Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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?