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Revamping Freenet
N3wsByt3 writes "Many will have heard about the anonymous P2P-system Freenet. What many probably don't know is, that a big change is at hand: the Freenet developers have decided to drop all support for the 0.5x version, to skip version 0.6 and to completely revamp the 0.7 build into some kind of poorly described, presumably scalable darknet. The main coder even threatened to quit if such a darknet would be rejected.
So, is it finally going the right way with the development of Freenet? Maybe not, since they seem reluctant to provide real data and rather rely on security through obfuscation, and then there is still the problem of their general inability in regard to pooling human resources, which, for any OSS project, is of the utmost importance." Obviously, the article submitter has his own feelings on Freenet, but notwithstanding that, what's the latest scuttlebutt from within the Freenet crowd?
will it take until it becomes something that can be used as easily as an web browser?
I used to run a freenet node - for a while it bloated with kiddie porn, and not much else - now not even the paedophiles bother, it's become so dilapidated, out of date and slow.
If the Internet is for porn, then Freenet is for child porn. Sad, but true. I would recommend getting around this by giving file sizes a low cap before they're broken into many parts, this would probabilistically decrease the chances of any person being able to get kiddie porn while retaining the ability to serve text.
A very interesting article about flaw in Freenet
http://www.aviransplace.com
I won't be the last to say it, and probably not the first either:
you can always fork. If you do not agree with the current developers' direction, fork.
Matthew has indeed indicated that he believes it is essential that we support "trusted links" in Freenet, and the other core Freenet developers, myself included, agree with him - so Newsbyte's attempt to stir that up into some kind of controversy is just another example of his trolling.
I have no idea where Newsbyte's accusation that we are relying on security through obscurity comes from, certainly the archived email he links do doesn't seem to support any such claim.
As for the blog entry he links to, it essentially boils down to whining about why we don't implement each and every one of his suggestions.
When considering the value of Newsbyte's opinions, I would urge you to look first at what he has actually contributed to the project, versus those that he seeks to criticise.
We ran these observations by Freenet founder Ian Clarke. He agreed that the caching behavior does reveal far too many clues. But the next major revision is expected to eliminate the problem. Sometime later this year, it is hoped, the Freeenet developers will release a version that employs premix routing.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
when the speed of freenet comes within an order-of-magnitude of the normal internet, people will start using it again. right now, it's just a nifty way to do things 100 times slower than you could otherwise.
For anyone who reads the freenet mailing list daily (me), you'd know the the submitter of this article (Newsbyte) is a known troll who doesn't actually contribute to the project.
I suggest that people who want to know the whole story check out the mailing lists going back a month or so.
I hear the accusation of Kiddy Porn quite a lot about FreeNet, but how does anybody actually know? I thought the big idea was that you don't know what's stored on your node - unless you're actually downloading FreeNet kiddy porn, how can you tell?
Freenet gets more attention because its developers are very vocal, but it sucks as a working network. You can hardly get any speed off it, you have to use the stupid browser interface, it's bloaty java, and there's no working search. Switch to gnunet, it has decent speeds, working search, and has a graphical client (not a very nice one as yet, but that could be improved).
I am trolling
with comments like these:
5. Slashdot effect doesn't write off the network for a month after release; if we grow by invitation, it will take longer to grow, but we will end up with a better network, and we won't generally have the collapse we have seen every time we've done a release.
this might just be an attempt to bait the slashdot crowd into trying out freenet so that freenet's userbase grows and the speed become reasonable.
How does freenet compare to plex?
Although you don't know what's on *your* node, you can see what's on the network as a whole...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
You can't tell what's stored on your node very easily.
However, it is relatively easy to see what is on freenet at large. There are several spiders that roam freenet and index freesites they come across. It's sort of like what Google does. So all one has to do is load up these indexes and see how many of the sites are child porn related. Another way to tell is load up Frost and see how many of the boards of child porn related.
There's a very large number of them.
A lot of people seem to be confused about obfuscation / obscurity.
Obscurity or hiding things is a perfectly valid security technique, and can be used as a component of a defense in depth strategy. One of the main reasons people love NAT boxes is because they provide this property automatically. (I don't like them for other properties they have, and a firewall combinded with public address space will be just as effective at providing this specific property).
People are stretching the meaning of Kirchoff's theorm. Krichoff was refering to crytographic algorithms when he said that there is no security in obscurity - the security of a crytographic algorithm should only rely on the secrecy of key. You should assume that the functioning of the algorithm will eventually be discovered by your adversaries, and therefore shouldn't make the security of the system depend on the functioning of the algorithm being kept secret. That being said, restricting knowledge of what algorithm you're using will make a contribution of the system being secured, as it can add to the depth an adversary has to penetrate.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Only a browser interface? There is an 'application port', and there are applications written for it. ( such as frost )
Java bloat? No worse then other languages that try to be *universal*. Besides, don't like java? Then recode it in something else and quit bitching.
Slow? Depends on what you are doing. Are you trying to download files? Well it really wasn't designed for that. And there will be a tradeoff on speed/anonymity.
Searches? Umm there are several search engines available if you look.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Freenet has websites, and a message board with Frost. While everything is anonymous it doesn't mean you can't see what's available.
Of course nobody actually knows who downloads what and how much, but there are big lists of websites and such. Although you can hardly call them accurate, since nobody forces anybody to submit their site to the existent indexes.
It's been ages since I last tried Freenet though. The Java server is incredibly annoying, eats tons of RAM and uses a lot of CPU time, and the rest is still very unimpressive. There was Entropy which seemed noticeably smoother, but it had plenty problems of its own, such as a complete lack of security (from what I could see)
Who knows.
/dev/null . Ill stick with The Onion Router, mynd you.
That damned programs runs like a overgrown elephant in a cold tar pit (it doesnt).
I had it for 2 days and really gave it a chance. Didnt do jack-shit for me and it ended up going to a file called
Some months ago when I tried it, one of the main index pages boasted of a link to such. I didn't follow it, and it might have led to a slashdotesque "Haha, you perv! No kiddyporn here." troll.
But it's not difficult to see how some would think that's what freenet is about.
Now, if there is anyone out there that lives outside the US, and would like to help me experiment with a different method of anonymous networking, send an email.
I hear the accusation of Kiddy Porn quite a lot about FreeNet, but how does anybody actually know?
