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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."
...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?
I just installed it and its running slow as shit. Same as last time. Is freenet being slashdotted or is this just hype?
...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.
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.
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.
I was asking as more of a general question. I personally have no purpose to or interest in downloading Freenet from work. Note my addition of [or country] to the above quote from our web filter.
My point was simply, Freenet sounds like a great tool to "obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship," but how do you obtain Freenet in the first place, if you are under said censorship? My workplace was just a convenient example.
You probably shouldn't click this.
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.
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.
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.
I've heard (though not tried) that Freenet can be compiled using GCJ, the GNU Compiler for Java, to native machine code. In other words, you lose the Java overhead.
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
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
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/ ?
But no (reasonable?) philosophy of freedom of speech is absolute. The classic example is shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater; but there are various forms of libel and slander as well. Speech should be free, but that's different from saying you should be able to say whatever you want, in any circumstance.
The actual problem of deciding whether or not to host child porn is a practical and technical problem that results from providing anonymity, not a philosophical one dictated by the goal of free speech. Once we've decided that anonymity is required for truly free speech (and it probably is) that results in some kinds of abuse: this is a necessary consequence of anonymity, not free speech.
Freenet's pass at this problem is to handle it strictly democratically: unpopular files will, by virtue of their obscurity, not get distributed (very much), while popular files (presumably, by definition, not obscene) will get distributed plenty. But there's a trap here, which is that unpopular speech is perhaps most in need of protection.
My own opinion would be that a better system would be accomplished by a framework of authorship and endorsements, a little like Slashdot's moderation system crossed with a web of trust. All content on freenet would be signed (with an anonymized identity). A few users would (voluntarily) take on the task of doing a little filtering and add their (anonymized) endorsement to the file. Most users would view (and could choose to host) only content so endorsed, and could further whitelist or blacklist certain anonymized identities. This allows the various philosophies of hosting and downloading potentially offensive content to co-exist on the same anonymous network. For example, there could be a few standard endorsements like "is not child porn" and I could elect to host only "non-child porn" content, as verified by Alice, Bob and Charlie but not Mallory, because he fooled me once; or Eve, because Charlie doesn't trust her.
demi
Well, at least one misinformed and silly person will be going to prison when they make Freenet usage illegal because of the child porn.
You know that it will be...it's only a matter of time for it to show on the radar screen of the governments of the world. Freedom doesn't mean 'free to do or say anything you want'. Freedom means 'freedom to do and say things until they start hurting others'.
Needless to say only the most backward of nations is going to tolerate an online repository of child pornography within its borders. I suspect even the Dutch would have a problem with this.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
As far as I can tell, trying to run it with any free java implementation fails--unsurprisingly, since it looks to be impossible, according to Sun's java license, to make a free java implementatino of a java standard post-1.1 (I'm not a Java expert though, and if I'm wrong I'd love to hear it).
I do always find it annoying when a program that claims to be free software is dependent on something that isn't free. I'm not criticizing the desire to use the Java language for free software, but couldn't they have made it compatible with kaffe or something?
demi
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.
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."
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 subject>
> 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.
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
Isn't the goal to have as much software availible to as many people as possible?
Of course it is. It is also the goal to have as much food available to as many people as possible. It is our social responsibility to ensure that the entire world is fed, even if that means us giving up some of our free time to labor in the fields.
Open source is the only way to provide software to the world. Not everyone in this world is a rich white American.
Yes, similarly a related concept known as Open Farms is the only way to provide food to the world. Not everyone in this world is a rich first world nation citizen. The concept is remarkably similar to Open Source. Farmers work in their fields for no pay, producing crops. They then give those crops out for free to anyone who needs them. They don't make money from selling their produce, but they can make sure their families don't go bankrupt by supporting them in other ways -- selling vegetable washing services, vegetable product support, offering cooking classes, etc.
Granted, the farmers won't make as much money as before but the needs of the world come before the rights of any individual farmer. And nobody's forcing them to be farmers either. After all, everybody in this world needs food and they will steal it if there were no free food available.
Have you read the GNU Manifesto lately?
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.
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.
This could easily be achieved by passing a law where people could own only one car and one house. People don't need to live in two places at once, and they can only drive one vehicle at a time. The thought of someone getting filthy rich by exploiting the sale of mere information is repugnant, and they then use the ill-gotten spoils to purchase excessive luxury items when their neighbor down the street has to do without!
Open Source is one of the first steps towards a society where everybody is treated equally.
Have you read the GNU Manifesto lately?
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.
"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.
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
It is almost ready. It seems that gcj from the pre-3.4 GCC suite is getting quite usable; it is also capable of compiling IBM's Eclipse IDE properly.
And will be available on Fedora Core 2 soon. Yum.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut