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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."
...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.
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.
Good luck on firewalling freenet specifically. It is encrypted and on random ports.
Both. Sorry, somebody misinterpreted what we intended to say :). UNSTABLE is working pretty well, but is still being worked on. 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. It is not CURRENTLY sorted out, it is in the process of being sorted out. I should know, I'm the project's one and only paid employee.
Eh? What makes you think it provides a false sense of anonymity? Unless you post from a transient node, establishing whether your node was ultimately responsible for an insert or request is very hard. It's not entirely impossible if you are inserting a large site or a large splitfile, but it is hard, probabilistic, and we plan to deal with that vulnerability in the mid term future. Furthermore for single files it is afaics pretty safe, unless the attacker for example compromizes a large fraction of the nodes on the network.
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.
They already thought of that. Freenet comes with the ability to host a distribution page for others to download Freenet from.
You can download Freenet from my node. (Will be up for 24 hours or 100 downloads, whichever comes first)
The Windows version auto-updates. Unix users are generally clueful enough to upgrade, or at least to go to the IRC channel and ask why it isn't working, and be told to upgrade. And we have not released any official releases for a while, because there was not a point at which it would have been sensible to do so. Our last major release got MAJOR press coverage resulting in the network being effectively DoSed for weeks! Oh and as regards respectable, we have a LOT of content, the overwhelming majority of what is on the main portals, which is not such filth; last I checked 12 out of 440 URLs on TFE were probably child porn judging by the titles.
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.
I'm against child abuse and rape as much as anyone else, but we really need to get our priorities in order. As the Freenet FAQ says, "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."
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
A few comments.
The idea that the net, meaning newsgroups, the Freenet overlay, web pages, FTP sites, the idea that all of them are hotspots of kiddy porn -- where did this idea come from?
Is there a metric? Has anyone done any studies? How could such a count be made, since viewing the pictures, hell, having them on your harddrive, is a federal crime?
Isn't it mostly anti-free internet politicos and religous agitators the people making these claims? And cops, federal and local, who are making big budget careers out of policing the net?
Isn't it just pandering to people's fears?
I mean, it started out small, this meme. After years in the echo chamber of mass communication, "terrorists and pedophiles" are now almost synonymous with file transferers. And, oh yeah, music and video "thieves". Small, now HUGE.
How many thousands of kiddy shots have any of you actually seen? Downloaded? And how many of that subset of imagery on the net was made lately? Are most if not all ancient 8 MM junk made in the 80's, and long before that? And of all that, how much is actually really being traded around by willing hosts, and how much of it is BEING PLACED THERE BY COPS looking to make some easy bust?
IS there kiddy porn on the net? Really? Examine the question for a minute. We are, in my opinion, being suckered into believing something is real 'cause everyone SAYS it is real -- like the WMD in Iraq, who dares say it is a pile of vapor?
And what is kiddy porn? Is a 16 year old in a bikini porn? For most people in this argument, yep. I seem to recall as a young lad that I really liked the Montgomery Ward catalog for its fashionably clad young ladies. Was it kiddy porn?
I seem to remember that Scott Ritter, the chief American weapons inspector in Iraq, got busted for "kiddy porn" on his hard drive not long after calling Bush a liar about WMD's. He's walking around today, so I guess the highly publicized charges were dropped, after he was suitably ruined, of course. What were those naughty pictures? I'm guessing it was the not-kiddy-porn variety.
Again and again, WHAT kiddy porn? How would anyone know without downloading it? And if they don't download it, HOW THE HELL DO THEY KNOW IT'S "ALL OVER" THE FREENET?
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.