Hard to tell exactly what's circulating on the network, yes, but I saw signs of it since it was the first thing I was greeted with after finally finding out the address of a large "a little bit of everything" Freenet portal. Maybe the conclusions were drawn prematurely, but it sure didn't look so with links like "The Blog of a Paedophile", "Illegal child porn", and on and on... Think of a kiddie porn-oriented Yahoo!.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Every time there's a freenet article on
Personally, I see Freenet as an experiment in what's possible. There's an abstract problem statement: how do you share data anonymously? And Freenet attempts to provide a solution to that problem. There are many valid uses for a solution to that particular problem. The canonical example is "dissidents in ". But it goes beyond that. Everything from corporate and government whistleblowers even in relatively free countries, to those who want to expose sensitive information they might be privy to without giving themselves away.
The problem is that such a system, by design, is necessarily going to be useful for people that organize activities and spread information that has little redeeming value. If dissidents and whistleblowers can obtain anonymity when sharing information, then so can child pornographers and terrorists and gangsters and whoever else.
This dilemma occurs with many systems based on an ideology of freedom and opposition to censorship. The US constitution's first amendment guarantees the right of NAMBLA to express their views on a public webpage.
The point is, freedom to any extent in the public commons will, necessarily, support both good and bad uses of that freedom. The question people have to ask themselves is wether their belief in the ideology behind that freedom is worth the tradeoff or not.
If you believe that the "bad guys" should be kept off of Freenet, then you don't believe in Freenet, or any other truly censorship-free information sharing system.
-Laxitive
I suspect (and it is a suspicion from someone who hasn't yet used freenet) that plenty of copyrighted music and movie files are floating around on freenet.
My question is, has the RIAA, MPAA, or any other such agency yet attempted any legal action against any user of Freenet? If so, can coverage links be provided?
i2p.net seems to be a better alternative. especially because it provides an overlay network. you can't just transfer files over it - you can do everything which you can do on the current net. you can even choose how "much" anonymity you would like (over how many nodes should your messages be relayed).
I'm not going to fight with someone to help them with their project...
and yet we are both modded Off-topic. Heaven forbid we correct the kiddy-porn distro's spelling!
click me
I haven't tried Freenet in quite a while, but when I did use it now and again before (in the 0.3-0.5 days, AFAIR), the main problem was that they'd get a network that kind of worked, lots of people would start posting stuff, it would be usable for a few months, and then they'd break it to introduce the 'next big thing'. And it would stay broken for six months, during which time most people stopped using it.
Frankly, for Freenet to have any future, I think the developers need to get used to the idea of _not breaking it_ every six months. Otherwise the few people with the enthusiasm required to keep it operating are going to find better things to do with their time.
You can either have a research network or a viable, usable system, you can't have both. If it ever gets to a viable, usable network, I might give it a try again, but it's pointless when you can't insert anything and can barely retrieve anything.
Fast networks with nothing in them aren't very useful.
The web exploded when everybody and their brother started publishing web pages, not when people had browsers or connections to the internet.
It's about content. For freenet though, that means a very different type of content that you wouldn't want on the web. The social problems that they'll face if the network does grow into something substantial are surely going to be something to behold.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
What many probably don't know is, that a big change is at hand
Like maybe making the thing fast enough to be usable, maybe?
You always hear the Freenet detractors talking about all the questionable content making its way to Freenet, but my question is "How the hell could you stand using Freenet long enough to view anything in the 1st place?". The thing's dead-dog slow, and I'm on a very fast broadband connection!
I love the concept, but unless this new revision brings speed to Freenet, it's a waste of time and effort to me. Secure and anonymous internet browsing is an important thing, but usability's should be just as important if they ever hope to bring this to fruition.
can you upload the script somewhere? I would (and I'm sure others who find child pornography morally and ethically questionable) find this very useful.
click me
unless you're actually downloading FreeNet kiddy porn, how can you tell?
Seems like it's bad enough that (for example) this FreeNet index has felt obligated to include a short essay and an "Enter Here at Your Own Risk" warning on their front page.
Looking at the actual index for a moment (somewhat, the idiot webmaster decided to put in a username/password prompt that keeps coming back endlessly), I notice 3 or 4 immediate child porn/pedophile-related links right on the front page, several links to regular porn, a link to the "Freenet Drugs Index", "The Illuminati Agenda" (heh), and so on.
Not that it's necessarily anything you couldn't find on the normal Web with a little work, but at the very least it sure doesn't give any advantages.
I'd very much doubt that if people were given all the public addresses they needed (negating the need for the address expansion property of NAT), they'd be happy for their machines to be publicly visible, respond to ICMP echo-requests a.k.a. pings etc.
Note that I didn't say it was the only property that people liked, just that it was one of the main ones.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
2 related projects, but they're also very different to freenet.
Tor is simply an anonymous p2p proxy:
http://tor.eff.org/
i2p is a fork from freenet. Similar to Tor but you can host your own site off it.
Both are not nearly as freenet. I'm loving i2p though because it's much more practical.
For a lowdown from the i2p people on these and more similar technologies see here:
http://www.i2p.net/how_networkcomparisons
A blog I run for the wealth
The problem I've had in using Freenet is that they are open to any content. What this says to me is, "If you want to share terrorist information or child porn, you are welcome here."
Before you jump down my throat, please keep in mind that I know that the term "terrorist" is highly subjective. Also, I *like* the idea of being able to have my communications remain private. My relationships are my business, and I don't have to subject them to any other *human's* supervision because I don't trust that the supervisor is any more virtuous than I am.
But to create a Freenet that is completely agnostic toward content is entirely the same thing as creating a terrorist-friendly and pedophile-friendly network. That may not be the intent, but it is certainly the outcome.
And it's for that reason that I don't use Freenet. I want completely private communication, but I don't want to be lumped in with vicious creeps, either. How can Freenet or any network provide me with that? I have doubts that it's possible at all.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
FYI - there is a short response to this article on the Freenet website.
Not necessarily a result of freedom and anonymity. I haven't looked for child porn, but I know there's plenty of music and programs up on gnunet.
I am trolling
We need the market to change to make trading TV shows, movies, and music legal. This article yesterday is a perfect example of tackling the problem from the right direction.
Just trying to hide it will only invite further problems and frankly, the idea of being unable to avoid contributing to the spreading of child pornography bothers me a lot more than the MPAA and RIAA going after people illegally trading copyrighted material.
What we need is for the RIAA, MPAA, or some organization(s) that will eventually supplant them to find a financially viable market in open, distributed file sharing. A solution that makes everyone happy and doesn't contribute to child pornography.
I am convinced that this is possible. If the MPAA and RIAA can't figure out a way to make money doing it, someone else will and the MPAA and RIAA will eventually die off. Evolution: Adapt or die off. Wasn't there an article on that over the weekend as well?
wrong. While a mid-level mathematician could never aspire to write on the level of Einstein, he assuredly could verify his results.
Ceci n'est pas un post
fails to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
If the entire net suddenly switched overnight to end to end encryption with some kind of anonymity system as well, how many people who are currently against the ethics of freenet would just leave? Who knows would you could be routing over your network? The concept of you actually hosting a chunk of content isnt really relevant, you dont know what it is.. the whole thing is transparent. Its immaterial.
Brain(s): 0.0% user, 1.3% system, 0.1% nice, 98.6% idle
I dont like his attitude based on his posts in the projects mailing list, simple as that.
guess you are too busy making further unsubstianted claims to actually justify those you have made so far. Exactly where is this "proof"? Have you told the real life dissidents that are actually using Freenet today?
I am sure there are some trained pandas using it too. The point remains that the network features ten times more of kiddie porn then anything else. In addition to its major flaws such as being totally vulnerable to a mere traffic analysis at the ISP, being vulnerable to a fixed-node takeover, having abysmal performance, being useless for the main purpose it was designed for, etc, it also allows for the opressive government to create a plausible equation of Freenet user = Pedophile.
And let me guess, you are just the person to do it. I look forward to reading your paper.
An all-time classic of mis-direction: if someone can prove that something does not work, you claim his point is invalid because he did not volunteer to fix it! I already stated the problem might be unsolvable in the first place.
You can have speed and anonymity with I2P since you can control your the # of hops. Now if you *and* your destination node both choose to have 0 hops then it would be a direct connection. But since no one knows you are choosing to use 0 hops, you have plausible deniability that you are just acting as a buffer and ferrying the data for someone else instead of yourself.
With I2P you can control how much anonymity you want and how much speed, that is why many people are looking at it (on top of the fact you can run BT, IRC, eMail and other internet services over it).
Try explaining that to the Men in Black. The CIA/NSA types will just laugh.
Yes, this is tinfoil hat land in the U.S. but for places like China, Corea, Myanmar, etc. plausible deniability is simply not an option, just being a link in the chain will land you on the short path to the salt mines.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Its been said before, but freenet is a reflection of us as a society. You may not like it, but some people do and thats all there is to it - legal or not - the fact that this project represents true freedom of information, without fear of censorship from anyone. Period.
The truth is hard to swallow.
There have been several comments so far mentioning how Freenet aids the spread of child porn and other evil things (IMO) and how the user of a Freenet node has no say in what kind of content is spread using their net connection and computer.
My question is, ignoring Freenet's ideological notion that all speech (even nasty/evil stuff) is worth protecting, can anyone think of a possible solution to this situation? In other words, do you think it is even possible that Freenet or something that works like Freenet could be modified to alleviate these concerns?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
With BT, I can decide that I have no moral objection to spreading last nights episode of the Simpsons, with FreeNet (and others like it), I don't get the same choice.
Yea, fine, but you don't send a letter to the MPAA every time you are spreading one of their works, do you? So you are also relying on security by obscurity, namely that you will stay protected by the general open nature of the internet.I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
... or I just heard wrong. But you only cache the content you look at and not what you don't. Is that right? Then that would mean that if I didnt' look at porn or CP it wouldn't cache itself on my computer/node?
I thought the idea of p2p was you share what you have and caching (although good in some way) wasn't what p2p was about.
maybe I'm wrong
However, this may not be the correct course to take in order to guarantee free information exchange whether governments like it or not.
As a general rule of thumb, provoking a government will cause it to crack down and decrease liberty. Regardless of the supposed safety built into 'Freenet' software, people don't want to be in the position of running an illegal program and depending on the security features of that program to keep that fact safe from prying eyes. Each release of the software will have flaws which can be exploited. The government 'bad guys' will be able to hack in to each new release making you and your users upgrade constantly to keep ahead. And there will be no way to be sure you are not actually one step behind.
If ever it should work, freenet will be banned in the West and in the Rest. Once it is banned, few people will risk running it, and those who depend on it for anything important will be caught, meanwhile, the rest of us will have lost the right to use such technology for legitimate purposes.
Misusing dynamite doesn't bring down the government. You don't get anarchy. You just ruin everyone's ability to buy a stick or three at the local hardware store to remove stumps with while the criminals still brew it in their basements.
So how to fight back? How to help keep information exchange possible even in repressive regimes?
Let's take a look at what works, and see why: The internet at large is one example - the internet at large is not illegal in China( or Saudi Arabia or pick your own repressive non-DPRK country ). The PRC works tirelessly to censor the internet while keeping it available because it knows that to shut it off completely would have extremely deleterious economic effects. What company would invest heavily in a country that was so closed as to shut off the internet?
The censorship, the PRC acheives is far from perfect. Information gets through, and spreads via word of mouth. Millions of curious chinese make prosecution for mild curiousity impractical, and create a crowd for the very curious to hide amongst - and they are more careful.
The governments swallow the poison pill of unpreventable free information exchange in order to reap the valuable benefits to be had from all the information exchange that DOESN'T offend them.
At present, the internet is structured in a way that makes many forms of censorship technically simple. Sure the censorship is not perfect, but it is good. Because legitimate servers are traceable and visits to those servers are traceable, would be censors are in a powerful position.
P2P software can be made to anonymously share information, but it is vulnerable to being made illegal until it provides economic benefits that make outlawing it too unsavory to consider. Legitimate use of P2P must make up the lions share of activity or P2P will not survive widespread popularity. It will be made illegal before blooming, forever preventing it's true fruition. Check out this post I made a while ago (my email address has changed since then)
"There's a very large number of them."
;). I have little doubt that this
age of hysteria over
terrorists and pedophiles under our beds will pass as well, although I wonder
what the next group will be.
Perhaps, although not that I've seen. It's mostly people pushing anarchy type views, copyright infringement (assuming that their country has copyright which may not) of books esp., and other type blogs. Perhaps we could post the front page, in text format, of one of the portals here and count them.
Although just of think, if it was 40-50 years ago we'd be complaining about communists, or black civil rights organizers, or gay and lesbian individuals wanting their freedom. Every age has it's group that is the bad group of the day and go back far enough and we'll be at the original witch hunts
The new Freenet with trusted links will be quite like these anonymous friend-to-friend networks:
WASTE,Mute, and NapShare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2F_P2P
"If not, is there a threshold level?"
:). Unless the attacker is able to isolate your node by becoming all of your peers you should be safe. You can prevent this of course then by making sure one of your peers is someone you know to trust (although if your peers are a variety of IP addresses throughout the world, it would be hard indeed for someone to be able to become all of your peers).
It is good you are asking although it is best to ask people who know what they are talking about. Although many (most?) of the Slashdot people here are intelligent (in comparison to other chat/blog sites) you should still ask people you know to be competent...
That being said, here is my answer
As well, I2P's anonymity might not be 100% due to unforseen bugs. Freenet is safer than I2P as it's been around longer. If you can do without I2P's usability then use Freenet, you can also try I2P out there is no need for I2P to 'intergrate' like Freenet has to, it should be fairly fast within 5-10 minutes (compared to day(s) with Freenet) of installing.
One interesting thing - I also checked out the freenet site (after holding down the Escape key for 20 seconds).
One interesting link:
The Cleanex Experiment
Link updated 2 days ago
A utility for removing child porn from your datastore.
Interesting...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
"Yes, this is tinfoil hat land in the U.S. but for places like China, Corea, Myanmar, etc. plausible deniability is simply not an option, just being a link in the chain will land you on the short path to the salt mines."
;).
It is quite hard indeed to design a network in which all users are not easily found. In my opinion though Freenet has had it's day and is useful as a experimental network esp. with this new 0.7 routing idea but is no longer in the running for useable anonymous p2p for the masses.
The contender for that is I2P now. Freenet is still useful through for developing the 2nd generation of anonymous p2p when we'll need more protection from node list creators/sniffers when our Western 'democratic' governments outlaw anonymous p2p and come a knockin'
Cell networks don't. The goons catch one person, look at who his machine connects to, look at that one, and the next, and map out the whole network. Users don't even know they're helping out, the goons can just look at upstream router traffic.
The only way to have more or less anonymous usage without betraying your colleagues is to piggyback traffic on broadcast data -- such as irc, like the spam robots, or, better, web sites. The traffic should look just like (non-SSL) HTTP, like somebody websurfing, with the data encoded in odd places, such as varying the whitespace found in HTML of pages taken from other sites. (It could be encoded purely in the page, by normalizing the spacing before encoding into it; or only extractable by comparison with the original text.)
Furthermore, it should prefer to connect to hosts in other countries, to break the trace path. The node posting the data should post it to a different IP address than any of the other nodes get it from; they should get it from a variety of addresses. Each text should be encoded into a different page each time it's sent.
Socially, it needs to be something people can be proud of patching into their web servers -- like an underground railroad -- so that there may be a very large population of foreign web servers running the host side and replicating files among themselves. (Maybe they can restrict delivery to clients in certain countries.) And, of course, it needs to have a small footprint, so it doesn't interfere with normal operation of the web server.
Directories invite abuse. Better, just arrange that every client gets everything posted more or less recently, and knows which it has seen before so it will know not to accept those again. Clients only see traffic on channels they monitor, like leaf usenet feeds. Some would be for discussion, others for posting documents.
Freedom is not absolute. Even Germany in the middle of the European Union has laws against neo-nazi propaganda. Some things *are* beyond the pale and I would suspect that most rational humans would agree that at the very least coerced child pr0n is one of those cases. You could argue, I suppose, that evil must be fought on a more fundamental level than that of speech, but I would defy you to ask any survivor of the death camps whether communication of neo-nazi ideas is an important thing to control despite its implications for "free" speech. It's a shame that there is always someone who wants to use a public resource for other than the public good, but short of intentionally mutating the human organism, it ain't gonna happen. How to impliment such an attitude technically? I haven't a clue. I just know that the myth of absolute freedom is just that--a myth. And any project that tries to support that myth is going to get really bizarre.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Sure:
Time to get you off my 'friends' list. Loser.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
"(Newsbyte) is a known troll who doesn't actually contribute to the project."
Really, and attacking his character instead of his statements makes you...what then?
I really hate to get into a debate about character, since I prefer to judge a statement on its own terms since it seems to be a statement's truth is independent of the speaker, but Newsbyte runs the freenethelp.org webpage. He's not some loner retard coming out of left field, he seems to have large issues with the (lack of) progress Freenet has taken over these past few years. Hopefully this will stimulate something in Freenet, but many people have long since moved on to other anonymous p2p projects.
This conversation really should have taken place a few years ago, but I think it did (October 1.5 years ago actually) when people wanted to fork it and go back to a working model. I look at MUTE and see all the forks and side projects, or BT with all its forks and side projects, but has Freenet had any forks? It does not look vibrant any more, and defiantly not in comparison to current anonymous p2p application development in my opinion. Too bad really, although this new idea of Freenet's looks interesting, enough to try it they've little to lose.
IMO, Freenet is trying to solve the wrong problem by trying to make it impossible to detect even through statistics, impossible to shut down, etc. What they should be doing is building the freenet features as a trojan part of a larger software. Make a 'plausable deniability' P2P system that works and is fast and you can send any other data you want as a small amount of overhead. For example, if as you are using bittorrent you are also sending .5k / sec of encrypted "free" data out of China then your problem is solved.
Basically, include lots of Joe Innocents and porn downloads in the network as white noise.
Its quite common for satisfied customers to quietly go on about their business, leaving the nuts cases that are unhappy to complain and grab the press.
They are still nut cases, and are still wrong.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"yet hasn't actually contributed a single line of code to the project in his several years of trolling the mailing lists."
Well, duh. Did I say something else, ever? That's just the point of what I say on my blog: people that don't offer code, are not much then trolls in your eyes.
"As for the blog entry he links to, it essentially boils down to whining about why we don't implement each and every one of his suggestions."
Hmmm... First of all, it's not merely 'my' suggestions: many of them were suggested by others too. And secondly, it's not about 'each and every one'; not even *one* of all the suggestions I listed on my blog has been implemented.
