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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."
for my free Kevin. There was supposed to be a free Kevin. I'm not donating anything else until I get my free Kevin.
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.
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
...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.
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 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.
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?
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.
No, I would be going after my ex-wife or banker, not complaining about freenet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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 the project's one and only paid employee.
/.? Get back to work, man!
So WTF are you doing reading
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
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.