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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.
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?
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?
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
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
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?
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.
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?
Is freenet really going to help them though? I'm asking this as a question, not implying that it won't, but I'm wondering: Can you detect that a given packet or set of packets are freenet packets, regardless of being able to determine what's in those packets?
If I were the communist China government, I'd set up the country's firewalls to drop freenet packets. There could be benign uses of freenet, but there's definitely uses that don't appeal to the communists.
Either that...or anyone using freenet gets arrested. In China, they might have an easier time getting away with that than in the US...maybe there won't be proof that you were doing anything illegal...but can you prove that you weren't doing anything illegal?
...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
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
I might point out that child porn and rape are completely disconnected. Some child porn does not depict any actual sexual act, and legal sexual acts may illegal to make images of. In fact, in America, it would be perfectly possible to go to jail for possessing an erotic picture of your own wife.
In Maine, New Jersey, Vermont, Conneticut, in fact in the majority of states, it's perfectly legal to screw that 16 year old cheerleader, you just can't take her picture.
You are consfusing the age of consent with the age of majority, a confusion the laws themselves often promote. Perhaps this is the cause of your being modded as a troll by someone.
P.S. you forgot to include the legal disclaimer that your post is void where advocating changing the law is illegal. The net police shall be arriving with their black helicopters momentarily. Please, do not resist arrest. Maybe you'll get lucky and get to inhabit Thoreau's old cell.
KFG
Good luck on firewalling freenet specifically. It is encrypted and on random ports.
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 ----
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.
> 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.
After installing FreeNET and trying it out , I couldn't care less about its claims to be a conduit for freedom of speech. Along those lines, I also couldn't care less about poor, oppressed people in communist countries who aren't allowed to express their views, if they try to express them via FreeNET
FreeNET claims to provide an safe haven for people to exchange information without fear of oppression or censorship. What FreeNET is (whether or not by design) is a "harbor house" of sorts for child pornographers, terrorists, and other criminals.
You may argue (as the FreeNET team does), that a few bad apples are just spoiling the bunch, but next time you log on to FreeNET, count how many of the afforementioned links are available (and towards the top of all the lists).
As far as I'm concerned (and I am not a lawyer, but I have studied the U.S. Constitution in-depth), free speech extends to speech. It does not extend to breaking laws revolving around child endangerment and molestation and civil rights violations and hiding behind it by claiming it's protected by the right to free speech.
In fact, having something like FreeNET tied to the open source community could have a harmfully negative impact upon it. Imagine the FUD campaigns if people started pointing to the material available on FreeNET (sure, they'd be baseless arguments, but they'd be playing on people's emotions). Rebuttal to the FUD might be that such material is freely available from other sources, however that argument would fall short in the eyes of the public because FreeNET is forever tied to the open source community
Just some things to think about before you consider donating (time or money) to the FreeNET project
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
Yes, the anonymous storage on your PC is a problem for many people. I also do not want to support the most disgusting people by giving storage to them for free.
But, anyway, you have to make a very important distinction between freenet and the real world:
Freenet transfers information. Rape nad Murder *always* happen in reality. IMHO, there should go the power of law enforcement.
Wait a sec...
Are the dissidents communists, or are those oppressing them communists?
Your statement makes very little sense. Communism is an economic system - and an economic system has very little to do with freedom of speech.
(Actually, communism may have more of an effect upon freedom of speech, but in the case of communism as an economy, it actually HELPS it)
China's government is communist (though it's becoming arguable with the humungous amount of foreign trade going on). However, it is also a dictatorship (and a somewhat fascist one at that) - a dictatorship certainly supresses civil liberties.
India is communist by popular election. No system of government which supresses personal freedoms as China does would be acceptable to the masses. And you certainly don't see these violations of civil liberties in India today.
Looks like you're still feeling the ill effects of Senator McCarthy (America's worst politian. Ever)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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!
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.
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 don't want my node to be used to harbor child porn, offensive content or terrorism. What can I do?
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.
Personally, I think the only way to stop kiddie porn is at the source. Removing the transport medium will only lead to those involved seeking another medium, and there's always SneakerNet.
> What FreeNET is (whether or not by design) is a "harbor house" of sorts for
> child pornographers, terrorists, and other criminals.
You mean `the internet is...`. So why are you using it. Perhaps you should stop using the phone, postal system, visiting libraries etc.
You can only make the world a better place with information. Ultimately, it is better than ignorance, even if you can pick a few examples of the downside.
I'm still at a loss as to how the internet can help terrorists. What can they now do that they couldn't do before with phone calls? Likewise for "criminals" in general.
I think the internet is a godsend for police and other agencies trying to track down child pornographers.
And who gets to determine what speech 'promotes freedom'?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Let us say that I'm a member of a organization that is strict Constitutionalist, or in other words, believes in a LITERAL interpretation of the Constitution of the U.S.; Or I was a fundy Mormon (Polygamist). Or a member of ELF.
That would make me a terrorist to the current administration.
Let us say also that the Administration was making use of advances in Science to monitor dissidents communications, purchases, library visits, how many times you go the bathroom each days, etc.
Freenet is a neccesary evil, much like lawyers.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
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?
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
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 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.
Don't shoot the messenger. Really.
I hate child porn as much as humanly possible. But that doesn't make me hate cameras. Or freenet. It makes me hate child pornographers. They should be found and shot dead. If it is hard to find them, I don't blame the largeness and complexity of the physical world. Or freenet.
I don't have a solution to child porn, but I don't want restrictions on useful technology because of the sick actions of a few.
Cheers.
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.
"I couldn't care less about its claims to be a conduit for freedom of speech."
"It does not extend to breaking laws revolving around child endangerment and molestation and civil rights violations and hiding behind it by claiming it's protected by the right to free speech."
Personally, I think you're totally crazy. A digital camera and a CD burner might seem like ideal tools for publishing child pr0n. Should they be illegal? Should I say that I couldn't care less about their non-infringing uses? You're just another hypocrite who hates the DMCA for it's effects on non-infringing uses, but at the same time is more than happy to kill a project like FreeNET because it can be used in ways that are in violation of your laws and morals. I don't want to start a war here, but what is wrong with you people!?!?
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
" Freenet will blatantly be used for child porn, and probably already is."
;) The problem is that if you or I can remove child pornography, then the Chinese government can remove dissenting remarks, a corporation can remove documents posted by a whistleblower, and a politician/other important person can remove damaging facts posted about them. Freenet is an all-or-nothing venture.
They state as much in the FAQ. The downside of an uncensorable system is that some people will use it for things you and I would prefer to censor.
Aside from that, the same can be said of the internet itself. The same can be said of the real world, as well. Shall we destroy the internet and the real world to prevent disgusting things from happening or being posted? Or should we address the problems behind the content, such as the abuse of children? We can continue to ignore the problems that are out there by censoring them away, or we can recognize that there exists a major problem, and then go on to solve it.
"While I'm sure there are lots of chinese people who will find value in it, "
Well, yes... considering the fact that it saves their lives . Quit living in your tiny little world and open up a little bit, just for once, hmm? Just recently, a Chinese dissident was jailed for posting "subversive" materials on the internet. Had this person had access to, and used Freenet, they would still be promoting democracy, instead of wondering how many times the guards will be back for torture sessions this week. People in China and other places DO use Freenet to communicate safely with one another. In places like China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, etc, speaking out means you're going to die. How it is you can simply brush aside the fact that Freenet saves peoples' lives every single day is beyond me.
" 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)."
Again, the same can be said of the internet. How many sites have been busted for selling access to child pornography? How many years did those places operate with impunity? How many others continue to go undetected by law enforcement? How many others pop up on the regular internet every single day? Obviously there are those who use Freenet for things that disgust most of us, but those people will find ways to distribute that content regardless of Freenet's existence. The capture of one, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand does little to stem the tide. Until we address the underlying problem, the content will always exist.
"Yeah, free speech is nice, but at the same time providing free speech to child pornographers and Nazis is both hypocritical and wrong."
Your definition of hypocrasy is flawed. Hypocrasy is to pretend to be or believe something which you are not, or do not believe. It would be hypocritical of Freenet to advertise free speech, and then censor that with which it does not agree.
What you mean to say is that you don't like those who would produce or distribute child pornography, and you don't like Nazis, and you wish that they would be quiet and go away. Guess what - I wish the very same thing. The difference is, I'm not willing to call for the downfall of something that saves lives every single day simply because some people use it to say or distribute things that turn my stomach. It's people like you who think that censorship stops at things with which they disagree. In fact, there will always be someone wanting to censor the very things you hold most dear, because they find it offensive. Do you believe in God? There will always be an athiest who doesn't want you 'indoctrinating' their child, and thus wants you banned from saying the word under any circumstances. You don't believe in God? There will always be someone who finds the very thought so utterly repulsive that they want you jailed for even menti
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I agree. We should outlaw kids.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
>
> 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.
Yeah! And I'd rather not have kiddie porn travelling by mail. If we need to end the postal system, so be it, it's for the children. Come to think of it, those vile kiddie pornographers are using encryption to hide their behavior. Let's ban encryption too. Some are even using the Internet, let's ban that. And they're using cameras to take those pictures, time to ban cameras.
Hmmm, now that I think about it, human beings are a common threat in the sexual abuse of humans. We better get rid of people ASAP.
Ultimately your argument is, "But what about the chiiiiiildren!" There are lots of tools used by criminals. Yes, child pornographers use Freenet. It's unfortunate, but it's not the fault of the tool. Terrorists use airplanes and box cutters, but no one is trying to ban them.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
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.
I don't think Freenet is about 'avoiding responsibility', I think it is about protecting yourself from those who find your opinions 'distasteful'.
Yup. Sadly, that may include pictures of porn. And it may include photos and reports of people getting killed for going to a democratic rally.
Porn will be made and distributed with or without Freenet. What about censored, unpopular, unjust information?
It's easy to sit back in your Aeon chair and say, "Well if they can't be bothered to run over to the local AP wire office, then their story must be false."
That's exactly what the government wants you to think, no tinfoil hat needed.
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
I figure I'm about as culpable as anyone running a router on the regular public internet. My node will route any requests it recieves, regardless of content; in the normal course of operation, I can't even tell what is locally stored on my hard disk. I'm no lawyer, so I don't know the ins and outs of common carrier status; I have no idea if this line of argument would hold up in court. It's basically the legal theory that the whole freenet project rests upon, though. And, yes, if the feds decided to crack down on freenet, I would be happy to stand up in court and argue for free, anonymous, uncensorable communication.
Just trying to open someone's head! I mean "mind!" Open someone's mind, um, to the possibilities! With explosives!