If you're going to argument about my motives, at least use facts, not generalisations based on bias.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
"you can always fork. If you do not agree with the current developers' direction, fork. "
People tried to fork Freenet a couple of years ago (October 2003) when it started going down the shitter (in April 2003). The forkers tried to be as nice as can be about such an issue, but the current Freenet developers told them in effect to 'Get the fuck out of here' and they did not bother.
What one of the would be forkers (jrandom) did do though which is a nice kind of tasty ironic desert is make I2P instead. Kinda nice, time that would have been spent on Freenet now made an application that in many respects meets or exceeds the abilities of Freenet.
I really do not want to make this sound like a bitter tale, it really isn't. I believe both projects (are?) seem to be getting a long since everyone has the goal of working anonymous p2p. This newest idea of Freenet is looking towards the future when our government (Western governments) try to outlaw anonymous p2p like current dictatorships are or have done.
and let the grown ups talk. This looks like one of those times that you have a lot more to learn than you have to teach.
I'll bet terrorists and pedophiles feel EXACTLY the same way. So how do you create a system that instinctivly knows where the line is drawn, especially when as a society we do not even know where the line is drawn.
It's impossible, just like it's impossible to use Freenet without immediately lumping yourself into the "terrorist and pedophile" camp. I never argued that we should create a filtered system. I argue that Freenet, by its nature, draws the eyes of law enforcement and, hence, I can't use it. I believe it may have the *reverse* effect of increasing privacy by increasing scrutiny.
Freenet seems to have taken the only POSSIBLE approach, which is to say it does not try to make value judgements.
There's no way to avoid the value judgement in this case. By saying, "We don't care what you send over our encrypted network," they say, "terrorists and pedophiles are at home here," and that is a value judgement. We may quibble over the definition of "terrorist" and "pedophile," but that's not going to change the fact that Freenet welcomes terrorists and pedophiles and that's going to draw the police like flies to shit. And, for that reason, I think that Freenet is a flawed concept.
All forms of encryption are, ultimately, perceived as a thumb at the nose of law enforcement and a childish dare. "Bet you can't crack this, coppers!" I don't feel that way about it, but I don't have to. Hiding in the open draws scrutiny. What privacy have I gained if I start encrypting all of my messages and the FBI responds by putting a surveillance team on my house? This happened to a friend of mine (not for using encryption, and he was acquitted of all charges, stupid FBI agents). You'd be stunned at what the FBI has the right to photograph or videotape without "invading your privacy" (as defined by law).
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
This is completely ridiculous reasoning. If you really believe this
Actually, I don't believe it at all, but it really doesn't matter. Perception is reality to law enforcement (as it is to most humans). Freenet is perceived as a network where terrorists and pedophiles can exchange information with impunity. Law enforcement does NOT have the same perception about computers and doors. Law enforcement probably uses lots of doors and computers but has little idea about Freenet other than it being a place where pedophiles can go to swap pictures and not get caught. My claim: To law enforcement, a person who uses Freenet is more suspicious than a person who uses a computer.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
What about fake children?
I bet you could find someone with both the mindset plus access to talant on par with the folks at pixar, for enough moola.
And yes, i'm trying to cause a morality short-circut, just for experiments sake.
"Not only that, this program benefits China and 'the Middle East' according to the site. Sorry, I'm not 'down' with a program that caters to communists and terrorists."
Are you ignorant, or are you just flamebaiting? Freenet benefits those who work *against* China's oppressive government or terror-supporting Middle Eastern regimes.
Or is everybody in China a Communist/fascist, and everybody in the Middle East a terrorist?
Freenet caters to anybody who has something to say. It doesn't know or care, for example, whether that speech is supporting or attacking terrorism, or whether it's defending or opposing the government of China. Freenet helps information be free, but whether or not Freenet exists, the information still does.
Signature.
Based on your beliefs, we (The Peopele) can NEVER conspire to bring justice to this governement (because the government 'won't allow it').
Many responces above explained that the purpose of ananymous speech is more than just for criminal intent. Maybe you'll understand them better is you go try telling a cop, judge or juries they can't have private conversations.. or better yet, maybe we can go a step further into 1984 with a camera and mike into the bedrooms (of all the so-called protector of children) to see what their 'up to'. I'v ALWAYS been suspious of people who are 'obsessed with protecting children'. It makes you wonder what they are hiding.
I'll tolerate or ignore whatever speech you want to give, but when you break the law with speech (by planning a crime or leaking classified government documents or slandering someone), I want the police to hold you accountable.
So you would arbitrarely allow this even tho 'The Law' is the most 'subjective' thing on earth (ie it is constantly being contested, changed, removed-retroactively, and just plan 'ignored' because it is either a 'bad law' or *can't* be applied'.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
They were the same reason we shouldn't have any of:
VCR
BBS
Internet
Polaroid
Digital Camera
Just because you can think of a sick use for them doesn't villify the technology. How long will we continue to see methods of speech propagation attacked because there are some things that are horrifying, which will be spread via them?
Short version: Give ethical/moral arguments opposed to Freenet that do not also apply to the Internet in general. Note that the Internet in general is a superset of Freenet, and therefore includes anonymous posting of information.
I vote Libertarian always. And what you say is true in theory, but not in reality.
The government has the right to steal any property from you that they think is connected to the distribution of controlled substances. It sucks and I hate it, but the citizenry has allowed the government that right.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
As I expected, I'm getting viled and praised at the same time. Some call me courageous, some call me a troll.
Well, I don't care either way, as long as people give valid arguments for why my claims in my post are untrue. Alas, few who refute what I say by claiming I'm a troll even try. But, of course, even if I *was* a troll, then still it says nothing about the arguments I made. The tactic of depicting the speaker as an idiot, troll, etc, and thus what he says as being untrue neither, is a well known falacy.
I find it humorous that Ian, in this slasdot thread, says I'm a troll because 'look; he's never provided one line of code to Freenet'...which proves to me he didn't even do the trouble of reading my blog, because that's exactly what I point out in my blog: if you aren't a coder, and don't contribute code, one isn't worth much in the eyes of Ian, whatever one may have done in support as a non-coder.
