period of time, but even if the adversary is dumb and only gets a warrant for a key it requested and is somehow unable to recreate the content in the crime lab, you're proven Not Guilty.
Big deal. It doesn't matter if you don't get the Grand Prize of 15-20 years. The damage (to your gear, your reputation, and your career) is done when the warrant is signed, not 6 years later when the dust settles.
If you want to run a Freenet node because you believe in anonymous free speech, and you understand that you could well become the test case for Ian and Matt's political stance, go right ahead. If you agree with Ian and Matt's stance, go right ahead -- it's a free country, which means you're allowed to do things that are of untested legality. You just have to be prepared to face the charges when people with differing legal opinions, differing political agendas, and overwhelmingly superior firepower decide to bring the matter before the courts.
I have a principled objection to running a Freenet node. My gear, my network, my rules. Freenet doesn't allow me to enforce my rules. So I enforced my rules the only way I could -- by not installing it.
There's also a practical objection
One of indias states has an elected majority of communist party members, that does not make the national government communist.
I've not installed Freenet in a year, but it seems from the mailinglist that the activity is increasing.
it may or may not be. but ignorance is not a defence, so if it turns out to be - or even if you simply don't have the resources to fight your country's government in its own courts of law - you're done for.
i think the OP's point was something down the lines of, do you wanna be the punk who doesn't get a chance to see if he's lucky or not? because, i think, the reasoning goes like this:
do yourself a favour - never think they cannot get such proof. especially if you actually were so involved.
http://www.altavista.com/image/results?q=nymphets& avkw=aapt&stq=100
In the West, and specifically, the US, the rules are something like this:
To convict you, they need proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
To charge you -- that is, "to break down your door, take all your stuff, destroy your life and reputation, and make you do the perp walk in front of the cameras", they only need probable cause.
To get probable cause, they need only investigate you, and the outdated laws that used to hamstring government agencies from performing an effective investigation on the 'net have been amended.
In fact, the same laws that empower law enforcement to aggressively investigate clandestine criminal networks have also lowered the bar for seizure to less than "probable cause" in many cases!
Or did you miss every nauseating bleat from every ACLU-sympathizing Slashdot reader in every USA PATRIOT Act thread that's been posted since the smoke cleared in New York and DC?
Even if the ACLU sheep are wrong, it's clear that a Freenet node likely exposes you to legal risks far beyond what you run if you run a Kazaa node.
Choosing to take part in a civil conspiracy to piss off the RIAA and MPAA risks only your bank account. You might even land a contract with a soft drink producer to appear on television during the SuperBowl.
Choosing to take part of a criminal conspiracy to piss off law enforcement and intelligence agencies is a whole 'nother ball game. If you live in China, you might even land a contract with your government to appear in the stadium during the halftime public executions.
Choosing to take part of a criminal conspiracy to piss off law enforcement and intelligence agencies
How is using a software program that is part of a network - like freenet - being part of a criminal conspiracy?
I'm not conspiring to do anything illegial on freenet. No one has contacted me to try and subvert the government.
Not that I really care. I'm going to end up deleting freenet - cause it doesn't work anyway.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
The same argument can be applied to an anonymous system--that is, freenet's anonymity will be broken by the Chinese government, if it can be, just as with a pseudonymous system.
The entire point of a pseudonym is that it cannot be connected with the poster's, or reader's, real-world identity. But, the pseudonymous identity can be held accountable by community standards (the community of the pseudonymous network), at least to the extent of being silenced (which being the raison d'etre of the network, is effective).
demi
Well, at least for me. Since I installed Freenet, about a month ago, I have been unable to get all of the graphics to load on my gateway, nevermind getting a web page *out there on the Freenet* to completely render in anything less than 30min-hour. Considering that I am on dial-up, I wasn't really surprised; but, I was still curious about the project, gui, etc. However, now(at least since this link appeared on Slashdot, I've been able to browse at least 4 or five pages in the past 5 minutes. Granted, like someone else had written I does taste quite a bit like NS Gold on a 14.4 connection; but, I was quite surprised that a posting to Slashdot would actually _help_ a network. Thanks again, Slashdot!!