So, I'm a troll because I've never provided code and I dare to criticise? Wow. Even now, he doesn't see where the problem lies, instead he portrays exactly the attitude that I describe. But still, while I have troubles with the way he manages Freenet, I still think he has had (and still has) some good ideas - something which is important too. I could call him a 'troll' as well, and thus shrug off everything he says, but I'd rather see arguments, especially about the topics that I've raised. But, chances are, I'll be waiting for a very long time; it's much easier to call me a troll, after all.
That said, my opinion of Freenet, as a concept, is still high. People should not make a mistake about that; being all for free speech, I can't else then see any way of making it possible for all people to speak their mind unafraid as something unbelievable valuable. So, it's not Freenet itself that I have a problem with, it's the current way in which it is managed and developed - and I don't say that just out of the blue; I argument it and give examples of it on my blog.
As yet, 'troll' is the most advanced reply I received from the founder. I don't know: maybe I was the wrong person to tell this. Clearly, his bias towards me prevents him from arguing rationally about the points I brought up.
It's true, that sometimes, my blog is a bit harsh, but then again, after seeing and experiencing several years of people being ignored because they are no coders, one gets a bit annoyed by it.
Anyway, maybe Freenet WILL go in the right direction, perhaps... or maybe it will be surpassed by systems like I2P. But, I can bet one thing: its succes or failure won't be determined just by the code.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
but ignorance of the FACTS is a perfectly valid defence
Often, the degree of the crime (such as Nth degree murder vs. Nth degree manslaughter) depends on mens rea. There are several levels of mens rea, from willful, to intentional, to reckless, all the way down to negligent. But there's also strict liability; look it up. Ignorance of fact, even despite one's best effort, is no defense to a strict liability tort or crime.
"And I don't see any particular impediment"
The "don't" got lost in an edit.
KFG
There should be no restrictions on speech. Look, if someone puts child porn on the internet THEY are the ones who should be put in jail, the people who actually took the pictures and abused the child, put them in prison. People who just look at the pictures, this is putting people in jail for a thought crime. There is a difference.
Free speech does not have to be limited for law enforcement purposes, are we in China now? You should have the ability to annonymously say whatever you want as long as its not harming anyone. What you are saying is that by somehow stopping the distribution of childporn that you somehow cure the child of the abuse and thats BS. The child is already abused, so what you really mean is anyone who sees the abuse should go to jail? or do you mean anyone who talks about the abuse? you see where this can go? They could make it illegal just to describe child porn with text if you don't protect freedom of speech. If they can limit child porn speech then its easy to limit any other kinda speech and all freedom is lost.
So how much freedom is too much? It's not freedom to harm a child, its freedom of speech to talk about it. This means no child should ever be harmed, raped or any of that, but the moment you start putting people in jail for talking about it, then something is wrong. What would stop the government from putting people in jail for talking about communism?
The problem I've had in using Freenet is that they are open to any content.
What this says to me is, "If you want to share terrorist information or child porn, you are welcome here."
funny because 'what is says to me is'.. oh good, an area where i can congrigate with those 'like me', so that we can try and stop 'those'(ie people like-you) who want to stop' me from talking privetly!!
your answer reveals ALOT about how you think (after all you said; "What this says to me.."). ie, you have kiddie porn and terrorism on your mind alot (which is quite unnatural, and makes you suppicious).
I believe most people don't think of negative thoughts natuarally when discussing this subject, they are more interested in what the *good* is, and how by *discussing* this good (privetly, so as to not 'tip-their-hand) the *good* will defeat the evil eventually.
The old saying: "take away their guns and only the government (ie criminals) will have them" holds true with anonymouty as well.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
China does this kinda stuff all the time. Free speech is free speech. Child porn may not be the speech I like, but I don't think we have a right to outlaw speech we don't like, otherwise theres a lot of political speech which could be outlawed as well. This can easily be taken too far and I think that there should be absolutely no possibility for thought crimes to exist. We should never even allow the laws to be configured in a way which allows for the possibility of thought crimes.
Look, I don't want children to be abused, but controlling speech wont stop children from being abused. This is equal to saying "It's illegal to think about or talk about kiddie porn". It should be illegal to CREATE kiddie porn. Thats wrong, because the child is being abused. Talking about it isnt abusing anyone, and a lot of people are more abused than the average child porn victim on the internet by internet bullies. Remember the star wars kid who become suicidal after his video was put all over the internet? Are we going to arrest everyone who ever downloaded or distributed that video?
If you use the internet you are aiding terrorists who may be on the same ISP, You are aiding communists, you are aiding liberals or conservatives. You are aiding child pornographers who use the same ISP as you.
It's impossible to do that. If you removed every child porn picture that exists in the world, then they'd just start talking about it and telling stories, and if you outlaw that then they'll draw pictures of it, and if you outlaw that they'll find some other way to express themselves. So ultimately people want free speech and to make this into a thought crime is limiting free speech, its not protecting children because look, even if no child porn picture ever existed, these people would still have their fantasies. You think their fantasies will go away just because theres no pictures? They'd start drawing child porn anime pictures and it would happen all over again. So whats the point of having thought crimes?
We all look at porn, but we arent all rapists, correct?
Child porn addicts who look at porn arent all going to rape children, its just the psychopath pedophiles who are rapists who do that.
Just because someone looks at pictures does not mean they have to do whats in the picture. Porn just does not work that way. This is like saying porn creates rape so all porn should be outlawed. I think its actually the other way around. I think with less porn there would be more rape.
The person who encrypts his email, refuses to submit to warrantless searches, or keeps his blinds closed is also more suspicious than a person who uses a computer.
Indeed, one of the very points of liberty is to protect citizens from an oppressive government: It is a requirement of a free society that the government not be omnipotent and omnipresent when it comes to enforcing its laws, or else it would be impossible to subvert or overthrow a tyrranical one.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This includes child rapists, adult rapists, prison rapists, or anyone who rapes anyone. Rape is just plain wrong and should never be done to another human. I'm not even talking about just physical rape, emotional and psychological rape is wrong also.
This is a fact most reasonable people can agree with, but if you are psycho then you might think that rape is okay and if you are aggressive and psycho then rape becomes something you are more capable of.
Most people, they wouldnt ever rape someone, they just don't have that in them. So, when we talk about stuff like childporn, which millions of people may view, do we really want to say that millions of people are potential rapists for viewing rape? I don't think you can connect the dots like that. A lot of people watch murder or watch violent stuff, and I can't say all of the people who think about murder are murderers or are going to commit murder.
I disagree with people who actually do these things, I don't disagree with people who think about these things. Its their mind, they have the freedom to think about whatever they want, just don't go out and do it.
There is broad international agreement on the definition of child pornography:
Child pornography means any representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes. Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. 110 Signatories, 87 Parties
The sexual exploitation of a child for the amusement of others or commercial gain is not an exercise in free speech, but a silencing and corruption of the innocent.
Defending FoS means fighting against the powers that try to prevent that right, like governments, or self-proclaimed "guardians of morality".
Although FreeNet could be useful for groups that need guerilla methods to defend FoS, FreeNet itself does not defend FoS.
Sadly, it seems like many people think that FoS is a technical problem, and they then stop thinking about how to really defend it.
Yes those things are wrong, but should we stop talking about those things because they are wrong?
Should we outlaw all nazi material? should we arrest racists for thinking like a racist or for drawing a swastika? Look, I'm against certain acts, I have morals, but I don't think removing freedom of speech makes life better.
If we outlawed certain words so that people couldnt describe different races and we outlawed culture, and forced people to marry inter-racially, it might actually help the world but at the same time its removing peoples freedom to think and speak how they want to. How would your average nazi friend feel if they had to give up their pro-white religion because those kinds of thoughts are illegal? That only makes the problem worse, it makes them more likely to be violent when they cannot express themselves. Don't you get it?
sooo, when ever some blows-a-cop-away, it warms my heart because that is one less 'terrorist' The People' have to worry about.
The governments of the world, including people-like-you (probably a cop), will need to be dealt with soon, or will all go up in a nuclear war, when some criminal like you decides that they can't force 'their-brand-of-freedom' on everyone else any more.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
When you pay AOL your ISP to provide the internet, you are also paying to host terrorist websites, communist websites, and for child pornographers to distribute their porn. Look we don't have any control over what goes on over the internet, we arent supposed to try to micromanage the internet, its not designed to work like that.
AOL cannot control what goes on in their node, yes if they find an offensive site they can remove it, but they cannot stop someone from transfering mp3s or kiddie porn over their connection. Communication by nature is supposed to be free, its not supposed to be controlled. You can censor your own communication to a point in that you dont have to actively seek out child porn and you don't have to ever pay a site thats hosting child porn. You cannot however prevent child porn from being distributed on the internet, its impossible and its morally wrong to destroy the internet to stop speech you dislike.
The way to prevent children from being harmed is put chips in cameras and make everyone get a license to take pictures. The way to stop child porn is to do a better job tracking where a picture came from. If we each camera had a signature, you could track to find out who purchased that specific camera. If the computer OS has a certain signature in the camera software you could figure out which computer it came from, you should let the forensic teams deal with this stuff and help come up with better technology to catch the people who create illegal porn. Not just illegal porn, but also people who take pictures of random individuals without permission, and people who do stuff like put videos on the internet without permission. You could stop this at the point where people upload the video onto the computer in the first place and make it so people can be sued lots of money for each unauthorized picture or video of themselves online.
Until this happens, all you are doing is attacking freedom of speech. You are focusing on the wrong people and doing nothing to stop kiddie porn or child abuse because you are fighting the technology instead of using the technology to fight the abusers.
After all your saying people can't use other means like walking and talking in public (sidewalks, cafe's etc.) to plan or commit crimes? i hope you talk like this normally so someone will put you away soon. :)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
That's not my point. What irritates me about Freenet is that when you set up a node, megabytes of data go flying in and out of yournetwork, while you try desparately to recieve kilobytes of stuff from Frost or whatever.
If you leave your machine on all day, you just send absurd amounts of traffic around distributing all kinds of smut while the system isn't responsive enough to do anything other than distribute enormous illegal files.
I don't think the "members-only" thing is a good idea. For one thing, it excludes too many potential users, who would never bother going through the hoops to get an invitation, but would do some casual browsing if it wasn't such a hassle. And, the fewer users there are, the easier it is for governments to put them all in the same bucket of being assumed guilty because they are on a network that is being used only by those who need it the most (who are doing something illegal). I think it must be assumed that a breach is still possible. The best agents/goons are those who can build up the trust of the other members of whatever they are trying to infiltrate, so requiring trust is not a total barrier. Am I missing something here?
Distribution is illegal. It doesn't matter if the files exist only in encrypted, fragmented form on your hard drive, the traffic can still bring the FBI to your door.
The pictures arent abusing the children, the abuser is abusing the children
Possesion is not thought crime. You have been caught collecting pictures of the rape of a child and applauding from the sidelines in the hope of more to come.
That's how it's supposed to be. Mucho stuff being moved around all the time in all directions so bno one can follow.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
If you click on this linkYou have been caught collecting pictures of terrorism and applauding from the sidelines in the hope of more to come.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
If you click on this link you have been caught collecting pictures of terrorism and applauding from the sidelines in the hope of more to come. (you win again preview button)
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I2P has less than 100 nodes. No wonder it's fast. But really it solves a whole different bunch of problems than Freenet does.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Yes if you posses and distribute illegal 1s and 0s, its the same as just typing these illegal 1s and 0s on a piece of paper and showing it, or as saying those 1s and 0s, in fact you can't even think about those 1s and 0s. Thats a thought crime, all data on computers are just communications, just thoughts, none of it is real. A picture is a frozen image of a thought or a document of an action but the 1s and 0s are still thought, still just 1s and 0s. This means these arent real pictures we are talking about here, this is a digital copy, and digits are numbers which represent things, and this means you are outlawing thinking about kiddie porn in any fashion. I don't endorse creating kiddie porn, but you do nothing to stop its creation by outlawing the distribution of it. In fact, the more its distributed the less value it becomes, who is going to pay for kiddie porn? what happens to all these companies that profit from kiddie porn? Now I know you won't stop kids from being molested by family members, but you can definately go after the organized child porn businesses and the organized sexual slavery. Stopping the distribution is like telling people to cover their eyes and pretend we are fighting it by making it impossible to view, or more difficult to think about. It's not the thought, its the crime of molesting kids, the criminals who did these acts should be put in prison, but just talking about it should not put someone in prison. 1s and 0s are speech not actual objects.
You got it. This is what annoys me about all these Freenet believers .. their fascination with technology blinded them to the basic facts of life ... and some of them are being disingenuous by pretending to care about dissidents in danger while really only being occupied with ways to construct a facade to hide their true reasons for using Freenet. I would not mind this nonsesnse as much, if it were not for the fact that all their arm-waving is causing some less tech-savvy people in dangerous places attempt to use this thing and subsequently put themselves in grave danger, all so that someone else half a globe away can watch dirty photographs while sitting on his lard-ass while gorging himself on donuts.
As I mentioned somewhere else, far more mundane methods of just tossing leaflets from rooftops or painting slogans on walls are orders of magnitude more effective and safer for dissidents then Freenet.
I got it all along was just trying to clarify for those who didn't.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Firstly, it is likely that we will have a separate "open" network based on more or less the current algorithms (but faster). Secondly, right now it costs very little to find all nodes - because it is an open network, you can harvest it. Very fast. Of course you CAN infiltrate a cellular network. But it costs FAR more.
I guess you don't know a lot about how computers work. A jpeg or gif is just a set of 1s and 0s. This is speech. If I code the jpeg format, and some child pornographer takes pictures on his physical camera and stores these pictures in the jpeg format, you don't sue the creator of the jpeg format for aiding the child pornographer. You don't sue the people who made the camera. You don't sue the internet company for allowing them on the internet. You shouldnt sue people who distribute it. Distributing 1s and 0s is the same as me telling you something and you repeating it to your neighbor and then me sueing you for it. If I can tell you a story and sue you for telling people, then am I right for trying to control what you can or cannot say? Or was I just wrong to tell you something expecting you to know not to repeat it?
The distributors job is not to be law enforcement. It's not the distributors fault that kiddie porn exists, the distributor just distributes whatever they are given, if this were business then when someone makes a bad product you don't sue the distributor, you sue the people who made the product because suing the distributors does not stop the people who keeps making the content.
Look, kiddie porn is bad content, most people can agree on this, but you don't stop bad content by trying to restrict its distribution, you stop bad content by preventing its creation. Lots of things are bad, but you cannot stop these things by restricting speech, this can quickly become thought control and you know where this will lead.
If you look at north korea, you can see how thought control works and where it leads. It starts with kiddie porn, but once they pass laws to stop kiddie porn it makes it easier for laws to be passed to protect say, intellectual property, software patents, and to control the internet in general. Child porn can be used politically to reduce freedom of speech, this is why it should be obvious why we don't want to give up freedom of speech on the internet over one issue. This is like giving up creativity to protect people from bad creativity. We should try to protect and increase freedom as much as we can while preventing people from creating bad content, concepts, or products. If you make it more difficult to create bad things like new weapons to kill people, or new cameras which can take xray pictures, or whatever new technology which could be exploited, if you don't let it be created in the first place you can protect children and have freedom. It's simple, if you make a digital camera it has to have a chip inside it to allow authorities to always know who purchased it. If a camera requires your digital signature then its like a gun, its licensed. This is how you could solve this problem. Someone who loses their license after being convicted of kiddie porn can never buy another camera and if they put it on the internet then they should never be allowed online. It's that simple.
You have to use the law in a way which prevents and discourages people from creating kiddie porn and then putting it online. You could increase sentences for people whos cameras were used to take a picture. If someone takes those pictures with the family camera then the owner goes to jail. This is look someone stealing your gun and shooting someone, you go to jail, but the point is, a camera is powerful so use it responsibly.
Free speech is too important to give it up over one issue.
Thanks for doing that! It appears that sanity was in short supply today on this thread and so every bit helps. I was just agreeing with you enthusiastically (not sure if it somehow came accross differently).
Strange, as far as I can see Sanity (1431) started this thread... :D
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
, as the original article poster was using the "all secrecy is bad" misnomer, and I hit my "I've got to say something" threashold :-). It was probably a bit off topic, and I can see how people were thinking that my comments were specifically relating to freenet. I'm wasn't saying use a secret algorithm, I'm saying that using a non-secret algorithm, but keeping which one you're using secret will add to the security of a system.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
If no one creates it then theres no reason to try to control who hosts what. Kiddie porn is illegal to create, this has nothing to do with freenet and distribution. I agree people shouldnt create kiddie porn, but the stuff thats already done, its done already. Outlawing freenet wont rewind time even if the documentations are gone and theres not a trace of the incident left, it still happened.
Yea I know, talk about a misnomer! The Happy Fun Ball comes to mind...
From TFA: "...One can see this data in the archives of the mailists; it comes right after the episode where Ian revoked my freenet-emailaddress, because my critical attitude to the current development-proces was aparently not to his likings)."
"I2P has less than 100 nodes"
This is true, hopefully I2P will get some press so we can quickly see if it is a dead end or not. Because of it's design it needs little (5-10 minutes) to intergrate into the network as a whole so making test networks would be trivial in comparison to a Freenet test network.
Each F2F-P2P node is an anonymous proxy and does forward files and queries between 2 friends' nodes.
Like is said in the Freenet MailList from the article (and the Mute homepage) the path used between 2 nodes will evolve to become the shortest available.
But if the network is very big, "shortest" could mean it is still comprised of 6 nodes (see the 6 apart theory), or more, depending on the underlying trusted links topology.
Nice troll - you have too much time on your hands. Unfortunately, you can't search freenet. Everything is in the form of linked directory pages.
As I said, you may want to read the Mute Papers on "ants algorithms" and the Freenet papers on "graph theory applied to trusted links".
What papers? I don't know of any Freenet papers on "graph theory applied to trusted links". And my understanding was that MUTE did a broadcast search to find the data and then used ants to find a fast return path.
freenet "paper": http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149 637&cid=12543926
As for Mute, i think this same Ant algorithm can be used to optimize the search queries:
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml
I'll just rephrase
"upon receiving this message, node X learns something about Alice: it learns that messages from Alice come through a particular neighbour node"
in
"upon receiving this search query, node X learns something about this query: it learns that someone is interested in this topic, and that messages from this person come through a particular neighbour node"
there is also a recent MUTE paper about anonymous search:/ 205
http://www.infoanarchy.org/story/2005/3/24/174447
Thanks. And no, it's not scalable. Freenet, like other DHT-based networks, is intended to be a global-horizons network. I won't comment on the anonymity of the solution suggested; it looks reasonably well thought out but I didn't read the whole paper.